Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune
| Anne Robert Jacques Turgot | |
|---|---|
Portrait of Turgot by Antoine Graincourt, now in Versailles
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| Born |
10 May 1727 Paris |
| Died | 18 March 1781 (aged 53) Paris |
| Nationality | French |
| Field | Political economics |
| School or tradition |
Physiocrats |
| Alma mater | Sorbonne |
| Influences | François Quesnay |
| Influenced | Condorcet, Murray Rothbard, Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Smith |
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne (10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), commonly known as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Originally considered a physiocrat, he is today best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. He is thought to be the first economist to have recognized the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.
Born in Paris, he was the youngest son of Michel-Étienne Turgot, "provost of the merchants" of Paris, and Madeleine Francoise Martineau de Brétignolles, and came from an old Norman family. As one of four children, he had a younger sister and two older brothers, one of whom, Étienne-François Turgot (1721–1789), was a naturalist, and served as administrator of Malta and governor of French Guiana. Anne Robert Jacques was educated for the Church, and at the Sorbonne, to which he was admitted in 1749 (being then styled abbé de Brucourt). He delivered two remarkable Latin dissertations, On the Benefits which the Christian Religion has conferred on Mankind, and On the Historical Progress of the Human Mind. In 1750 he decided not to take holy orders, giving as his reason that "he could not bear to wear a mask all his life."
The first sign we have of his interest in economics is a letter (1749) on paper money, written to his fellow-student the abbé de Cicé, refuting the abbé Jean Terrasson's defence of John Law's system. He was fond of verse-making, and tried to introduce into French verse the rules of Latin prosody, his translation of the fourth book of the Aeneid into classical hexameter verses being greeted by Voltaire as "the only prose translation in which he had found any enthusiasm."
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