Turgot and an Early Theory of Progress

Turgot, a French statesman, economist, and early advocate of economic liberalism, was one of the first to ponder how we achieve moral and material progress.

Paul Meany — Jan 5, 2024

Summary: Progress, though central to modern life, was rarely thought about until the last two centuries. During the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Anne Robert Jacques Turgot connected freedom with progress, emphasizing the unique human capacity for cumulative knowledge. Turgot’s ideas laid some of the groundwork for modern liberalism and economic theory, influencing thinkers and policies long after his time.

Progress through the Ages

Though progress is an essential ingredient of modern life, it is an ideal that has only been acknowledged, discussed, and debated extensively in the last two hundred years. At first, it might seem odd to say large swathes of people did not always think deeply about progress. But this view ignores that the vast majority of our distant ancestors used the same tools in their daily lives that their ancestors, from hundreds of years in the past, had used in their time.

Broadly speaking, the Greeks and Romans viewed civilization like any other living organism; it grows then dies like all living things. The expected historical norm was the cyclical rising and falling of civilizations. Though some, such as the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, theorized briefly about progress, this was an idiosyncratic line of inquiry at the time. Medieval thinkers viewed their age as a dark period in the shadow of an illustrious past. The word “progress” was alien to the human lexicon for thousands of years.

But this changed dramatically with the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement characterized, in part, by a new confidence in the power of reason to catalog, observe, and experiment upon our natural environment. An advocate for Enlightenment ideals and ambassador for liberalism in its early days, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, was among the earliest to examine the dynamics of progress. Importantly for classical liberals and libertarians alike, Turgot was the first to establish the connection between freedom and progress. Turgot believed without freedom, human progress would revert to cycles of development and decline.

Turgot’s Life, Education, and Career

Turgot was born in Paris to a distinguished Norman family that had long served the French monarchy as royal officials. Turgot’s father was Michel Michel-Étienne, a Councillor of the Parliament of Paris and one of the senior administrators in the city of Paris. His mother, Dame Madeleine-Françoise Martineau, was a renowned intellectual and aristocrat.

Turgot, as the youngest son in his family, was expected to join the church, the usual career path for a younger son in 18th-century Europe. He began studying at the Sorbonne in 1749, but after a year, he decided he could not become a priest because he refused to conceal his beliefs that were at variance with the teachings of the church. Turgot was suited to being a student; he studied voraciously, reading history, literature, philosophy, and the natural sciences, interests he would maintain until his death.

Sorbonne Lectures: Early Ideas on Progress

While studying at the Sorbonne, Turgot made his intellectual gifts known and was elected by his fellow students to the position of Prieur. This mostly honorary position called for an occasional speech to be delivered publicly. The content of these speeches was inspired by Turgot’s interaction with Bishop Bossuet and his idea of “universal history.” Turgot’s innovation was to give a secularized account of humanity’s universal history. Turgot, like the ancients, accepted that all things live and then die. However, he maintained that humans have a unique capacity for language and memory, allowing them to pass down knowledge that accumulates incrementally over the centuries, leading to ever-increasing stores of knowledge for the whole of humanity. Though this may seem like a simple idea today, for the time, it was revolutionary, and these speeches established Turgot at a young age as France’s foremost thinker on progress.

One of his speeches now survives as an essay entitled “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind.” It is debatable whether Turgot is the first person to theorize about progress, but we can say with certainty that Turgot is best known for identifying the relationship between freedom and progress.

Turgot’s “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind”

Unlike his inspiration, Bishop Bossuet, Turgot articulated a secular account of progress. Turgot does not entirely exile God from the discussion, but he relegates God to being a prime mover rather than a prime intervener in human affairs. For Turgot, progress does not come from divine providence but is a uniquely human phenomenon.

Turgot defined stages of civilizational development, beginning with hunting, then pastoral, and finally agricultural. Two years prior, in 1748, in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu had done the same. However, Montesquieu used these stages to illustrate how topography and climate influence human activity. Turgot’s stages are not separated by varying climates but by human developmental differences. Turgot argued human activity and civilization are influenced not only by climate and topography but also by degrees of social development, progress is not a mere descriptive conclusion; in Robert Nisbet’s words, “it is a method, a logic, of inquiry.”

Where Does Progress Come From?

For Turgot, the natural world is an unending cyclical succession of death and life —whereas human civilization shows signs not of constant decay but rather ever more vitality. Humans are unique creatures because of their capacity for language, writing, and memory. Because of these capacities, the knowledge of particular individuals becomes “a common treasure-house which one generation transmits to another, an inheritance which is always being enlarged by the discoveries of each age.”

All humans have the same potential for progress. However, nature distributes our talents unevenly. Our talents are made practical by a long chain of circumstances. Turgot wrote, “Circumstances either develop these talents or allow them to become buried in obscurity.” But from this infinite variety of circumstances, progress slowly develops unequally at first, but its benefits spread to the whole human species over time.

Humans’ collective capacity for memory means that even amidst war, famine, and disaster, they can preserve and continuously improve their knowledge of the world. Writing prophetically before the economic miracle of liberalism, Turgot says, “Amid all the ignorance, progress is imperceptibly taking place and preparing for the brilliant achievements of later centuries; beneath this soil the feeble roots of a far-off harvest are already developing.”

Progress Requires Experimentation

Unlike many of his philosophical contemporaries, Turgot greatly admired artisans and mechanics, people who worked with their hands to create new machines. Unlike Rene Descartes, Turgot did not believe the greatness of his century came from a superior set of ideals, attributing it instead to new inventions. Ultimately, Turgot believed we were indebted to artisans rather than philosophers for much of the comforts in our daily lives.

Behind all science lies experimentation. Turgot understood he could not give a complete account of how progress would unfold because a large part of it was down to chance and unique circumstances. He wrote, “Any art cultivated over a period of centuries is bound to fall into the hands of some inventive genius.” Turgot elaborates, “Chances lead to a host of discoveries, and chances multiply with time. A child’s play can reveal the telescope, improve optics, and extend the boundaries of the universe in great and little ways.” This might seem like fanciful thinking, but when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, it was due to a simple mistake that yielded a crucial element of modern medicine, while Edison had to experiment over 1000 times before creating an effective light bulb which thereafter illuminated the entire world. There is no set path for progress to take. That is why we must leave people the maximum freedom to experiment and try new ideas to maximize future progress.

Obstacles to Progress

Turgot feared the main impediments to progress were conventional thinking and concentrated interests that benefited from the status quo. Turgot believed a concentration of power in any area would lead to stagnation and decay in all aspects of life, whether cultural, economic, or political. Inherited ideas, or what John Stuart Mill would later call, “dead dogma,” stop people from appreciating new knowledge. Turgot rec o mmended we follow the facts because, “The greatest genius will not question a theory unless he is driven by facts.”

Turgot’s Laissez Faire Economics

After his time in the Sorbonne, Turgot turned his attention to politics. In 1752, he started climbing the political ladder as a substitut and later a conseiller in the Parliament of Paris. While living in Paris, he frequented salons, gathering places for intellectuals to come together to debate and discuss ideas. While attending, Turgot met the intendant of commerce, Jacques Vincent de Gournay, the man perhaps best known for popularizing the term laissez-faire economics. In an effort to promote the study of economics, de Gournay gathered a group of young men, including Turgot.

During this time, Turgot became acquainted with physiocrats such as Quesnay, who argued that the state should not regulate commerce to promote economic growth, but leave markets free. Inspired by his mentor de Gournay and his friends like Quesnay, Turgot became one of the foremost advocates of free trade in France, if not the whole of Europe, before the days of Adam Smith.

When de Gournay died in 1759, Turgot wrote a fitting eulogy that summarized de Gournay’s beliefs while expanding Turgot’s own positions on how best to run an economy. The result is a short essay entitled “In Praise of de Gournay,” where Turgot develops his laissez-faire philosophy.

Establishing the Idea of Economic Liberty

Turgot’s eulogy is the most complete statement of his economic beliefs that survives. Speaking on his mentor’s behalf, Turgot argues that, “The general freedom of buying and selling is therefore the only means of assuring, on the one hand, the seller of a price sufficient to encourage production, and on the other hand, the consumer, of the best merchandise at the lowest price.” Turgot, like de Gournay, believed that if people were left free to make their own decisions, there would not be anarchy like people expected, but instead harmony. Individuals, driven by self-interest, make their own decisions with the information available to them, and by acting on their own interests, they unwittingly promote the interests of the whole of society.

Many of the regulations governments impose are attempts at stopping fraudulent sales or scams. Turgot wrote that, “To suppose all consumers to be dupes, and all merchants and manufacturers to be cheats, has the effect of authorizing them to be so, and of degrading all the working members of the community.” On top of regulations, the government imposed a long list of different taxes on every kind of labor. Turgot believed a more concise and understandable tax system would help repair France’s then-failing economy.

Turgot’s thinking on spontaneous order anticipates that of later scholars like F.A. Hayek. Turgot argues that complex systems, such as economies or whole societies, emerge and organize without central planning. The idea of spontaneous order challenges the misconception that only top-down, state-run authorities can craft efficient and free societies. Turgot asserts that the doctrine of laissez-faire “was founded on the complete impossibility of directing, by invariant rules and by continuous inspection a multitude of transactions which by their immensity alone could not be fully known, and which, moreover, are continually dependent on a multitude of ever-changing circumstances which cannot be managed or even foreseen.” In short, almost 200 years before Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Turgot was arguing that an individual, group of individuals or even an entire government would never have access to the mountains of information required to “manage” the economy.

Like his mentor, Turgot was for free trade and a government that mostly stayed away from trying to manage the minutiae of the economy. Turgot believed people did not need to be managed; quite the opposite, their productive energies needed to be unleashed upon the world.

Political Career

Though a prominent theoretician on economic and philosophical matters, Turgot was never an academic. Though academically gifted, Turgot wanted more than for his ideas to be discussed in salons; he wanted them to be implemented for the benefit of France. In 1761, Turgot was appointed as the tax collector of Limoges. Turgot eliminated complicated taxes and abolished the despised corvée, a form of unpaid labor demanded in lieu of taxes. Throughout his time in Limoges, Turgot dedicated himself to removing obstacles in the way of the poorest in society earning their daily bread. By 1773, when Turgot left, Limoges was one of France’s more prosperous areas; as a reward for his achievement, he was appointed as Controller General of France by Louis XVI.

With his new position, Turgot had ambitious plans. He aimed to implement several economic reforms, including free trade, reducing the lower classes’ financial burdens, and removing feudal privileges. Turgot’s reforms faced strong opposition from powerful concentrated interest groups among the day’s nobility, clergy, and guilds. Ultimately, Turgot resigned in 1776, never holding a political position again. He spent his final years at his family estate, buried in his studies and correspondence, dying at the age of fifty-four.

Turgot’s Importance to the History of Liberalism

Though unsuccessful in his reforms, Turgot’s efforts put laissez faire and liberalism on the political map. They were no longer mere theories but practical policies. The writings of Turgot are still valuable because they help remind us of a simple yet fundamental truth: that progress consists not in merely more capital goods but in an ever-increasing store of cumulative knowledge. His writings also illustrate that progress was a relatively rare phenomenon before the Enlightenment, only experienced in brief glimpses by select pockets of the human population. Despite being a busy and politically engaged figure, Turgot’s ideas nonetheless had a massive impact on the intellectual history of the Western world.

Legacy of Turgot

It is difficult to overstate the impact of Turgot’s ideas and work as a politician. He has garnered many admirers, including the economist Joseph Schumpeter and libertarian thinkers like Murray Rothbard. Turgot’s career in economics was brief but brilliant. Thinkers like Turgot, his mentor Vincent Gournay, and his friend François Quesnay were responsible for France being among the first countries to implement laissez faire economic policy and for integrating liberal ideas into the public consciousness. Without the intellectual and political efforts of people like Turgot, liberalism and economic freedom might have remained obscure ideas relegated to a select group of obscure intellectuals.

A version of this article was published at Libertarianism.org on 11/14/2023.

Wall Street Journal | Trade & Manufacturing

Amazon Nearly Using More Robots than Humans in Its Warehouses

Jul 1, 2025

“The automation of Amazon facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans.

The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities.

Company warehouses buzz with metallic arms plucking items from shelves and wheeled droids that motor around the floors ferrying the goods for packaging. In other corners, automated systems help sort the items, which other robots assist in packaging for shipment.

One of Amazon’s newer robots, called Vulcan, has a sense of touch that enables it to pick items from numerous shelves. Amazon has taken recent steps to connect its robots to its order-fulfillment processes, so the machines can work in tandem with each other and with humans…

Now some 75% of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics, the company said. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity, while easing pressure on the company to solve problems such as heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.”

From Wall Street Journal.

World Bank | Food Prices

Global Food Prices Ease amid Improved Supply and Trade

Jun 25, 2025

“Global grain supplies are projected to reach a record 3.6 billion tons in the 2025-26 season, marking a third consecutive year of growth—though at a slower pace than the average annual growth of the preceding two decades. Wheat supply has returned to its long-term average growth rate, while maize supply has rebounded after recent setbacks but remains below its historical trend. In contrast, supplies of rice and soybeans are projected to grow at about their long-term growth averages, building on last season’s significantly elevated levels.”

From World Bank.

Blog Post | Manufacturing

Grim Old Days: Virginia Postrel’s Fabric of Civilization

Beneath today’s abundance of clothing lies a long and brutal history.

Chelsea Follett — Jun 10, 2025

Summary: Virginia Postrel’s book weaves a sweeping history of textiles as both drivers of innovation and toil. From ancient women spinning for months to make a single garment to brutal sumptuary laws and dye trades steeped in labor and odor, it is revealed how fabric shaped the foundations of human society.

Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is the riveting story of how humanity’s quest for thread, cloth, and clothing built modern civilization, by motivating achievements from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and more. While much of the book contains inspiring tales of innovation, artistry, and entrepreneurship, the parts of the book about the preindustrial era also reveal some dark and disturbing facts about the past.

In the preindustrial era, clothing was often painstakingly produced at home. Postrel estimates that, in Roman times, it took a woman about 909 hours—or 114 days, almost 4 months—to spin enough wool into yarn for a single toga. With the later invention of the spinning wheel, the time needed to produce yarn for a similarly sized garment dropped to around 440 hours, or 50 days. Even in the 18th century, on the eve of industrialization, Yorkshire wool spinners using the most advanced treadle spinning wheels of the time would have needed 14 days to produce enough yarn for a single pair of trousers. Today, by contrast, spinning is almost entirely automated, with a single worker overseeing machines that are able to produce 75,000 pounds of yarn a year—enough to knit 18 million T-shirts.

Most preindustrial women devoted enormous amounts of time to producing thread, which they learned how to make during childhood. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Postrel does, “Most preindustrial women spent their lives spinning.” This was true across much of the world. Consider Mesoamerica:

At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.

These girls often multitasked while spinning: “preindustrial spinners could work while minding children or tending flocks, gossiping or shopping, or waiting for a pot to boil.” The near-constant nature of the task meant that prior to the Industrial Revolution, “industry’s visual representation was a woman spinning thread: diligent, productive, and absolutely essential” to the functioning of society, and from antiquity onward cloth-making was viewed as a key feminine virtue. Ancient Greek pottery portrays spinning “as both the signature activity of the good housewife and something prostitutes do between clients,” showing that women of different social classes were bound to spend much of their lives engaged in this task.

Women of every background worked day and night, but still, their efforts were never enough. “Throughout most of human history, producing enough yarn to make cloth was so time-consuming that this essential raw material was always in short supply.”

Having sufficient spun yarn or thread was only the beginning; it still had to be transformed into cloth. “It took three days of steady work to weave a single bolt of silk, about thirteen yards long, enough to outfit two women in blouses and trousers,” although silk-weavers themselves could rarely afford to wear silk. According to Postrel, a Chinese poem from the year 1145, paired with a painting of a modestly dressed, barefoot peasant weaving silk, suggests that “the couple in damask silk . . . should think of the one who wears coarse hemp.”

Subdued colors often defined the clothing of the masses. “‘Any weed can be a dye,’ fifteenth-century Florentine dyers used to say. But that’s only if you want yellows, browns, or grays—the colors yielded by the flavonoids and tannins common in shrubs and trees.” Other dye colors were harder to produce.

In antiquity, Tyrian purple was a dye derived from crushed sea snails, and the notoriously laborious and foul-smelling production process made it expensive. As a result, it became a status symbol, despite the repulsive stench that clung to the fabric it colored. In fact, according to Postrel, the poet Martial included “a fleece twice drenched in Tyrian dye” in a list of offensive odors, with a joke that a wealthy woman wore the reeking color to conceal her own body odor. The fetor became a status symbol. “Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not an imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.” The color itself was not purple, despite the name, but a dark hue similar to the color of dried blood. Later, during the Renaissance, Italian dyers yielded a bright red from crushed cochineal insects imported from the Americas, as well as other colors that were created by using acidic bran water that was said to smell “like vomit.”

Numerous laws strictly regulated what people were allowed to wear. Italian city-states issued more than 300 sumptuary laws between 1300 and 1500, motivated in part by revenue-hungry governments’ appetite for fines. For example, in the early 1320s, Florence forbade women from owning more than four outfits that were considered presentable enough to wear outside. Postrel quotes the Florentine sumptuary law official Franco Sacchetti as writing that women often ignored the rules and argued with officials until the latter gave up on enforcement; he ends his exasperated account with the saying, “What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass.” But enough fines were collected to motivate officials to enact ever more restrictions.

In Ming Dynasty China, punishment for dressing above one’s station could include corporal punishment or penal servitude. Yet, as in Florence, and seemingly nearly everywhere that sumptuary laws were imposed, such regulations were routinely flouted, with violators willing to risk punishment or fines. In France in 1726, the authorities harshened the penalty for trafficking certain restricted cotton fabrics, which were made illegal in 1686, to include the death penalty. The French law was not a traditional sumptuary law, but an economic protectionist measure intended to insulate the domestic cloth industry from foreign competition. Postrel quotes the French economist André Morellet lamenting the barbarity of this rule, writing in 1758,

Is it not strange that an otherwise respectable order of citizens solicits terrible punishments such as death and the galleys against Frenchmen, and does so for reasons of commercial interest? Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying [banned cloth] to sell in Grenoble for 58 [coins]?

Despite such disproportionate punishments, the textile-smuggling trade continued.

Postrel’s book exposes the brutal realities woven into the history of textiles; stories not just of uplifting innovation, but of relentless toil, repression, and suffering. Her book fosters a deeper appreciation for the wide range of fabrics and clothes that we now take for granted, and it underscores the human resilience that made such abundance and choice possible.

Curiosities | Trade

The Real Story of the “China Shock”

May 30, 2025

“The total number of jobs remained largely stable in the U.S.—and even slightly increased—as people adapted to competition from Chinese trade. Trade-exposed places recovered after 2010, primarily by adding young-adult workers, foreign-born immigrants, women and the college-educated to service-sector jobs.

Lost in the alarm over jobs is that trade with China delivered substantial benefits to the U.S. economy. Most obvious are the lower prices Americans pay for everything from clothing and electronics to furniture. One study found that a 1 percentage point increase in imports from China led to about a 1.9% drop in consumer prices in the U.S. For every factory job lost to Chinese competition, American consumers in aggregate gained an estimated $411,000 in consumer welfare. This so-called Walmart effect disproportionately helped middle- and lower-income families, who spend a bigger share of their budget on the kinds of cheap goods China excels at producing.

U.S. businesses also reaped advantages. Manufacturers who use imported parts or materials benefited from cheaper inputs, making them more competitive globally. An American appliance company, for example, could buy low-cost Chinese components to lower its production costs, keep its product prices down and potentially hire more workers.”

From Wall Street Journal.