Editing Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (section)

==Commentary on Turgot==
According to the [[Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition]]:
{{quote|In character Turgot was simple, honourable and upright, with a passion for justice and truth. He was an idealist, his enemies would say a [[wikt:doctrinaire|doctrinaire]], and certainly the terms "natural rights," "natural law," frequently occur in his writings. His friends speak of his charm and gaiety in intimate intercourse, but among strangers he was silent and awkward, and produced the impression of being reserved and disdainful. On one point both friends and enemies agree, and that is his [[wikt:brusquerie|brusquerie]] and his lack of tact in the management of men; {{ill|August Oncken|de}} points out with some reason the schoolmasterish tone of his letters, even to the king. As a statesman he has been very variously estimated, but it is generally agreed that a large number of the reforms and ideas of the Revolution were due to him; the ideas did not as a rule originate with him, but it was he who first gave them prominence. As to his position as an economist, opinion is also divided. Oncken, to take the extreme of condemnation, looks upon him as a bad physiocrat and a confused thinker, while [[Leon Say]] considers that he was the founder of modern political economy, and that "though he failed in the 18th century he triumphed in the 19th."<ref name="EB1911"/>}}

[[Andrew Dickson White]] wrote in [https://archive.org/details/cu31924011368218 ''Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason''] (1915):

<blockquote>
TURGOT...I present today one of the three greatest statesmen who fought unreason in France between the close of the Middle Ages and the outbreak of the French Revolution – Louis XI and Richelieu being the two other. And not only this: were you to count the greatest men of the modern world upon your fingers, he would be of the number – a great thinker, writer, administrator, philanthropist, statesman, and above all, a great character and a great man. And yet, judged by ordinary standards, a failure. For he was thrown out of his culminating position, as Comptroller-General of France, after serving but twenty months, and then lived only long enough to see every leading measure to which he had devoted his life deliberately and malignantly undone; the flagrant abuses which he had abolished restored, apparently forever; the highways to national prosperity, peace, and influence, which he had opened, destroyed; and his country put under full headway toward the greatest catastrophe the modern world has seen.
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<blockquote>
He now, in 1749, at the age of twenty two, wrote... a letter which has been an object of wonder among political thinkers ever since. Its subject was paper money. Discussing the ideas of John Law, and especially the essay of Terrasson which had supported them, he dissected them mercilessly, but in a way useful not only in those times but in these. ...As regards currency inflation ... It still remains one of the best presentations of this subject ever made; and what adds to our wonder is that it was not the result of a study of authorities, but was worked out wholly from his own observation and thought. Up to this time there were no authorities and no received doctrine on the subject; there were simply records of financial practice more or less vicious; it was reserved for this young student, in a letter not intended for publication, to lay down for the first time the great law in which the modern world, after all its puzzling and costly experiences, has found safety.
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