Physiocratie et gouvernementalité : l’œuvre de Lemercier de la Rivière

The physiocrat Lemercier de la Rivière (1719-1801) dealt with the articulation of economics and politics around the issue of political construction that the Physiocratic economic ideal required. He is the instigator of « despotisme légal » that designates him as a « branche particulière » of Physiocracy which is regarded as a school of economic thought initiated and led by Francois Quesnay. He had three overlapping careers: as a lawyer, a colonial administrator, and a writer. Apart from, L'Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, the corpus of Lemercier de la Rivière remains virtually unexplored except by Richner who was looking for some Marxist premises and May who recounted his career as an colonial administrator. The thinking of Lemercier de la Rivière produced on the one hand a Physiocratic synthesis and on the other hand an ambitious post-Quesnay political structure with a draft constitution with innovative procedures for constitutional review. Lemercier de la Rivière kept, as an horizon, the functioning of the market and free trade, but he focused his work on the power of the State and he provided a constitutional, tax and educational framework, that freed up economic activities. He was the most political author of Physiocracy but his political discourse has remained mostly inaudible to the students of Physiocracy. This research has a double aspiration: to bring out of the shadows most of Lemercier de la Rivière's publications and manuscripts; and to reveal the specifics of his thinking with respect to Physiocracy. Holding on to the central idea that economic efficiency and the satisfaction of the needs of populations can be sought and achieved only in the stability of a controlled society obtained within a consistent and sustainable legal-institutional framework, we will link our study with Lemercier de la Rivière's conception of the power of the State. We will focus on the reconstruction of basic articulations between politics and economics to find the internal coherence of the physiocracy that Lemercier de la Rivière wished to produce and wanted to transform to build a governmentality, as Foucault expressed it, a « conduite des conduites » of men using their autonomy, their freedom, as an art of government which can be instrumentalized in and by the law. It will study the rationalities that underlie the practices of government, including that the art of government is structured by the interests of the prince. Finally, a governmentality focused on the rationalization of the power of the State structured by a positive law in conformity with natural law and with the will to state " les connoissances nécessaires à l'état de Citoyen, [qui] sont précisément les regles de conduite auxquelles chaque Citoyen est tenu de se conformer". A first phase will identify the origins of the reflection of Lemercier de la Rivière (his time as a colonial administrator, his writing and entering into Physiocracy) to write his intellectual biography. A second phase will explore the contours and organization of power of the State in his political thinking; it will establish how the physiocrat defined government in terms of fields and means of action. A third phase will examine Lemercier de la Rivière's constitutional proposals, especially to compare them with the alternative models of Montesquieu and Rousseau, and assess their influence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.