Kennedy on the history of the phrase Laissez faire

The ever informative Gavin Kennedy of the Adam Smith's Lost Legacy blog, writes the following, in answer to the question, Who first coined the phrase Laissez faire?

‘So where did the idea of laissez faire originate? Not surprisingly, the words were first uttered by a merchant in the French dirigiste regime of M. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), the French minister of finance under Louis XIV. The merchant’s name was M. Le Gendre, described as a ‘most sensible and plain spoken’ merchant and, reportedly, he responded to Colbert’s question: 'Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?' (what do you want from me to assist you?), with: 'laisser nous faire' (leave us alone). Colbert was the finance minister whose regulation of merchants was notorious for its oppressive licensing, inspection and control which personified French bureaucracy at its worst (plus ça change …).

Jean Vincent, Seigneur de Gournay, popularised a version of Le Gendre’s appeal to be freed of petty regulation, but the author who took Le Gendre’s words, dropped ‘nous’ and turned laissez nous faire’ (let us alone) into ‘laissez faire’ (let alone) into a principle of economic policy, was the Marquis d’Argenson (1694-1757), who was an active promoter of economic theory and a member of the world’s first economics club (salon), the Club d’Entresol (1726). He was also a Foreign Minister of France at the Court of Louis XV for two years. He did not publish his ideas, but circulated them, as was the custom, in manuscripts around the French intelligentsia. To govern better, he said, one must govern less. The true cause of the decline of our manufactures, he declared, is the protection we have given to them. Interestingly, Francois Quesnay, for example, did not include laissez faire in his General Maxims of Government.

‘Laissez faire’ was first used in English by George Whatley, a contemporary, friend and correspondent of Benjamin Franklin in 1774. Keynes reported that Jeremy Bentham in 1793 used the expression 'laissez-nous faire'. Bentham, who was not an economist, presented ‘the rule of laissez-faire, in the shape in which our grandfathers knew it’, adapted into the service of the Utilitarian philosophy. For example in A Manual of Political Economy, he [Bentham] writes: 'The general rule is that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government; the motto or watchword of government, on these occasions, ought to be - Be quiet ... The request which agriculture, manufacturers, and commerce present to governments is as modest and reasonable as that which Diogenes made to: Stand out of my sunshine.’