Madame de Stael's Father

From Mistress to an Age by J. Christopher Herold, 1958Monsieur Necker made himself useful to the King of France, got in some trouble, got out of it . . . here's a quote:

He was by no means a fool, and in some ways he was ahead of his time. His realization that France was rich, that only the government was poor, and that credit was the heart of prosperity--these certainly are ideas that have gained some currency in our times; but his lucidity was balanced by his blindness to the need of taxation, without which the credit was bound to collapse--as indeed it did, burying Europe in its ruins. His opposition to the laissez-faire doctrine, to Turgot's Panglossian notion that 'the general well-being is the result of the efforts of each individual to further his own interests,' was based not on a study of economics, of which he knew little, but on considerations of social justice. Government regulation, he insisted, was necessary to protect the people against lawless exploitation, and in the conclusion to his book on the 'Commerce of Grains' he echoed Rousseau's 'Second Discourse:'

It seems that a small number of men, after dividing up the earth among themselves, have created laws for their common protection against the masses . . . And yet, it must be said that after the establishment of laws to safeguard property, justice, and liberty, almost nothing has been done as yet for the most numerous class of citizens. 'What do the laws of property mean to us?' they well might ask. 'We owe nothing. Your justice? We have nothing to defend. Your liberty? If we do not work tomorrow, we die.'

(This would have been 1781-89)