A Note on Animal and Political Economy in Quesnay

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that François Quesnay’s physiocratic writings on economics entail the working through not only of formal principles of circulatory flow developed in his earlier physiological writings on “animal economy” but also the construction of a model of political economy that depends directly on an animal economy understood as the efficient administration of animal labor. Although the contradictions of this model already foreshadow those of today’s dominant model of economic administration, I argue that Quesnay’s economic writings nonetheless contain an invitation for us to rethink the connection between the economic and the ecological domains.

Notes

1. These comments on the tableau [table] are from Quesnay’s Analyse du tableau économique [Analysis of the Economic Table], first published in 1768 and included in Auguste Oncken’s 1888 edition of Quesnay’s economic and political writings. All translations from this edition of Quesnay’s economic and philosophical writings are my own.

2. In the 18^th century, this shift is documented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his article on “Économie” [Economy] in the Encylopédie [Encyclopedia] (2017), published in 1755, where he observes that the political meaning of the term was an extension of its original usage “to the government of the great family, which is the state.” This translation of Rousseau is my own.

3. The quote is from the article “Farmers,” originally published in the Encylopédie [Encyclopedia] (2017) in 1756. Quesnay opposes here the wealthy farmer, who is the “real laborer” and serves the “general good,” to the “poor cultivator,” who is of little utility to the State (p. 189).

4. The article was first published in the Encyclopédie [Encyclopedia] (2017) in 1757.

5. This quote is from Quesnay’s Despotisme de la Chine [Despotism in China], originally published in four issues of the journal Éphémérides du citoyen [Ephemerides of the Citizen].

6. In the Essai’s table générale [Essay’s (1747) General Table], the “excremental humors” are the counterparts of the alimentary ones, including the blood.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Billing

Andrew Billing, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Macalester College. His principal research interests include Enlightenment political and moral philosophy and political economy, Rousseau, 18th-century French literature, and critical and political theory. He has published articles, book chapters, and reviews in these areas and is currently completing a book on the animal–human relation in 18th-century French philosophy and literature. With Juliette Cherbuliez of the University of Minnesota, he recently edited a special edition of L’Esprit créateur titled Paris, Imagined Capital: Economic Transition and Modernity (17th to 19th Centuries).