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社會科學概論
高永光老師
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Physiocracy：
The
First Economic
Model
 The
branch of social science
called ‘economies’ is commonly
described as the study of how
humans make use of available
productive resources (including
their own labour and skills) to
produce goods and services for
human use.
 This
is partly a technical question of
the relationship between “inputs”
and “outputs” but it becomes a
matter of social science, rather than
physics or engineering, because
humans practise a high degree of
functional specialization.
 This
raises the questions of how the
specialized economic activities of
individuals are co-ordinated into an
orderly system; how different
systems of co-ordination work; and
what defects or deficiencies a
particular system has and how they
may be corrected.
 The
study of such questions is as
ancient as any of mans intellectual
interests but effective systematic
investigation of them is quite recent.
Most historians of economics would
date it no earlier than the latter half
of the eighteenth century.
 Adam
Smith is sometimes
described as the father of
economics, but shortly before his
great Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776) was published in England,
there flourished in France,
 at
the court of Louis XV, a group of
writers to whom must be given the
credit for attempting to construct the
first systematic and comprehensive
theoretical model of economic
processes. These were the
“Physiocrats”.
A. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
AND THE PHYSIOCRATIC SCHOOL
 The
long reign of Louis XIV,
which ended in 1715, left
France with a magnificent court
and a nearly ruined economy.
 Louis
engaged in a series of I wars
and built the lavish palace of
Versailles, activities that cost much
and produced little. In addition he
expelled the Protestants from
France, which thus lost some of its
most skilled and talented human
resources.
 He
proclaimed himself absolute
and tolerated no criticism, thus
stifling another source of
productivity.
 His
Finance Minister, Colbert,
embarked on a policy of
encouraging industry which
emphasized economic activities for
which France was not particularly
suited and hampered agriculture, in
which the country had rich natural
resources.
 The
result of this reign of folly was
that the economy of France was
overburdened by regulations and
twisted by policies that stunted its
productivity, and, despite the
crushing burden of taxes, the flow
of revenues into the national
exchequer was insufficient to match
expenditures.
 The
state sank ever more deeply
into debt. The originator of the
Physiocratic doctrine, Francois
Quesnay (1694-1774), was brought
up in peasant surroundings, despite
the fact that his father was a lawyer.
 He
head little formal education
and was taught to read by a
friendly gardener at the age of
twelve.
B. THE PHYSIOCRATIC MODEL
 The
term ‘Physiocracy’ suggests to
the English ear something like
‘physiology’ which is an especially
tempting interpretation when one
knows that Quesnay was a
physician. But in fact the term
connotes in French the more
general concept of law of nature.
 The
Physiocratic model was
built on the idea that social
phenomena are governed, as
are physical phenomena, by
laws of nature that are
independent of human will and
intention.
 The
basic idea underlying the
Physiocratic model is that goods
and services are produced not
for the direct use of their
producers but for sale to others.

The economy is viewed from the
standpoint of markets, as a system of
money transactions.
C. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PHYSIOCRACY IN
THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL CIENCE

1.The concept of spontaneous
order
 The most important idea of the
Physiocrats was that economic
processes are governed by laws
of nature in such a way that the
economic world,
 like
the natural world, is, or can
be, a system of spontaneous
order: not man-made or mangoverned. This ran counter to
much of the economic thinking of
the eighteenth century,
 which
viewed the economy as
something that required constant
management and extensive
regulation by the state. As noted
above, the Physiocrats did not
argue that the institution of the
state could be dispensed with;
 in
fact, they favoured despotic
government, but they contended
that its economic role could be
greatly reduced because of the
existence of a mechanism of
spontaneous order operating
through market processes.
 2.
Economic classes
The idea that human society is
a hierarchical structure and
that this structure is composed
of distinct and discrete social
classes so old that it can
hardly be traced.
 But
the Physiocratic model
involved an important innovation
in how the class structure of
society is conceived by the
social scientists.
Instead
of using the traditional
status categories (such as the
‘nobles’, ‘clergy’, and ‘third
estate’ of French Politics) the
Tableau contains categories or
classes that are economic in
nature.
 This
is undoubtedly one of the
main reasons why Karl Marx
admired the Physiocrats: he felt
that recognition of the economic
basis of class structure was
absolutely necessary to the
development of social science.
 3.
Circular flow
The modelling of the economy
as a circular flow of
expenditure is familiar today to
any student who has taken an
introductory college course in
economics.
 This
cannot, however, be traced
directly to the Physiocrats. The
classical economists did not
pick up the Physiocratic concept
of circular flow as an analytic
tool.
Karl
Marx used it to some extent
in his theory of capitalist
economic development but he did
not build his own basic economic
model around it.

Its revival as an analytical paradigm was
mainly due to the work of John Maynard
Keynes, whose General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) has
been the most influential book in economics of
the twentieth century responsible for
establishing macroeconomics as a major
branch of modern economic theory, and for
changing the views of economists, and others,
on the economic role of the state.
 4.
Surplus
The idea of a 'net product' or
surplus plays a large role in
Physiocratic theory. Indeed,
the main object of the Tableau
was to contend that there is
such a surplus and to locate
its origin in land.
The
concept of surplus
occupies an important place in
the history of economic theory,
playing a central role (after the
Physiocrats) in classical
economics,
Marx's
economics, and the
model of efficient resource use
developed by the neoclassical
school in the late nineteenth
century.
 This
aspect of economics is the
main point of contact between
scientific analysis and ethical
judgements in economics, as we
shall see later in this book when
we examine Ricardo's theory of
rent, Marx's theory of exploitation,
and Alfred Marshall's theory of
maximum welfare.

5. The single tax
 As
we shall see later, the idea of
land rent as the proper object of
taxation and the concept of a
single tax reappeared more than a
century after the Physiocrats in a
book by Henry George called
Progress and Poverty (1879).
 This
became a popular best seller
in both America and England and
was important in developing the line
of reformist political thought
represented by non-Marxist,
democratic socialist movement.
 Henry
George himself was not a
socialist; he felt that he had
discovered the one great defect of
a capitalist system, which could
be corrected by a single tax on
land values or rent.
 In
Progess and Poverty the
foundation of George’s
argument was Ricardo’s theory
of rent, but he dedicated his
later Protection or Free Trade
(1891) to the Physiocrats
 6. Advances
In
classical economics three
categories of factors of
production are employed for
analytical purposes: land,
labour, and capital.
 The
third of these has posed
problems of special difficulty for
economic theory, many of which are
associated with the fact that capitalusing methods of production involve
time.
 If,
say, instead of gathering fruit
as best one can with one's bare
hands, labour is first devoted to
making a fruit-picking tool, the
total production of fruit may be
increased, but its availability is
postponed.
There
are many economic
activities that have this
essential nature: increasing,
but delaying, production.
 7.
Ideology
The Physiocrats, as noted
above, were a group of disciples
gathered around a master,
convinced that they possessed
the truth on essential issues of
economics.
 Most
of them would have
acknowledged that there were still
some unsolved scientific
problems, but these were
regarded as minor; the main task
was to convey the truth to others,
especially those with political
power.
Put
this way, Physiocracy
resembles the ideology of a
sect more than the views of a
community of scientists.
The
line between what is a
scientific theory and what is a
sectarian ideology is difficult to
draw, and frequently depends
much on who is doing the
drawing; one man’s ‘science’
may be another's ‘ideology’.
 Sectarianism
and an ideological
attitude towards knowledge is
not completely absent in natural
science but a notable feature of
that area of human knowledge is
its development, in modem
times, of objective criteria by
which the validity of empirical
propositions may be tested.