Publication date:
01 December 2006Length of book:
410 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
240x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739114827
Compass of Society rethinks the French route 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 in understanding the conflicted French engagement with liberalism even up to the twenty-first century.
By the eighteenth century, Dutch and English writers were praising commerce, once derided as an ignoble activity, as the basis of a strong, free, and civic-minded community. In France, however, commercial values were difficult to reconcile with a heritage of hierarchical privilege, aristocratic prowess, and monarchical glory and control. In Compass of Society, Henry C. Clark shows how French thinkers wrestled with these competing values. The result is a fresh and illuminating perspective on the political and moral dimensions of commercial thought in the French Enlightenment and, more generally, on the values shaping the modern world.