Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
financed not only by taxation but by newly developing instruments of credit, and
so toward the world of high finance, rooted in commerce, civic virtue was
doomed to decline.
With this we touch on a central theme in the eighteenth-century discourse of
progress and corruption, one that embodied in a different but related way the
conflict between “liberal” activity and mercenary motivation visible in the discussion
of the arts: the opposition of agriculture and commerce. The national
household was still seen as based on farming, though already imbued with a capitalist
form. Physiocratic theory, notably, explained that agriculture alone
generated new wealth; thus Quesnay distinguished between “luxury in the way
of subsistence” and “luxury in the way of ornamentation,” arguing that “an opulent
nation which indulges in excessive luxury in the way of ornamentation can
very quickly be overwhelmed by its sumptuousness.” The science of economic
administration of which his Tableau presented the principles was not to be confused
“with the trivial and specious science of financial operations whose
subject-matter is only the money-stock of the nation and the monetary movements
resulting from traffic in money.” 28 But the ideological conflict between
landed property and the new order of the market overflowed this boundary;
even though the point of economic policy was to foster internal and external
trade we find Quesnay rehearsing the old complaint that “those engaged in
commerce share in the wealth of nations, but the nations do not share in theirs.
The merchant is a stranger in his country.” 29
These ideas, expressed by physiocracy in the form of an economic system, are
present throughout the philosophical writing of the time. Rousseau’s work,
which made such an impact on urban intellectuals throughout Europe, voiced
them in the association of the fallen state of humanity with an economically
expansive urban culture, in contrast to the healthy virtue of a modest rural existence.
In Voltaire’s Candide, as in the proliferating literature of the garden,
georgic pursuits represented both a haven from and a rational reproach to a
world of exploitation, bloodthirstiness, and falsehood motivated by greed for
gold. In general, the opposition of city to country contrasted both a site of (idle)
consumption with one of production, and wealth based on commercial and
financial speculation with that derived from the honest cultivation of landed
property.
28 M. Kuczynski and R. Meek (eds and trs), Quesnay’s Tableau Economique (London: Macmillan,
1972), pp. i, ii, 21.
29 “Les commerçants participent aux richesses des nations, mais les nations ne participent pas aux
richesses des commerçants. Le négociant est étranger dans sa patrie” (F. Quesnay, Du commerce,
in François Quesnay et la physiocratie (Paris, 1958), vol. 2, p. 827; cit. Daniel Roche, “Négoce et culture
dans la France du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 25 (1978), p. 375).
Note in the last phrase the Homeric echo; here again classical culture showed the way.
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