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In fact the discovery in the eighteenth century by the French Physiocrats of the economic effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of population on available subsistence, had already brought political science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the characteristic blight of Darwinism.
Johnson endorses the position of the ICONOCLAST that the getting of gain should not constitute the sole aim of man; that society cannot long exist with self- interest for "sole nexus," as the French physiocrats would say that the worship of Mammon is dragging us back to barbarism.
Five years after the publication of the Social Contract, a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain fundamental political conditions.
Hence the Physiocrats found economics in peasant life; and thus too Adam Smith renewed their science, with due academic logic, doubtless, but from his experience of Glasgow and Kirkcaldy manufactures and trade.
It is not by arms but by arguments and facts that economists like us, faithful to the teachings of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith, have sought to protect ourselves against it. On the eve of the war, at the inauguration of Turgot's Monument, we set forth his ideas of liberty and humanity in opposition to the German realpolitik.
He is so far in sympathy with the Wealth of Nations, although he says of that book that, while he knows of 'no abler work, he knows of none 'fuller of poisonous errors. Young, that is, sympathised with the doctrine of the physiocrats that agriculture was the one source of real wealth, and took Smith to be too much on the side of commerce.
Of Volney, Dupuis, Diderot, etc., we do not need to speak any more than of the physiocrats, now that we have shown the double derivation of French materialism from the physics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibnitz. This antagonism could only be realized by Germans after they themselves had come into conflict with speculative metaphysics.
This work of criticism was only rendered possible by Proudhon himself, just as Proudhon's criticism had as its antecedents the criticism of the mercantile system by the physiocrats, that of the physiocrats by Adam Smith, that of Adam Smith by Ricardo, as well as the labours of Fourier and Saint-Simon. All the developments of political economy have private property as their major premise.
The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called, who formed a definite school before 1760 Quesnay the master, Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest envisaged their special subject from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory was equivalent to a theory of human society.
'As we cannot fully understand the work of Adam Smith without giving some attention to the physiocrats, nor the physiocrats without looking at the mercantilists: so the beginnings of mercantile theory are hardly intelligible without a knowledge of the canonist doctrine towards which that theory stands in the relation partly of a continuation, partly of a protest.
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