François Quesnay

Francois Quesnay was a French physician and economist generally credited as the founder of Physiocracy, the first systematic school of economic thought. Quesnay served as physician to King Louis XV at Versailles before turning to economic writing in his sixties, and his 1758 Tableau Economique set out a diagram tracing how income flows in a circular pattern between landowners, farmers and merchants, arguing that agriculture alone produces a true net surplus of value while manufacturing and commerce merely transform value created elsewhere. Quesnay and the Physiocrats who gathered around him argued for a single tax on land rent in place of the complex mercantilist system of tariffs and monopolies, and their emphasis on natural economic laws and opposition to trade restriction directly influenced Adam Smith, who met Quesnay and other French Physiocrats while traveling in France in the 1760s.