physiocrat
Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- noun Any of a group of economists in 18th century France who believed that the government should not seek to influence the operation of natural economic laws.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- noun One who advocates the doctrines of physiocracy; specifically, one of a group of French philosophers and political economists, followers of François Quesnay (1694-1774), which rose to prominence in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and maintained that a natural constitution or order exists in society, the violation of which has been the cause of all the evils suffered by man.
Examples
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The French physiocrat Quesnay depicted an economy as a flow analogous to human circulation -- an attempt to systematize economics and perhaps to compare it to the most experimentally "scientific" of fields available in Quesnay's day -- medicine.
Teaching Un-Normal Economics, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
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Pietro Giannone (16761748) created a profound stir with his anticlerical Historia civile del regno di Napoli (1723); Antonio Genovesi (171369) was an outstanding physiocrat; Giambattista Vico (16681744), with his Scienza nuova (1725), laid the basis of the modern philosophy of history; while Cesare Beccaria (173894) in his Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) founded the modern science of penology.
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Of a family friend he says, If you scratch an engineer, you’ll find a physiocrat underneath.
Note
The word 'physiocrat' comes through French, ultimately from Greek roots meaning 'nature' and 'to rule'.
