Richard Cantillon (1680-1734) and Jacques Turgot (1727-1781)

Richard Cantillon was an Irish refugee who fled to France after the defeat of James II. As a business associate of John Law he sold stock on a rising market and made a fortune from the Mississippi Bubble. His one great book Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General circulated widely among French and English economic writers and was widely quoted and even plagiarised by amongst others Hume, Turgot, Mirabeau, Stewart and Adam Smith. Jacques Turgot was a leading physiocrat, an economic theorist whose Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches (1770) was a major influence on Adam Smith, and an early example of the economist as policymaker. The Reflections is a remarkable book containing the concept of the division of labour, the distinction between the market price and the natural equilibrium price of commodities, and the stress on the volume of real savings as the prime determinant of an economy's rate of growth. Turgot was even more insistent than Adam Smith in propounding the notion that least government in economic matters is best government and left no doubt that the forces of the market could be relied on to drive an economy automatically to an equilibrium position.