Economía

Cantillon, Quesnay, and the Tableau Economique

Anthony Brewer

Discussion Paper No. 05/577 October 2005

Department of Economics University of Bristol 8 Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1TN

Cantillon, Quesnay, and the Tableau Economique
Anthony Brewer1

Abstract Schumpeter argued, long ago, that Quesnay’s tableau économique was based on Cantillon, but this claim has never been spelled outin detail and seems not to have been generally accepted, since many writers still write of the tableau économique as though it were Quesnay’s alone. This paper examines the relation between Cantillon and Quesnay in more detail than before and argues (a) that the relation between Cantillon’s analysis of circulation and Quesnay’s tableau is too close to be a coincidence, but (b) that the use Quesnayput it to is quite different from its role in Cantillon’s system. Keywords: Cantillon, Quesnay, Tableau Économique JEL classification: B11

1 Department of Economics, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN; A.Brewer@bristol.ac.uk. I am grateful to Walter Eltis, John Vint, and participants in the 2005 conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought forhelpful comments. The remaining errors are mine.

CANTILLON, QUESNAY, AND THE TABLEAU ECONOMIQUE

Introduction Joseph Schumpeter argued long ago that ‘Cantillon was the first to draw a tableau économique. And, barring differences that hardly effect essentials, this tableau is the same as Quesnay’s’ (1954 222). This claim has been repeated, for example by Foley (1973 139– 40) and Brewer (1992163–4). Meek discussed the relation between Cantillon and Quesnay, but simply referred in passing to ‘the well known parallels between Cantillon’s account of the circulation process and Quesnay’s’ (1963 265). All the authors cited presented the argument very sketchily, assuming that the underlying similarities between Cantillon and Quesnay would be obvious to any reader who had been alerted to them.That seems to have been a misjudgement. Aspromourgos (1993 171–2), for example, describes the claim (among others) as a ‘gross absurdity’. Pressman, in a book-length study devoted entirely to the tableau (1994 182) said that Quesnay ‘developed a model at a time when there were no other models in existence to serve as his guide’. Many writers (too many to cite) write of the tableau économique asthough it were Quesnay’s alone. The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of the tableau économique in more detail than has been usual. I will present a formal tableau2 based on Cantillon’s text to demonstrate how closely Quesnay modelled himself on it, but I will also argue that Quesnay’s economics was different from Cantillon’s in other ways, primarily because Quesnay stressed the needfor investment in agriculture and thought that the French economy was performing well below its potential. Quesnay almost certainly took the basic idea of the tableau from Cantillon, but he set it in a very different context.

Quesnay’s tableau. Since it is the origins of Quesnay’s tableau that are under discussion, it is convenient to start by setting it out briefly. Quesnay presented manytableaux, differing in the numbers used and in the way they are presented. The famous zigzags of the earliest versions were later abandoned. They were no more than an expositional device, since they clearly do not represent a real process that goes on during the notional ‘year’ involved. As Quesnay well knew, farmers sell their crops to merchants after the harvest, so any zigzagging is betweenmerchants and buyers, not between farmers and the rest of the economy. I will take one of the simplest and best known versions of the tableau, that of the ‘analyse’ (INED 1958 801; also Meek 1962 159) as my example (Figure 1).3

The numerical example presented here is in Brewer (2001), but with minimal discussion. BenitesRochel and Robles-Teigeiro (2003) also present a tableau derived from...