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01 / 05
Turgot and an Early Theory of Progress

Blog Post | Progress Studies

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 —

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 recommended 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.

Blog Post | Trade

How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Opposition to Trade

We evolved in a world of zero-sum competition between individuals and groups. Without developed market economies, outsiders could gain something from your tribe only at your tribe’s expense.

Richard Hanania —

Summary: Many Americans instinctively support trade protectionism, often citing job losses, national decline, or loyalty to domestic workers. Those views find little support in economic data. They stem from deep-rooted psychological instincts—such as zero-sum thinking and a bias toward tangible labor. Understanding these evolutionary roots can help explain why bad economics often makes for popular politics.

The American right is obsessed with bringing back manufacturing jobs. Long before Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, free trade was blamed for everything from kids not playing outside anymore to national weakness and the United States being at a strategic disadvantage relative to China.

These perspectives, however, find little support in empirical data, and the ethical arguments underlying protectionism range from underdeveloped to downright odd. The fact that poor arguments against trade persist despite common sense and the overwhelming consensus of economists is a sign that we need to understand support for protecting manufacturing jobs against foreign competition as being rooted in evolutionary psychology. Protectionism is a preference that can be found where two very strong emotions intersect: hostility toward outgroups and an aesthetic preference for work that involves producing tangible objects.

Chris Caldwell has recently criticized trade on the grounds that the idea of the “country as a whole” is a myth. “The same policy could be perceived by one group as a windfall and by the other as a catastrophe. Trade made you the ally of certain foreigners and the rival of certain fellow Americans.” Similarly, in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that free trade leaves workers feeling betrayed by leaders in government and business, thus “bursting the bonds of mutual loyalty.”

These arguments are difficult to justify upon reflection. With regard to Caldwell’s view that trade puts you on the same team as foreigners against Americans, one may ask: Doesn’t restricting trade do the same? If I want to buy a widget from a Chinese manufacturer at a cheaper price, aren’t the protectionists within my own country thwarting me in that goal if they prevent me from doing so? Caldwell’s perspective treats a world without cross-border trade as the natural default, with the movement of goods across borders “creating” a situation in which Americans are pitted against one another. In fact, a world without trade can come about only through heavy-handed government action, with the state intervening on the side of some Americans against others.

Hazony’s argument likewise presents a strange view of ethics. When members of a group sacrifice, it’s usually to help the whole. For instance, a soldier might die in war to keep his nation from being conquered. The “moral” argument against trade flips this idea on its head. The majority, and the well-being of the whole, must be sacrificed for the sake of the few.

Even if we accept the desirability of redistribution, this argument could make sense only if the pro-trade position involved a transfer from the poor to the rich. Those who have a lot might sacrifice to help the poorest among us. The problem with this view is that tariffs function as a regressive tax, especially on goods that make up a larger share of low-income budgets, such as clothing, food, and appliances. A 25 percent duty on imported washing machines raises prices for everyone, but the cost is a greater burden for a minimum-wage household than for a wealthy one. A study of Trump’s 2018 tariffs found an annual cost of $419 per household. High earners might not notice such a cost, but it takes a big chunk out of the disposable income of the working poor.

While protectionists focus on jobs their policies save, they ignore the much larger harms inflicted on the rest of society. Steel tariffs imposed by the Bush administration in 2002–2003 were found to have cost 168,000 jobs in industries that have steel as inputs, more than the total number of jobs in the entire steel industry. The first Trump administration’s washing machine tariffs created 1,800 jobs, at the cost to consumers of $820,000 for each job.

None of that should be surprising given the nature of the American economy. Protectionists seem to imagine that manufacturing makes up a massive portion of the national workforce. Yet only 8 percent of the nonfarm labor force works in manufacturing, half of what it was in the early 1990s. Even if you focus on the less educated, such jobs do not represent anywhere near a majority. As of 2015, only 16 percent of men without a bachelor’s degree worked in manufacturing, down from 37 percent in 1960. Thus, even if you ignore women and everyone in the country who completed higher education, most people do not actually have the kinds of jobs that opponents of free trade seek to protect and cultivate.

On what basis, then, should national policy be geared toward helping a very small minority of the public, and even a minority of the working class, at the expense of everyone else? What is odd about antitrade conservatives is that they rarely focus on other sacrifices the rich could make on behalf of the poor. The most straightforward way for them to do so would be to call for higher taxes on the wealthy and more redistribution. That way, instead of taxing everyone (with a disproportionate effect on the poor) to help a small minority of the population, one could focus on those who can most afford to pay. This is not to argue for redistribution, but rather to say that if that is your goal, putting restrictions on trade is not the way to achieve it.

Given what the empirical data overwhelmingly show about the effects of tariffs, and given the existing structure of the American economy, there must be a psychological reason for the strong attachment many have to protectionist policies. Evolutionary psychology provides an answer. First of all, we evolved in a world of zero-sum competition between individuals and groups. Without developed market economies, outsiders could gain something from your tribe only at your tribe’s expense.

President Trump makes this view explicit when he says that a trade deficit means we are “losing” money to foreign countries. This, of course, makes no sense. When I buy something from a store, it is because both parties decided it was in their interest to engage in a voluntary transaction. It’s telling that conservative intellectuals, and Americans more generally, rarely have opinions nearly this strong in economic domains outside of trade and immigration. Shouldn’t every situation where there’s a buyer and a seller be some sort of scam, according to Trump’s worldview? The fact that almost nobody understands economics this way indicates that the presence of foreigners in an interaction changes the nature of how individuals perceive it.

In addition to zero-sum thinking, another aspect of evolutionary psychology that is relevant here is how we perceive the nature of work. As alluded to earlier, protectionists tend to value manufacturing jobs higher than other forms of work, while also implicitly overestimating the extent to which our economy depends on them. But why, exactly, does someone going from working in a factory to becoming a hairdresser or driving an Uber seem like a loss, even if their new job might pay more? Why do protectionists in America seem envious of nations like China and Vietnam, which have a higher percentage of their workforces involved in manufacturing but are much poorer than we are?

Once again, the answer must be found in the distant past and how it shaped our contemporary brains. As hunter-gatherers and later farmers, we could see that someone who erected a dwelling or made a fishing spear was clearly contributing to society. Manufacturing workers are the modern equivalents, producing goods that individuals can see and touch.

The rise of the service economy is a recent phenomenon. For most of human history, nearly all labor was tied to survival—hunting, gathering, farming, or crafting tools. Even through the early industrial period, most workers made things. But in the past century, advanced economies have shifted dramatically. Today, the vast majority of workers in countries like the United States are employed in services, including sectors such as health care, education, finance, hospitality, and software development. These roles often involve abstract forms of productivity, making their social value harder for most people to grasp.

Note that like manufacturing, agriculture is often romanticized and protected from foreign competition, likely because it has premodern equivalents. Just like factories, farms evoke images of hard physical labor, sustenance, and independence. To find such work aesthetically appealing is deeply wired into our collective psychology. In truth, however, the structure of modern work has moved on. Manufacturing and farming make up only a fraction of the economies of advanced nations.

Most Americans today do not make things. They provide care, solve problems, create knowledge, or facilitate transactions. These jobs are no less real or valuable than factory work, but they lack the visceral, visible outputs our minds were shaped to recognize as valuable. The nostalgia for manufacturing, then, is rooted not in economic logic or ethical clarity, but in an instinctive bias toward forms of labor that resemble those in our ancestral past.

Of course feelings matter in politics. Nonetheless, it is important to understand when we are being motivated by psychological illusions. One might argue that the path to happiness is to indulge in our natural instincts and have a closed economy in which more people make tangible things, even if it causes our living standards to collapse. Yet protectionists practically never make a case like this—and for good reason. Once you understand the nature of these biases and how irrational they are, the case against trade falls apart.

This is why protectionists instead argue that their preferred policies will make their country better off economically, or at the very least transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. The proper response here is that their assumptions are simply not true. Instead of throwing up barriers to trade or trying to resurrect a long-gone employment landscape, we should ask how best to support workers as they are, not as we imagine them to be. That means supporting things like flexible labor markets, higher-quality training and education, and the removal of arbitrary barriers to making a living such as occupational licensing regimes.

World Bank | Food Prices

Global Food Prices Ease amid Improved Supply and Trade

“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.

Curiosities | Trade

The Real Story of the “China Shock”

“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.

UN Trade and Development | Trade

Global Trade Hits Record $33 Trillion in 2024

“Global trade hit a record $33 trillion in 2024, expanding 3.7% ($1.2 trillion), according to the latest Global Trade Update by UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which warns that while trade remains strong, uncertainty looms in 2025…

Developing economies outpaced developed nations, with imports and exports rising 4% for the year and 2% in the fourth quarter, driven mainly by East and South Asia. South-South trade expanded 5% annually and 4% in the last quarter.

Chain and India outperformed global trade averages. In contrast, trade in the Russian Federation, South Africa, and Brazil remained sluggish for most of the year, with some improvement in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, developed economies’ trade stagnated, with imports and exports flat for the year and down 2% in the last quarter.”

From UN Trade and Development.