The birth of Physiocracy was the birth of the science of economics in the broad general form in which it is known to us today but it is surprising that the Physiocrats should have received so little attention from economists in the English-speaking world. This book fills that gap.

This 1976 book is concerned with the emergence, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, of a new theory of socio-economic development, based on the idea that the key factor in the developmental process was the way in which men made their living. Professor Meek traces the prehistory of the four stages theory, from its emergence with French and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to its modification by critics and revisionists. He argues the theory was shaped by literature about savage societies, especially American Indian. It is well known that contemporary notions of savagery influenced...

A. R. J. Turgot (1727 81), one of the greatest thinkers of the century of the Enlightenment, is known to political historians as a pioneer of the doctrine of universal progress, which he first put forward when a student at the Sorbonne in a lecture on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind. He is also well known to economists as the author of Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in which he anticipated - and in some respects surpassed - the theoretical system of classical political economy. In this volume, translations of these two works are printed together with a...