Vincent de Gournay

Jacques Claude Marie Vincent, marquis de Gournay (Saint-Malo, May 28th 1712 - Paris, June 27th 1759) is a French economist, considered as the first of the physiocrats.

Originating in a family of Breton ship-owners and wire of a negotiating rich person, it directed a long time the operations of his father to Cadiz, and visited the principal countries of Europe to study the state commercial there.

Having an economic field crop (he knows in particular the thought of Locke), he enters to the service of Maurepas, then Minister for the Navy in 1744. In 1751, he becomes intendant Commercial and traverses the provinces of France for this reason. It was accompanied in its voyages by Turgot, on which it had a great influence and which wrote its funeral praise by which the ideas of Gournay were transmitted to us.

Gournay was very dependant with Quesnay the founder of the physiocratic school, and with the Encyclopédistes on which it had a great influence, without to leave a written work. Its positions differ from those of the Physiocrats in what it did not place all the richness in the ground and recognized that industry creates an actual value. Large partisan of commercial freedom, it adopted the famous maxim “ Laissez to make, let pass, the world goes from itself ” which one generally allots paternity to him.

Gournay is not at the origin of the designs ruralists of the physiocrats, who are the fact of François Quesnay, but it bequeaths to this school of thought its attachment to economic freedoms: partisan of freedom to trade, produce, work, it opposes the Mercantilisme and thus denounces the direct intervention of the State in the economy by subsidizing (the State must remain confined with functions of law and order), but also the Corporation S, the guilds, the exclusive privileges, like that of the Compagnie of the Indies.

He will inspire directly Turgot, Quesnay or Malesherbes, and more generally all the tradition of the French economic liberalism.

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