Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, Marquis de

Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, Marquis de 

Born Oct. 5, 1715, in Pertuis, Provence; died July 13, 1789, in Argenteuil. French economist.

In his early works Mirabeau shared the ideas of the mercantilists; later he joined with the Physiocrats. He propounded the principle of noninterference by the state in the economy, criticized the tax farming system, and advocated a single tax on the net product of landownership. A defender of patriarchal, small peasant agriculture, Mirabeau failed to grasp the bourgeois essence of Quesnay’s economic doctrine, which concealed itself beneath an outward appearance of feudalism. “This semblance deceived Dr. Quesnay’s adherents among the nobility, such as the crotchety and patriarchal Mirabeau the Elder,” wrote Marx (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 26, pt. 1, p. 21).