# Literature of Liberty: Progress **URL:** **Published:** March 1, 1979 --- The continuing significance of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) is both as a founder of modern economic science and as a powerful shaper of the Enlightenment idea of progress. The youthful Turgot was deeply moved by the liberal temper of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (1748). Turgot, however, found Montesquieu’s determinism uncongenial; he was deeply impressed by the role of the human mind in molding history. This conviction, Turgot later expressed while a theological student at the Sorbonne (1750), in two major dissertations: On the Benefits which the Christian Religion has conferred on Mankind, and On the Historical Progress of the Human Mind. On related themes, he wrote the _Recherches sur les causes du progrès et de la décadence des sciences et des arts_, and the_ Plan de deux discours sur l’histoire universelle_.