Quesnay’s 'Tableau Économique' and the problem of rent

Watch the video

François Quesnay’s Tableau Économique, which dates from the late 1750s, is an attempt to model economic interdependencies between the agricultural, manufacturing, and rentier classes in order to inform debates about optimal taxation. This discourse mirrored a similar set of debates raging in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century about the economic incidence of excise taxation on beer and ale, which had pitted the landowners against merchants and manufacturers. Although participants in these debates in Britain and France corresponded with each other, their competing analyses were informed by very different political regimes and by different fundamental assumptions about the basis, scope and limits of state power. They also reflected fundamentally different approaches to the problem of rent. Some 260 years later, these two traditions suggest two very different approaches to taxation and to the question of the role of the state in the modern economy. 

• Discussant: Giorgos Gouzoulis
• Chair: Antonio Andreoni

Background material linked to this seminar

Coffman, D. (2020). François Quesnay, Luigi Pasinetti and the Historical Contexts of Economic Theory (including an English translation of Luigi Pasinetti’s ‘The Tableau Économique and the Modern Economy’). Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2020.10.005

Cardinale, I. and Coffman, D. (2014). Economic interdependencies and political conflict: The political economy of taxation in eighteenth century Britain. Economia politica, 31(3), pp.277-300.
 

Read more about the IIPP Seminar Series 2020-21