Founder of the Physiocrats, author of the Tableau Économique
An eighteenth-century French economist, a court physician who founded the first systematic school of economics — the Physiocrats. Opposing mercantilism, he held that a nation’s true source of wealth is not gold and silver, nor industry and commerce, but the produce of agriculture and land. His Tableau Économique for the first time drew, as a diagram, how a nation’s wealth circulates among its classes — the earliest "macroeconomic circulation" model in the history of economics. He advocated "laissez-faire," a slogan that later became the banner of free-market economics, and deeply influenced Adam Smith, who visited France.
The Physiocrats left the enduring slogan "laissez-faire, laissez-passer" (let it be, let it pass), urging the state to intervene little and let the economy run by its natural order. This French phrase became the banner of all free-market thought. Quesnay saw the economy as a self-running system like the circulation of blood in the body — this intuition of "the economy as an organic cycle" is still the undertone of macroeconomics.
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