Hume serves as proof that "the creation of this whole branch of science" (economics) "is the achievement of a more enlightened philosophy" {123};and similarly Hume as predecessor is the best guarantee that this whole branch of science will find its close, for the immediately foreseeable future, in that phenomenal man who has transformed the merely "more enlightened"philosophy into the absolutely luminous philosophy of reality, and with whom, just as was the case with Hume, "the cultivation of philosophy in the narrow sense of the word is combined -- something unprecedented on German soil -- with scientific endeavours on behalf of the national economy" {D. Ph. 531}
Accordingly we find Hume, in any case respectable as an economist, inflated into an economic star of the first magnitude, whose importance has hitherto been denied only by the same envious people who have hitherto also so obstinately hushed up Herr Dühring's achievements, "authoritative for the epoch"{D. K. G. 1}.
* * * The physiocratic school left us in Quesnay's Tableau économique , as everyone knows, a nut on which all former critics and historians of political economy have up to now broken their jaws in vain; This Tableau , which was intended to bring out clearly the physiocrats' conception of the production and circulation of a country's total wealth, remained obscure enough for the succeeding generations of economists. On this subject, too, Herr Dühring comes to finally enlighten us.
What this "economic image of the relations of production and distribution means in Quesnay himself," he says, can only be stated if one has "first carefully examined the leading ideas which are peculiar to him". All the more because these have hitherto been set forth only with "wavering indefiniteness", and their "essential features cannot be recognised"{105} even in Adam Smith.
Herr Dühring will now once and for all put an end to this traditional "superficial reporting". He then proceeds to pull the reader's leg through five whole pages, five pages in which all kinds of pretentious phrases, constant repetitions and calculated confusion are designed to conceal the awkward fact that Herr Dühring has hardly as much to tell us in regard to Quesnay's "leading ideas" {105}, as the "most current textbook compilations"{109} against which he warns us so untiringly. It is "one of the most dubious sides" {111} of this introduction that here too the Tableau , which up to that point had only been mentioned by name, is just casually snuffled at, and then gets lost in all sorts of "reflections", such as, for example, "the difference between effort and result". Though the latter, "it is true, is not to be found completed in Quesnay's ideas", Herr Dühring will give us a fulminating example of it as soon as he comes from his lengthy introductory "effort" to his remarkably shortwinded "result" {109}, that is to say, to his elucidation of the Tableau itself. We shall now give all, literally all that he feels it right to tell us of Quesnay's Tableau.
In his "effort" Herr Dühring says:
"It seemed to him" (Quesnay) "self-evident that the proceeds" (Herr Dühring had just spoken of the net product) "must be thought of and treated as a money value {105-06} ... He connected his deliberations"(!) "immediately with the money values which he assumed as the results of the sales of all agricultural products when they first change hands.
In this way" (!) "he operates in the columns of his Tableau with several milliards" {106} (that is, with money values).
We have therefore learnt three times over that, in his Tableau , Quesnay operates with the "money values" of "agricultural products", including the money values of the "net product" or "net proceeds". Further on in the text we find:
Had Quesnay considered things from a really natural standpoint, and had he rid himself not only of regard for the precious metals and the amount of money, but also of regard for money values... But as it is he reckons solely with sums of value , and imagined" (!) "the net product in advance as a money value" {106}.
So for the fourth and fifth time: there are only money values in the Tableau!
"He" (Quesnay) "obtained it" (the net product) "by deducting the expenses and thinking,' (!) "principally" (not traditional but for that matter all the more superficial reporting) "of that value which would accrue to the landlord as rent" {1061.
We have still not advanced a step; but now it is coming:
"On the other hand, however , now also" -- this "however, now also" is a gem! -- "the net product, as a natural object, enters into circulation, and in this way becomes an element which ... should serve ... to maintain the class which is described as sterile. In this the confusion can at once" (!) "be seen -- the confusion arising from the fact that in one case it is the money value, and in the other the thing itself, which determines the course of thought" {106}.
In general, it seems, all circulation of commodities suffers from the "confusion" that commodities enter into circulation simultaneously as "natural objects" and as "money values". But we are still moving in a circle about "money value", for "Quesnay is anxious to avoid a double booking of the national-economic proceeds" {106}.
With Herr Dühring's permission: In Quesnay's Analysis at the foot of the Tableau , the various kinds of products figure as "natural objects" and above, in the Tableau itself, their money values are given. Subsequently Quesnay even made his famulus, the Abbé Baudeau, include the natural objects in the Tableau itself, beside their money values.
After all this "effort", we at last get the "result". Listen and marvel at these words:
