This essay stems from a colloquium devoted to “Antiphysiocracy”: this very notion pays grudging homage to the intellectual notoriety and the manifest influence of a group of determined thinkers who forged a doctrine, founded on putatively scientific premises, which advocated urgent and profound changes necessary to right the course of a nation-kingdom utterly adrift. The Physiocratic conception derived from a study of the “natural order” apprehended largely through a deductive epistemological lever called “évidence,” a certitude so clear and manifest that no mind could spurn it. This examination revealed that the “imprescriptible,” “inviolable,” and “holy” right of property and the concomitant faculty to dispose of it with “total” and “absolute” liberty were the formative principles, anterior to all manner of social and political life, from which all relations, activities and institutions developed. “Évidence” demonstrated that everything in the “moral” sphere flowed from the “physical” world that was nature's peculiar domain. Physiocracy's integral, dynamic analysis of economic mechanisms showed that the land was the unique source of national wealth. The discovery of nature's laws showed men the range of their options—what they could do through positive law—and the scope of their errors—what they must undo in to make the best use of their lives, individually and collectively. As a result of their study, the économistes—the title to which the Physiocrats loftily claimed a monopoly—proposed ideas for deep changes in economic practices, financial administration, modes of political governance, education and the structure of society. Virtually all of the major threads of their thinking converged on the question of grain, the overwhelmingly dominant sector of the old-regime economy.