A fine assemblage including the first edition of Ferdinand Galiani’s virulent critique of the physiocrats and the royal edict of 1764 liberalising the trade in grain, bound uniformly with a sammelband containing two critical works written in direct response to Galiani by Morellet and Condorcet.
Written while Galiani was serving as secretary of the Neapolitan embassy in Paris, the work established Galiani’s reputation as an economist and stands as the ‘strongest attack on the doctrine of the exclusive productivity of agriculture’ (New Palgrave). Galiani’s Dialogues would prove to be immediately controversial and prompted fierce retorts by the adherents of physiocracy, two of which are present here in a uniformly bound sammelband.
The first of these critical retorts by the Abbé André Morellet (1727-1819), published later in the same year as Galiani’s Dialogues, is a general defence of physiocrat principles that fiercely equates Galiani’s criticism of the grain trade with an attack on liberty itself. Morellet’s critique is followed by Condorcet’s defence of the free trade of grain, written in the wake of the bad harvests and rocketing prices that had followed Turgot’s liberalisation of the grain trade in 1774. Condorcet had written the present tract prior to Turgot’s enactment of the policy, perhaps to anticipate it, but the work was not published until April 1775, in the midst of the troubles, and the month before the outbreak of bread riots in Paris.
The deregulation of the corn trade would ultimately prove to be ‘the decisive element which undermined the influence of physiocratic views on government policy’, and the liberalisation of the trade was scaled back following Turgot’s dismissal as Controller-General of Finances in 1776 (New Palgrave).
