Physiocracy anticipated a more complex capitalist future than its own agrarian rhetoric suggests

Evidence

The Physiocrats represent the break with mercantilism and with the guild system, and are a stage on the way to classical economics. But it seems to me that precisely for that reason they represent a far more complex future society than the one against which they are fighting, and even than the one which immediately derives from their affirmations. Their language is too much linked to their time, and expresses the immediate contrast between city and countryside, but it permits an expansion of capitalism into agriculture to be foreseen. The formula of “laissez-faire, laissez-passer”, that is to say of free industry and free enterprise, is certainly not linked to agrarian interests. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 650

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the Physiocrats as a transitional stage from mercantilism toward classical economics, not mere agrarian spokesmen.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader claim in these notebooks that a class’s political consciousness can outstrip the immediate social base it speaks for — parallels later hegemony and what Gramsci means by ‘historical bloc’.