QUESNAY, FRANOIS

born June 4, 1694, near Paris, France died Dec. 16, 1774, Versailles French economist and intellectual leader of the physiocrats, the first systematic school of political economy. Quesnay was consulting physician to King Louis XV at Versailles, where he developed an interest in economics. However, he did not publish his first book on the subject until he was in his 60s. With the support of Mme de Pompadour, he and Jean de Gournay attracted the Secte des conomistes, whose members looked to Quesnay as their leader. Quesnay's system of political economy was summed up in his Tableau conomique (1758), which displayed diagrammatically the relationship between the different economic classes and sectors of society and the flow of payments among them. In his Tableau Quesnay developed the assumption of economic equilibrium, a concept used as a point of departure for much subsequent economic analysis. Of especial importance was his analysis of capital as avances, or a stock of wealth that had to be accumulated in advance of production. His classification of these avances distinguished between fixed and circulating capital. Quesnay believed savings to be possibly harmful, because if they were uninvested they might disturb the equilibrium of the flow of payments. His analysis is similar to that of J.M. Keynes almost two centuries later. The methodology of Quesnay's physiocratic system and his principles of policy sprang from an extreme form of the doctrine of natural law. Acceptance of that doctrine led him to proclaim that laissez-faire in economics followed the natural law and therefore represented the divinely appointed economic order. He was, indeed, one of the originators of the 19th-century doctrine of the harmony of class interests and of the related doctrine that the maximum social satisfaction occurs under free competition.