Chapter Four - Against the Chinese Model: The Debate on Cultural Facts and Physiocratic Epistemology

Summary

New science, new models

Gabriel Bonnot de Mably introduced his highly polemic Doutes proposés aux philosophes économistes, published in 1768, with a personal story of disappointment in his former ‘maîtres’ in political economy, François Quesnay and Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau. The break between Mably and these prominent Physiocrats, and its consequences, have been well documented in the literature, but there is an “exotic” detail in the reasons Mably gave that is often overlooked. Having briefly explained his initial great expectations for the innovations produced by this active little ‘school’, he describes his horror when “[i] t became obvious to us that our philosophers had a kind of contempt for the nations that we are most accustomed to respect. They showed a predilection for the government of China.” The “philosophers” referred to must be Quesnay and Mirabeau, the authors of the 1763 Philosophie Rurale, since Mably traces the beginning of this new “Chinese fashion” to that work. In the same book, Quesnay and Mirabeau had begun to openly question the relevance of republican and parliamentary systems of governance, hence the “nations” to which Mably refers are most probably Great Britain, the Netherlands, and other European nations with a tradition of actively curbing the power of monarchs and emperors.

The year 1768 was a turbulent and critical year for the Physiocratic movement. The ideas of Quesnay and his followers, having won so much favor at the French court during the 1760s, were now accused of constituting one of the direct causes of the failures of the French agrarian economy. (Kaplan 1976: 307ff; Levy 1980: 92f). That year saw the publication of Dupont's collection Physiocratie, which included several new and potent theoretical pieces, such as Pierre-Paul Lemercier de La Rivière's L'Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés from 1767 and Quesnay's analysis of the Tableau Économique from 1766. Also, Quesnay had published a series of essays in the Physiocratic journal Ephémérides du Citoyen, called Despotisme de la Chine. For Mably, however, the defense strategy applied in these writings provoked a reaction against the “Chinese model” that he regarded as the common denominator for the political visions of the Physiocrats. If this was the way to implement the economic principles he had otherwise been so infatuated with, Mably was no longer a friend of the cause.