only the "rent" obtained by the owner of the land on which the agricultural production took place. "The physiocrats damned cities for their artificiality and praised more natural styles of living. They celebrated farmers." They called themselves les Économistes, but are generally referred to as "physiocrats" to distinguish their beliefs from the many schools of economic thought that followed. Precursors Physiocracy is an agrarianist philosophy which developed in the context of the prevalent European rural society of the time. In the late Roman Republic, the dominant senatorial class was not allowed to engage in banking or commerce but relied on their latifundia, large plantations, for income. They circumvented this rule through freedmen proxies who sold surplus agricultural goods. Other inspiration came from China's economic system, then the largest in the world. Chinese society broadly distinguished four occupations, with scholar-bureaucrats (who were also agrarian landlords) at the top and merchants at the bottom (because they did not produce but only distributed goods made by others). Leading physiocrats like François Quesnay were avid Confucianists who advocated China's agrarian policies. Some scholars have advocated connections with the school of agriculturalism, which promoted utopian communalism. One of the integral parts of physiocracy, laissez-faire, was adopted from Quesnay's writings on China, being a translation of the Chinese term wu wei. The concept natural order of physiocracy originated from "Way of Nature" of Chinese Taoism. History The growing power of the centralized state control in the era of enlightened absolutism necessitated centralized, systematic information on the nation. A major innovation was the collection, use and interpretation of numerical and statistical data, ranging from trade statistics, harvest reports, and death notices to population censuses. Starting in the 1760s, officials in France and Germany began increasingly to rely on quantitative data for systematic planning, especially regarding long-term economic growth. It combined the utilitarian agenda of "enlightened absolutism" with the new ideas being developed in economics. In Germany the trend was especially strong in Cameralism while in France it was an important theme in physiocracy. Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert served as a member of Louis XIV's local administration of Paris, and wrote pamphlets and booklets on subjects related to his work: taxation, grain trade, and money. Le Pesant asserted that wealth came from self-interest and markets were connected by money flows (i.e. an expense for the buyer is revenue for the producer). Thus he realized that lowering