Quesnay's Tableau économique has raised more interest and received
more comments from historians of economic thought than from historians
of political thought. There is nothing really strange in that observation:
the Tableau is the first full-fledged quantitative and abstract representation
of society, described as a network of money flows linking three
classes. It would not really be absurd to think of the Tableau as the true
genesis of economics. That is not to say that nothing valuable was produced
before Quesnay.
