LINGUET, Simon Nicolas Henri.

£525 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Canaux Navigables, First edition. Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet (1736-1794) was a French journalist and lawyer "whose delight in taking views opposing everyone else's earned him exiles, imprisonment, and finally the guillotine" (Encyclopaedia Britannica online). In this period he is notable for being perhaps the most vocal opponent of the ascendant physiocrats, with this book attacking their ideas, within the framework of his support for the establishment of new canals. "Linguet's 1769 book was not an engineer's, but rather a project designer's who discussed the usefulness, assets and flaws of existing canals. He submitted several constructions in different French provinces. The epistolary form of his work allowed him to change subjects frequently and broach peripheral questions" (Kaplan & Sophus Reinert, The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe). It was from these peripheral questions that he could attack the physiocrats and their "agromania & the passion to write, these past few years, on economic matters", those who "pretended to be shepherds in the middle of Paris" and "sowed their seeds on their own writing tables". That said, at this stage Linguet does not fundamentally oppose phyisocrat arguments to liberalize the grain trade, and he does not offer detailed economic assessments of physiocratic thought - in keeping with his controversialist ways, he mainly opposes physiocracy as he saw it as the latest fad, and disliked its adherents.

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