A Note on Animal and Political Economy in Quesnay

In this article, I argue that François Quesnay’s physiocratic writings on economics entail the working through not only of formal principles of circulatory flow developed in his earlier physiological writings on “animal economy” but also the construction of a model of political economy that depends directly on an animal economy understood as the efficient administration of animal labor. Although the contradictions of this model already foreshadow those of today’s dominant model of economic administration, I argue that Quesnay’s economic writings nonetheless contain an invitation for us to rethink the connection between the economic and the ecological domains.