It was on this date, December 14, 1739, that French economist and industrialist Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours was born in Paris. The family name is chiefly remembered for the company founded by his son, but the elder Dupont influenced Adam Smith‘s ideas in the latter’s Wealth of Nations during the 1760s with his own writings on the national economy of France, particularly his two-volume Physiocratie (2 vols., 1868). Influential though his Physiocratic School of economics was, Dupont not only drew the attention of Voltaire and Jacques Turgot, but for its criticisms of the king’s mishandling of the French economy his writings were suppressed by Louis XV.

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Originally published December 2003 by Ronald Bruce Meyer.