This extremely savant book is the fruitful issue of many years of research and thinking; Liana Vardi is not a very prolific author but every peace of her is a very fine work, if not a milestone in the historiography. This time she advances a deeply informed, nuanced image of Physiocracy; it enters a recent resurgence of interest in physiocratic ideas linking them to Enlightenment debates on natural law, luxury, sovereignty, the national debt, and, of course, agriculture. Vardi adopts a correct historical approach: instead of evaluating physiocracy on the ground of “pure” economic theory, she preserves the authors’ orientation, according to which economics was not separated from philosophy, arts, and natural sciences. The titles and contents of the chapters reflect this assumption; thus, the first chapter, “Arts, Crafts, and Court,” is about Quesnay's apprenticeship as surgeon and as engraver. At the workshop, Quesnay acquired a specific set of manual and visual skills, as well as a broad introduction into natural sciences. In later years, he would solicit botanic samples from his correspondents to help him assess the earth's agricultural potential. At the same time, Quesnay refused to rely on analogy in medicine, and, later, in economics. According to Quesnay, analogy stemmed from imagination and, thus, it was not scientific. Chapter 2, “The Ways of the Mind,” precisely focuses on Quesnay's shift from physiology to economics; this shift modified his approach to scientific inquiry. Abandoning his earlier prudence, Quesnay extrapolated a theory of the production of wealth from statistics on agriculture productivity and treated his conclusion as unassailable. Economic laws were considered as self-evident and could therefore be expressed into a visual model, the Tableau économique. Quesnay's reliance on mathematical analysis was his major innovation, raising political arithmetic to a new level. Quesnay bequeathed to future generations quantification and the use of models in economics. At the same time, he criticized vitalism (the umbrella term given to theories that attributed the body's motion and nature's generative powers to an irreducible force inherent to organic matter) and defended the mechanist approach insisting that the body was passive and had to be stimulated by an external force. The peculiarity of Quesnay's natural law is that, unlike gravity which function outside of human control, his law is predicated on human action.

Yet this attitude did not prevent him to collaborate with Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, to which chapter 3 is devoted (“The Ways of the Hearth”). He started his literary career as a poet and author of relatively unsuccessful pieces. The book that would make him famous, L'ami des hommes, appeared in 1756. Mirabeau initially endorsed the vitalist notions that Quesnay rejected. Yet he criticized existing agricultural societies (as Quesnay did) and considered that in public affairs, mathematics, not moral philosophy, could correct errors. He added that free trade and improved husbandry would strengthen France's economy. His first encounter with Quesnay took place in 1757 and began their long collaboration to improve French finance. Chapter 4, “A Delicate Balance,” is devoted to this collaboration. Mirabeau became the major disseminator of physiocratic ideas, in particular in his Théorie de l'impôt of 1760 and Philosophie rurale of 1763. Like Quesnay, he meant to entrench property rights within natural rights; both authors agreed that all individuals sought their self-preservation and safety. Mably and Rousseau accused them of justifying inequality and encouraging “legal despotism.” Galiani also accused physiocrats to ignore differences in land, political systems, and human attitudes.

This leads to interrogate physiocrats’ attitudes towards institutions. Chapter 5, “Representative Assemblies” reminds that Mirabeau defended representative institutions (in particular at municipal level), while Quesnay and Mercier de la Rivière (another physiocrat) supported the “legal despotism” of the enlightened monarch. Theirs was a top-down vision of the exercise of power. This approach was equally supported by Pierre Samuel Du Pont, the third major player of Liana Vardi's story and to whom chapter 6 is devoted (“The Journalist”). In his pamphlets, Du Pont advocated free trade and argued that taxes should be paid only by landowners. In 1774 the new monarch, Louis XVI, named Turgot controller general and Du Pont inspector general of commerce. Du Pont pushed Turgot to adopt immediate reforms of grain trade and guilds; but their project met the hostility of the Court and they were ousted from office in 1776. Yet Du Pont sought to widespread physiocratic ideas not only in political economy but also in poetry and literature. This made Quesnay furious, but Du Pont comedies on agriculture, the state, and the economy had an impact on French elites, as well as in Tuscany and Baden (chapter 7, “The Education of Princes”). Du Pont also invented “agrarian festivals” to the aim of disseminating knowledge. The last chapter, “Changing the World,” comes back to Turgot's and Du Pont's mix of dirigisme and laissez-faire and their failure in 1776. Liana Vardi links this outcome much less to the abolition of guilds than to their project of establishing local municipalities. Ten years later, in 1786, Condorcet will rehabilitate this project. However, “economics, meanwhile, had moved on to factor in desires as well as needs in the demand for goods, to appreciate the role of labor…but fear of irrational drives…would continue to haunt the science of economics” (p. 277). This conclusion goes beyond classical interpretations of physiocracy, including Albert Hirschman's claim, according to which this school of thought narrowly focused on self-interest (Hirschman 1977, p. 97). Viardi's book rather shows that the pursuit of self-interest in Enlightenment Europe protracted efforts to reconcile accumulation with morality. However, after physiocracy, economic analysis split into two major directions: one led to a more thorough inquiry into economic processes themselves, clarifying the nature of profit, prices, value, and so on; the other provided a more sustained governmental experimentation.