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Turgot
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Turgot was the Frenchman's Adam Smith. His Reflections on the Production and Distribution of Wealth, which predated Smith's The Wealth of Nations by six years, argued against government intervention in the economic sector. Turgot recognized the function of the division of labor, investigated how prices were determined, and analyzed the origins of economic growth. Like Quesnay, Turgot was a leading Physiocrat and attempted to reform the most stifling of government economic policies.
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When Turgot was dismissed by the king, Condorcet ... left politics and returned to the Academy, to his beloved mathematics, and to humanitarian pursuits. A gentle man, Condorcet was extremely sensitive to the pain, physical and emotional, felt by others and "could not even kill an insect unless it was very harmful.1" When talk turned to the Rights of Man, Condorcet took up the cause of slaves, publishing 'Reflections on Negro Slavery' in 1781 and founding the Society of the Friends of the Negro in 1788. In the 1780s he also penned tributes to two of his now-deceased friends: Life of Turgot (1786) and Life of Voltaire (1789). As a further indication of his humanitarian concerns, Condorcet was opposed to the death penalty.
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All might yet have gone well if Turgot could have retained the confidence of the king, but the king could not fail to see that Turgot had not the support of the other ministers. Even his friend Malesherbes thought he was too rash, and was... himself discouraged and wished to resign. The alienation of Maurepas was also increasing. Whether through jealousy of the ascendancy which Turgot had acquired over the king, or through the natural incompatibility of their characters, he was already inclined to take sides against Turgot, and the reconciliation between him and the queen, which took place about this time, meant that he was henceforth the tool of the Polignac clique and the Choiseul party. About this time, too, appeared a pamphlet, Le Songe de M. Maurepas, generally ascribed to the comte de Provence (Louis XVIII), containing a bitter caricature of Turgot.
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At this stage of Turgot's thinking, there lies a difference with Vico. Turgot calls an "absurd mixture of the most ridiculous opinions" "tales" that were far from being deformations of previous knowledge. Vico understood them to be a spontaneous and immediate expression of "poetical wisdom", a point accurately developed by Giuseppe Modica. For Vico, the mythos of the first logos "is not an intellectual, symbolic representation", something like - according to the arrogance of learned people - a collection of "philosophical allegories impregnated with mystical significations hidden by doctrine and erudition"[10]. Tales cannot be "false narratives" because they embody through their "fantastic figurations" a fundamental reality, an ontological truth produced by this prelogic or primitive logos. "The first tales", Vico writes, "must have enclosed civil truths, and ... must have been the history of the first nations".
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Turgot owed his appointment as minister of the navy in July 1774 to Maurepas, the "Mentor" of Louis XVI, to whom he was warmly recommended by the abbé Very, a mutual friend. His appointment met with general approval, and was hailed with enthusiasm by the philosophes. A month later (24 August) he was appointed controller-general. His first act was to submit to the king a statement of his guiding principles: "No bankruptcy, no increase of taxation, no borrowing." Turgot's policy, in face of the desperate financial position, was to enforce the most rigid economy in all departments. All departmental expenses were to be submitted for the approval of the comptroller-general, a number of sinecures were suppressed, the holders of them being compensated, and the abuse of the acquits au comptant was attacked, while Turgot appealed personally to the king against the lavish giving of places and pensions.
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Turgot, (French)wrote a letter to Dr. Price (English) discussing Constitutions of six of the new American States, "It is impossible not to pray that this people (Americans) may arrive at all the prosperity of which they are capable. They are the hope of mankind." Turgot suggested that…“Americans had an opportunity to prove by example that political, religious, and commercial liberty was a possibility.”
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