| | I am presently reading John Adams by David McCullough. Congress sent Adams to join Benjamin Franklin in Paris in 1778. Jacques Turgot (Ann-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne) was one of the people to whom Benjamin Franklin introduced John Adams on Adams's first morning in Paris.
Later, in 1787, serving in London, Adams wrote a pamphlet defending the forms and formats of the state constitutions. Among the ideas against which he "defended" America's constitutions were those of Turgot who proposed a single legislature. Adams had written the Massachusetts constitution before he left for Paris. As the nation eventually would, the new state had a bicameral legislature.
Citations for Turgot appear in the Wikipedia and the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia. According to the Wikipedia:
In 1769 he wrote his Mémoire sur les prêts à intérêt, on the occasion of a scandalous financial crisis at Angoulême, the particular interest of which is that in it the question of lending money at interest was for the first time treated scientifically, and not merely from the ecclesiastical point of view. Turgot's opinion was that a compromise had to be reached beween both methods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Robert_Jacques_Turgot,_Baron_de_Laune
According to the Catholics, his understanding of history led him to predict in 1750 that the American colonies would become independent of England:
The year 1750, during which he was prior of the Sorbonne, marks the transition between the two periods of his life: on the one hand, he delivered a discourse on the advantages accruing to the human race from the Christian religion, which showed him as still an ecclesiastic; on the other, he delivered a discourse on the successive progress of the human mind, in which the true and false ideas of the philosophers were mingled confusedly. In this discourse he foretold the separation from England of the North American colonies. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15092c.htm
Murray N. Rothbard wrote a biography that appears on the Mises website
(http://www.mises.org/content/turgot.asp) This work has strong bibliography of sources, including citations from Schumpeter and Boehm-Bawerk and, of course, Turgot himself:
Turgot, A.R.J. 1921. Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches. New York: Augustus M. Kelley (online from LibertyFund).
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/trgRfl1.html
(In fact, the Online Library of Liberty is an outstanding resource for any serious researcher who wants to get to the roots of ideas, rather than being carried by the digests of others.)
Rothbard's list of cites ends with a pointer to the Social Science server at McMaster University, which provides this list of texts online:
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot May 10, 1727-March 18, 1781
I appreciate Ed's hard work in summarizing so much material. Anyone with a deeper interest can go to the original sources. Sometimes you find things that another biographer passes over. Sometimes that can lead you to a different insight.
So, too, by the way with Adams. As nice as the McCullough book is, it motivates me to read Adams in his own words.
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