"This Essay May be Considered as the Germ of the Treatise on The Wealth of Nations, Written by the Celebrated Smith" —Condorcet's Life of Turgot

A. R. J. Turgot (1727-81), one of the greatest thinkers of the century of the Enlightenment, is known to political historians as a pioneer of the doctrine of universal progress, which he first put forward when a student at the Sorbonne in a lecture on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind. He is also well known to economists as the author of Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in which he anticipated - and in some respects surpassed - the theoretical system of classical political economy. In this volume, translations of these two works are printed together with a lesser-known work entitled On Universal History, which should be of great interest to sociologists. Professor Meek has prefaced his own translations of the three texts with an introduction in which he analyses the interesting interrelationship between Turgot's political, economic and sociological theories.