Compass of society
Subtitle: commerce and absolutism in old-regime France
By: Henry C. Clark.
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Lanham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 389
ISBN-13: 9780739114827; 9780739114834
Subjects: Enlightenment -- France; France -- Commerce -- History -- 18th century; France -- Commerce -- History -- 17th century; France -- Commercial policy -- History
Description: "Compass of Society rethinks the French social journey to a conception of "commercial society" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Henry C. Clark finds that the development of market liberalism, far from being a narrow and abstract ideological episode, was part of a broad-gauged attempt to address a number of perceived problems generic to Europe and particular to France during this period. In the end, he offers a neo-Tocquevillian account of a topic which Tocqueville himself notoriously underemphasized - namely, the emergence of elements of a modern economy in eighteenth-century France and the place this development had in explaining the failure of the Old Regime and the onset of the Revolution. Compass of Society will aid readers in understanding the conflicted French engagement with liberalism even up to the twenty-first century."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 351-374) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Commerce and cohesion in the long seventeenth century; title: Social trust and nascent globalism: commerce in early seventeenth-century France; title: Louis XIV and the two kinds of trade; title: Commerce, government and history in the Age of Enlightenment; title: "Compass of society": commercial sociability in France, 1715-1740; title: Corporatism, nobility, and the "spirit of commerce," 1740-1763; title: Friend of French mankind: absolute liberalism in the physiocratic moment; title: Trust, information, and the grain trade under Terray, 1770-1774; title: Local knowledge, local reform: Turgot towards a new commercial republicanism; title: Luxury and commercial society on the eve of the French Revolution; title: The French Revolution and the theory of commercial society: from program to philosophy; title: Abbé Sieyès on the commercial roots of representative government; title: "Apostle of moderation": Morellet on the French Revolution and commercial society; title: Conclusion.