Luxury and consommation in physiocracy Quesnay, Mirabeau & Baudeau

In the course of the eighteenth-century debates on luxury, Physiocracy represented a crucial turning point which had strong political implications. According to the physiocratic tenets of expense and savings, the arguments against luxury, as an economic principle, proceeded from the claim for productive expenditures and held luxury to be a specific type of expenditure within the process of creation, circulation and distribution of wealth. This attitude undermined traditional hierarchies and represented an attack to the trade interests and the privileged orders in the name of the positive effects of the spreading of buying and the interconnection between luxury and consumption.