The Centrepiece: The Tableu Économique

The most celebrated achievement of the Physiocrats is the Tableau économique, the first edition of which Quesnay produced in December 1758. Two more editions appeared the following year. During the 1760s it was republished—and revised—in numerous physiocratic essays and books.^[62] To the Physiocrats themselves, the Tableau had a near-mystical importance. Mirabeau, for example, claimed that along with writing and money, the Tableau represented one of the three great human inventions. Although subsequent commentators were not quite so exuberant in their praise, it has been widely hailed as a brilliant innovation in theoretical economics. Marx, for example, described its conceptual structure as "incontestably the most brilliant for which political economy had up to then been responsible." Schumpeter characterized the notion of economic interdependence which the Tableau encapsulated as "a bold abstraction and an innovation which was methodologically most important." These views have been echoed by historians of economic thought for many years.^[63]

The Tableau was indeed a "bold abstraction." Quesnay made it clear in fact that his diagrammatic representation of the annual interchange of commodities and money between the main economic classes (the "zigzag") involved disregarding secondary details to focus attention on essential economic interrelations. Thus, as he wrote to Mirabeau:

The zigzag, if properly understood, cuts out a whole number of details, and brings before your eyes certain closely interwoven ideas which the intellect alone would have a great deal of difficulty in grasping, unravelling and reconciling by the method of discourse.^[64]

In this respect, the Tableau represented a new level of abstraction in physiocratic analysis; with it, Quesnay embarked upon the task of model-building. Rather than making social and political policy the centre of analysis, he presented a model of the economy as a self-reproducing system, as an organic totality which creates and recreates itself. The economic mechanism appears, therefore, to be independent of human action; it seems to adhere to natural laws and to follow a causation of its own. Quesnay and his followers were inclined to represent the Tableau as a theoretical discovery of natural laws. Indeed, Quesnay claimed that the main interrelations depicted

in the zigzag were "faithfully copied from nature." Mirabeau extended and elaborated this theoretical orientation by arguing that the task of political economy was to anatomize the regular movements of "la machine économique."^[65]

In depicting the economy as a self-regulating mechanism, Quesnay deemphasized the social and political assumptions of his model. The Tableau does rest upon such assumptions. However, they are implicit presuppositions of the analytic model constructed in the zigzag diagram (although they are explicitly stated in the text of the Tableau ) and have escaped the attention of all but the most penetrating commentators. Below we will attempt to reveal these presuppositions of the Tableau économique . But first we must examine in some detail the technical features of this "bold abstraction" which so captured the attention of later commentators.

The Tableau économique depicts the process of annual economic reproduction as a unity of production and circulation. The cycle begins with the agricultural harvest. The dynamic element of agricultural output is the surplus which cultivators hand over as money rent to the land's proprietors. From that point on, the Tableau describes the exchanges of money and commodities between the productive (agricultural) class, the landed proprietors, and the sterile (manufacturing) class. The best known of the early versions of the Tableau (the third edition) represents the process of annual reproduction (illustrated in figure 1, p. 112).

According to this model, the agricultural surplus (the net product) is equal to the working capital (advances) used in agricultural production. These advances produce a surplus at the annual rate of 100 percent. Thus an advance of 600 (million livres) produces 600 (million livres) of rent. Abstracting from taxes on the net revenue and assuming that the proprietors do not save out of their revenue, the Tableau depicts first the expenditure of the rent between the productive and the sterile classes. In this version (as in most) the landlords divide their spending evenly between agricultural and industrial goods. Following the expenditure of the aggregate revenue, the productive and the sterile classes enter into a mutual exchange, in which they continually spend one-half of their receipts upon the products of the other class. The diagram also expresses the notion of the exclusive productivity of the land (that is, its unique ability to produce a surplus above costs of production) by depicting the receipts of the

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Figure 1.

productive class as generating a new output which accumulates in the centre column and indicates that the productive class will be able to begin the next cycle of economic reproduction with the payment of rent.

Within the course of one annual production period, then, the cultivators produce commodities to a value of 1200 (million livres). Of these, 300 are purchased by the proprietors of the land and 300 by the sterile class (the sum of these purchases equals the value of the surplus product). Of the remaining 600 in commodities from the land (equal to the annual advances), 300 are consumed by the agricultural class (farmers and labourers), and the remaining 300 are used to feed and maintain livestock. The sterile class, meanwhile, receives 300 from the proprietors and 300 from the productive class. Of these 600 (million livres) in receipts, 300 are retained for annual advances in the next production period while the other 300 are used for wages. Thus, abstracting from any interest on fixed capital, the annual reproduction is 1200 (million livres). Of this amount, one-half is consumed directly within the productive class (the advances); the other half (the revenue) is spent equally between the productive and sterile classes, which then enter into a period of mutual exchange. At the end of the period of reproduction, then, the productive class has produced another 1200 (million livres), of which one-half is retained as productive advances while the other half goes to pay the rent.

Let us examine the assumptions of the Tableau more closely. It represents an ideal model. Quesnay did not believe that the eighteenth-century French economy was reproducing itself year after year in a balanced fashion. The Tableau was designed to demonstrate the economic interrelationships that must be maintained to ensure stability and prosperity. In presupposing the essential conditions of prosperity, for example, the model assumes large-scale capitalist farming: "The land employed in the cultivation of corn is brought together, as far as possible, into large farms worked by rich husbandmen."^[66] Furthermore, the model assumes that this type of farming produces a surplus equal to the annual advances; the zigzag is designed to show how these essential relations can be preserved year after year. Thus, the Tableau sketches out the prerequisites of a simple reproduction and not of growth (expanded reproduction); it depicts a situation of zero net investment.

Next, the model employed in the Tableau presupposes complete freedom of trade and export. The Tableau also operates with the assumption of equilibrium prices and, therefore, eliminates the possibility that market disequilibria can disrupt the price structure. The capital of the rich farmers (the agricultural advances) determines all of the fundamental economic relations—the size of the revenue, the amount of money necessary for annual reproduction, the level of consumption within the productive class, and the aggregate sterile output. Once we introduce the assumptions that the costs of the industrial sector are half labour costs and half raw materials costs, and further that each class spends half its income on agricultural goods and half on manufactured goods, then the zigzag diagram follows automatically. In this respect, then, the Tableau "proves" nothing; it merely illustrates diagrammatically the constraints of Quesnay's model of simple reproduction.

Nevertheless, there are some technical difficulties with the zigzag diagram as it appears. Perhaps the most important of these problems is that the diagram neglects fixed capital. No production process can be carried on with working capital (annual advances) exclusively; the Physiocrats were quite aware of that fact. Indeed, Quesnay claimed that there were three types of advances necessary to agricultural production: avances foncières, expenditures on removing stones, weeds, tree roots, and on irrigation, drainage, hedges, and fertilizer; avances primitives, fixed capital expenditures on fences, buildings, and farm machinery, and on maintenance or depreciation; and avances annuelles, yearly expenditures on raw materials and wages. At no point do the avances foncières figure in the text accompanying the Tableau . Such is not the case with the avances primitives ; in the earliest editions, Quesnay discusses the need to replenish these productive elements over time. Nevertheless, the most common versions of the zigzag show no income flow or interest to replace fixed capital. As a result, popular versions of the physiocratic system have represented economic production as strictly annual, all factors of production being replenished each year. This annual reproduction model (with no role for fixed capital) was to create theoretical havoc for classical political economy for years to come.

Quesnay does, however, solve this problem by incorporating fixed capital (avances primitives ) into his model. Early versions of the Tableau mention the need for a fund to maintain and replace the ele-

ments of fixed capital. It is only in the Analyse, an elaboration of the Tableau published in 1766, however, that Quesnay finally introduces interest on fixed capital into the zigzag itself. Working with a base of annual advances (A) of 2000 (as in the version of the tableau he first used in Philosophie rurale ), Quesnay assumes that the avances primitives are five times the value of the avances annuelles (5A = 10,000). Furthermore, he assumes that the elements of the avances primitives must be entirely reproduced every ten years; one-tenth of the value of fixed capital must be reproduced (via interest) annually. As a result, the avances primitives turned over annually constitute a value equal to one-half the value of the avances annuelles (5A/10 = 1/2A = 1000). From what source will the productive class obtain the money to pay the interest on fixed capital? In answering this question, Quesnay clears up the confusion surrounding the missing purchase the sterile class makes from the productive class. He states specifically that the sterile class uses its advances of 1000 to buy raw materials from the productive class (the 1000 it receives from the proprietors it uses to buy food from the productive class, as depicted in the zigzag). By accounting for this missing purchase and by introducing the 1000 in interest on fixed capital explicitly into the diagram, Quesnay increases the total reproduction (as always excluding the sterile sector) from 4000 to 5000. In the meantime he has—again in the interest of consistency—ignored the consumption of agricultural produce by livestock since this is an intrasectoral process. Thus, the revised Tableau presented in the Analyse appears in Figure 2 (p. 116).

As important as is the refinement of the Tableau, the technical difficulties of Quesnay's model have tended to obscure its fundamental social and political features.^[67] Analysis of the technical operations of the Tableau does not, after all, elucidate the purpose of Quesnay's model. Surprisingly, no serious study has probed the problem which Quesnay attempted to illuminate by constructing the Tableau or examined the political presuppositions of the economic model it encapsulated. Without a study of this problem, the interpretation of Physiocracy remains grossly one-sided.

The clue to Quesnay's motivation in constructing the Tableau may be found in his famous letter to Mirabeau, in which he explains the principles of the zigzag. In passing, Quesnay refers to the Tableau as "this Little Book of Household Accounts."^[68] With this expression, Quesnay indicates that, for all his analytic innovations, his enterprise

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Figure 2.

remains curiously within the traditional discourse of political economy which conceptualized the economy from the standpoint of—and as an extension of—the royal household. Quesnay's genius consisted in recognizing that the problem of royal finances could not be addressed adequately outside a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental interrelations of economic life. Consequently, his "Little Book of Household Accounts" had to include a treatment of the annual flow of commodities and money between the basic sectors of the economy. Within the text of the Tableau which accompanies the zigzag diagram, Quesnay states that his objective is to establish a scientific analysis of the economy as a solid foundation for royal finances. Indeed, he calls his theory "the science of economic administration in a kingdom," and he writes that "it is in a knowledge of the true sources of wealth, and of the means of increasing and perpetuating them, that the science of the economic administration of a kingdom consists."^[69]

Taking the problem of the economic administration of the kingdom as his point of departure in fashioning the Tableau, Quesnay

naturally sets the issue of taxation in the centre of his sights. As in the article "Impôts," he assesses forms of wealth in terms of their contribution to state revenues. Once again he suggests that mercantile trade is not a component of the national wealth since it makes "no contribution to taxes." Commercial wealth, he argues, is not a fixed national asset; it can flee the boundaries of the nation—and the clutches of the tax collector. Monetary fortunes, he writes, "are a clandestine form of wealth which knows neither king nor country ." As a result, merchants are "foreigners" to their nation.^[70]

Quesnay's denunciation of mercantile activity does not translate itself into praise for other social classes. Quesnay is equally critical of wealthy financiers who adopt the path of "court capitalism" by attempting to "share in the favours of the Court." Likewise, he attacks the "ignorant greed" of the landed proprietors who refuse to understand the economic benefits of exclusive taxation of the net product of the land.^[71] These criticisms of the main privileged classes in eighteenth-century France reveal that Quesnay is not looking to any single social class to transform society in the general interest. Quesnay believes that there is no class whose particular interest is identical with the social interest. Indeed, he argues that "the natural order has been turned upside down by individual interests, which always hide under the cloak of the general welfare and make their requests in its name."^[72] The only solution to the conflict of competing partial interests within civil society is to construct the state as an autonomous and universal power in society, free from the influence of particular wills, able to impose order and harmony upon society from above. Any conception of the state and the social order as in some sense constituted by the free interaction of individual interests would doom society to faction and conflict. It is necessary, therefore, in Quesnay's view

that there should be a single sovereign authority, standing above all the individuals in society and all the unjust undertakings of private interests .... The division of society into different orders of citizens some of whom exercise authority over the others destroys the general interest of the nation and ushers in the conflict of private interests between the different classes of citizens. Such a division would play havoc with the order of government in an agricultural kingdom, which ought to reconcile all interests for one main purpose—that of securing the prosperity of agriculture which is the source of all the wealth of the state and that of all its citizens.^[73]

Quesnay's economic theory reveals itself to be political economy in the fullest sense of the term. Both analysis of the economic anatomy of society and theory of the state, Physiocracy sought to be "the general science of government."^[74] Quesnay's innovation is a radically new conceptualization of the maxim that economic prosperity determines state power; the precondition of a unified state capable of resisting internal and external threats is the continuous production of wealth within civil society. For this reason, Quesnay argues that "the political administration of agriculture and of trade in its produce" is the very foundation "of the department of finance, and of all other branches of administration in an agricultural nation."^[75] It is this insight which provides the theoretical point of departure of the Tableau économique . In it Quesnay erects an abstract model of the economy which examines these processes from the standpoint of the state. The vantage point of the Tableau —indeed, its terminology and conceptual structure—reflects the position of the Crown in relation to the fundamental processes of economic life.

Quesnay profoundly understands that the state can subsist in a lasting and stable way only upon the net product, the surplus of society. It is for this reason that the Tableau shows the circulation of the surplus product which derives strictly from agriculture. Although it is not true, as Fox-Genovese asserts, that the Tableau exclusively incorporates that movement of the total annual surplus, it remains the case that—both conceptually and visually (in the zigzag)—the circulation of the annual surplus is at the centre of most of the significant economic transactions.^[76] The Tableau includes those transactions which replace factors of production responsible for a continued surplus within the primary (productive) sector. And it is primarily the circulation of the surplus product by the landed proprietors that replenishes those factors. Furthermore, the pattern of the expenditure of the revenue determines whether the economy will experience simple reproduction, expansion, or contraction. For these reasons, Quesnay places the landed proprietors and their revenue in the centre of the zigzag. Without the landlords and the circulation of the revenue, the economic system would collapse (a view which Quesnay shares with Cantillon).

Those transactions excluded from the Tableau —such as intrasectoral exchanges—have no economic significance from a viewpoint concerned with the surplus-producing sector of the economy. Fur-

thermore, in naming the two classes productive and sterile, Quesnay chooses terms that reflect his preoccupation with taxation and royal revenues. The industrial class is sterile not in the sense that its labour fails to create use-values of social importance but rather because it is incapable of producing the "wealth of primary necessity in a state" which contributes to the expenses of government. The Tableau thus expresses Quesnay's view that the sovereign is a "coproprietor" of the land and its net product.^[77] In fact, the wealth which figures centrally in the Tableau is that wealth in which the Crown claims a share and which supports it.

It follows from this argument that "the wealth which gives birth to wealth ought not to be burdened with taxes."^[78] Quesnay's Tableau returns, therefore, to the position advanced in "Grains" that the cultivator should be exempt from taxes and all levies placed on rent. But Quesnay's prescriptions for state policy transcend those devoted to taxation. The Tableau consistently advances the concept of an interventionist state which shapes policies and directs events to encourage agricultural production. In particular, the state must discourage excessive consumption by the proprietors of manufactured goods. Any disruption in the balance of proprietorial expenditure which shifts consumption away from agricultural goods will prevent reproduction of agricultural advances and lead to a decline in the net product and the revenues of the state. Since landed proprietors must be discouraged from excessive consumption of manufactured goods, all of Quesnay's writings exhibit a marked bias against luxury consumption.^[79] In fact, Quesnay advocates an active policy by the state to encourage consumption of agricultural goods. He argues, for instance, "that the government's economic policy should be concerned only with encouraging productive expenditure and trade in raw produce, and that it should refrain from interfering with sterile expenditure."^[80]

Quesnay's writings are often notoriously vague about the specific measures he would advocate to implement general policies. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of concentration of landed holdings in the hands of rich farmers. As early as "Fermiers" Quesnay argues clearly that it is preferable for a poor peasant to become a wage labourer than to work the land on his own. In the Tableau he continually sings the praises of rich farmers. Indeed, he writes that "more than anything else the kingdom ought to be well furnished with wealthy cultivators." He also claims that "the land employed in

the cultivation of corn" should be "brought together, as far as possible, into large farms worked by rich husbandmen." Furthermore, he suggests to the proprietors of the land that they should not entrust the cultivation of their land to poor peasants. Rather, he argues that "it is wealthy men whom you should put in charge of the enterprises of agricultural and rural trade, in order to enrich yourselves, to enrich the state, and to enable inexhaustible wealth to be generated."^[81]

Nonetheless, Quesnay does not indicate how the shift to large-scale farming with rich cultivators is to take place. How, for example, are customary rights and practices to be eliminated? Given the contemporary agitation in favour of enclosure, one might expect to find Quesnay openly adopting a similar stance. References to the enclosure controversy, however, are rare in the entire corpus of physiocratic literature. This may well be, as Weulerrse suggested, because the Physiocrats concentrated their energies upon the campaign for free trade in grain.^[82] Nonetheless, Dupont did reprint articles favouring enclosure in his journal. Furthermore, we find in Mirabeau's manuscripts a passage explicitly condemning all laws against enclosure:

It is to my sense a barbarous law to impede the proprietor from enclosing his field, his pasture land, his woods. It is to violate the laws of property, basis of the laws: and this prohibition, under whatever pretext it may introduce itself, is unworthy of any legitimate Government and, for all the more reason, of a Government founded on equity and liberty.^[83]

The establishment of a just set of laws is for the Physiocrats the most important obligation of the state. The elimination of laws which prohibit enclosure should go hand in hand with general protection of property rights. Quesnay writes, in fact, that "security of ownership is the essential foundation of the economic order of society."^[84] And security of ownership means for Quesnay that land is free from the customary claims of tenants. We shall explore the physiocratic conception of law and the state in more detail. For our present purposes it suffices to record the fact that the fundamental precondition of stable economic reproduction in the Tableau économique is that the state establish social arrangements which specifically favour a capitalist organization of agriculture at the expense of customary rights. Furthermore, there can be no doubt as to the ultimate objective of

the economic analysis in the Tableau: its central purpose is to restore the military power of the French Crown.

"It has not been sufficiently recognized," Quesnay writes in the Analyse, "that the true foundation of the military strength of a kingdom is the nation's prosperity itself." It is not men but wealth which wins wars, he argues. The military prowess of a nation is, therefore, a function of its prosperity; its degree of prosperity is determined by the size of its surplus product. And from the proposition that military power is a function of wealth it follows inexorably that "it is in the permanent well-being of the taxpaying section of a nation, and in the patriotic virtues, that the permanent power of a state consists."^[85]

Thus, however much the "bold abstraction" of Quesnay's Tableau may interest us as analytic economics, any interpretation which loses sight of its explicitly political objectives is an impoverished one. At every step in the theoretical argument, Quesnay returns to his preoccupation with political reforms; he advocates overhaul of the system of taxation, abolition of all restrictions on the sale and export of grain, preservation of individual rights to property, concentration of land holdings in the hands of rich farmers, government support to agriculture, and discouragement of luxury consumption. Quesnay understands, however, that all of these reforms depend upon reshaping the French monarchy and its relation to the contending classes in French society. Physiocracy represents, in other words, a theory of the state as much as a theory of the economy. It is to an examination of that theory of the state that we now turn.