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This outstanding book was ten years in the making, but it is finally here and the result is startling. It is a pocket edition, super economical, 525 pages of Turgot – the bulk of his life’s work, all beautifully organized.
He might have been the key influence on Jefferson but, in any case, he certainly was the great French liberal of the 18th century, not only a proto-Austrian but also a fantastic defender of human liberty in every respect.
Of course the book includes his famed and pioneering "Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth." But this volume covers economics, history, social theory, philosophy, and even religion. It also includes his correspondence with Voltaire, Hume, Condorcet, and others.
You will find yourself wrapped up in his worldview and thinking like a liberal French aristocrat of the time. Murray Rothbard's brilliant essay on Turgot is the preface. David Gordon wrote the lucid and helpful introductions to each section. Here you find not only his economics but his theory of history and life itself.
Turgot might be the greatest, least known of the enlightenment liberals. This volume should certainly contribute to making a revival possible.

"Not only was Turgot a busy administrator, but his intellectual interests were wide-ranging, and most of his spare time was spent reading and writing, not in economics, but in history, literature, philology, and the natural sciences. His contributions to economics were brief, scattered, and hasty. His most famous work, “Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth” (1766), comprised only fifty-three pages. This brevity only highlights the great contributions to economics made by this remarkable man. In the history of thought, the style is often the man, and Turgot’s clarity and lucidity of style mirrors the virtues of his thought, and contrasts refreshingly to the prolix and turgid prose of the physiocrat school.” - Murray Rothbard

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune (10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), often referred to as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Turgot was a student of Francois Quesnay and as such belonged to the Physiocratic school of economic thought. Today he is best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism.

Jacques Turgot was the administrator for Limoges under Louis XV, and Minister of Finance under Louis XVI (1774 to 1776). He tried unsuccessfully to introduce free trade in grain within France and to reform the taxation system in the 1760s and 1770s. He lifted controls on grain, reduced tariffs, eliminated guilds, and substituted monetary taxes for the required labor of the corvée. His political efforts got him dismissed, but his earlier economic writings introduced capital as a factor of production to the French school, and carried the seeds of marginal valuation. He was a friend of Adam Smith and the Marquis de Condorcet.