Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In the context of the book’s emphasis on “Systems of Life” in the social sciences in the eighteenth century, this chapter seeks to interrogate the conception of growth, an evidently biological analogy, in the work of two major founders of the discipline of economics, François Quesnay and Adam Smith. Taking its cue from a famous passage in the Wealth of Nations, the first part investigates the surprisingly discreet physiological conceptions in the non-medical writings of the theorist of physiocracy. While recognizing significant parallels between the biological and economic systems developed by Quesnay, particularly with regards to circulation, this first investigation fails to produce a model of economic growth based on physiological principles. The second part turns to the thought of Adam Smith himself, in which can be found not only an explicit analogy between physical health and that of the economy, but a clear conception of economic growth. But if it is tempting to find in Smith’s economics a system akin to that of life, a close examination of his theory of growth makes it even clearer than with Quesnay that its fundamental principle is not physiological, but sociological, grounded as it is in a stage theory of historical development.