When we study the 18th century, we are always faced with the rise of the intellectual atmosphere that was present in Europe and the United States, which became known as Enlightenment. Well, within the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, other intellectual segments appeared, focusing on specific areas of knowledge. One of these segments was the physiocracy.
Physiocracy constituted one of the first theoretical approaches that sought to explain the phenomenon of the accumulation of wealth, the formation of the “wealth of nations”. We know that today this phenomenon is explained by modern economic science, but this science only came to appear, in fact, in the nineteenth century, after the advent ofLiberalismClassic (But that's another story).
The term physiocracy literally means "Government of Nature" (the word joins two Greek stems: physis: nature and Kratos: government) and was initially proposed by Dupont de Nemours and Vincent de Gournay. But it was with the doctor of King Louis XV of France, François Quesnay (1694-1774), that the Physiocrat model of interpretation took shape. The physiocracy understood that what came from nature, such as agricultural products, ores and raw materials, was more essential and more important to man's economic organization and prosperity (enrichment) than activities commercials.
Quesnay and the other Physiocrats directed their criticism of the systemmercantilist, that still had space in the economic activities of the first half of the 18th century. The Physiocrat critique was an important step towards understanding the stages of economic activity and how they should be distinguished. In this sense, commerce would concentrate on the stages of distribution and consumption of the products, while the agriculture and extractivism would be at the base, at the stage of production, and therefore would be essential and elementary.
In addition, the Physiocrats also formulated a critique of the interventionism of mercantilism in economic activities, a critique that was absorbed and made more complex by liberalism. The phrase "Laissez faire, laissez passer, le monde va de lui même" (“Let it go, let it go, the world will go by itself), which epitomizes this clamor for economic freedom, was formulated by one of the Physiocrats, Vincent de Gournay.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes