POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Abstract

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.