QUESNAY, FRANCOIS ( 6 ,144-1774), French economist, was born at Mere, near Paris, on June 4, 1694, the son of an advocate and small landed proprietor. He studied surgery at Paris, where he qualified as a surgeon, and in 1737 he was ap pointed perpetual secretary of the academy of surgery founded by Francois la Peyronie. In 1744 he graduated as a doctor of medicine, became physician in ordinary to the king, and after wards his first consulting physician.
Quesnay is mainly remembered, however, for his work as an economist. About the year 1750 he became acquainted with Jean C. M. V. de Gournay (1712-1759), and round these two men was formed the philosophic sect of the Economistes or the Physio crates. The most remarkable men in this group were the elder Mirabeau (author of L'Ami des hommes, 1756-60, and Philo sophie rurale, 1763), Nicolas Baudeau (Introduction a la philo sophic economique, 1771), G. F. Le Trosne (De l'ordre social, 1777), Andre Morellet (best known by his controversy with Galiani on the freedom of the corn trade), Mercier Lariviere and Dupont de Nemours. Adam Smith, during his stay on the con tinent in 1764-66, made the acquaintance of Quesnay and some of his followers, to whom he refers in his Wealth of Nations. Quesnay died on Dec. 16, 1774, having lived long enough to see his great pupil, Turgot, in office as minister of finance.
The Tableau economique, Quesnay's principal work, may be considered the principal manifesto of the school. It was highly esteemed by the followers of Quesnay, and is named by the elder Mirabeau, in a passage quoted by Adam Smith, as one of the three great inventions which have contributed most to the stability of political societies, the other two being those of writing and of money. Its object was to exhibit by means of certain formulae the way in which the products of agriculture, the only source of wealth, would, in a state of perfect liberty, be distributed among the several classes of the community (namely, the productive classes of the proprietors and cultivators of land, and the un productive class of manufacturers and merchants), and to repre sent by other formulae the modes of distribution which take place under systems of Governmental restraint and regulation, with the evil results arising from such violations of the natural order. It follows from Quesnay's theoretic views that the one
thing deserving the solicitude of the practical economist and the statesman is the increase of the net product ; and he infers also what Smith afterwards affirmed, on not quite the same ground, that the interest of the landowner is "strictly and indissolubly con nected with the general interest of the society." A small edition de luxe of this work, with other pieces, was printed in 1758 in the palace of Versailles under the king's immediate supervision.
Quesnay's system is expounded in two articles on "Fermiers," and "Grains" in the Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert (1756, 1757) a discourse in the Physiocratie of Dupont de Nemours (1768) ; Max imes Generates de gouvernement economique d'un royaume agricole (1758) ; Tableau economique (1758) ; and Dialogue sur le Commerce et des traveaux des artisans. Collections of his works are published by Guillaumin (Paris), and Oncken (Frankfort, 1888). A facsimile reprint of the Tableau economique, from the original ms., was published by the British Economic Association (London, 1895). See also F. J. Marmontel, Memoires; Memoires de Mme. du Hausset; H. Higgs, The Physiocrats (London, 1897).