The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe

By Anthem Press

The mid-eighteenth century witnessed what might be dubbed an economic turn that resolutely changed the trajectory of world history. The discipline of economics itself emerged amidst this turn, and it is frequently traced back to the work of François Quesnay and his school of Physiocracy. Though lionized by the subsequent historiography of economics, the theoretical postulates and policy consequences of Physiocracy were disastrous at the time, resulting in a veritable subsistence trauma in France. This galvanized relentless and diverse critiques of the doctrine not only in France but also throughout the European world that have, hitherto, been largely neglected by scholars. Though Physiocracy was an integral part of the economic turn, it was rapidly overcome, both theoretically and practically, with durable and important consequences for the history of political economy. The Economic Turn brings together some of the leading historians of that moment to fundamentally recast our understanding of the origins and diverse natures of political economy in the Enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783088577

Book preview

The Economic Turn

Anthem Other Canon Economics

The Anthem Other Canon Economics series is a collaboration between Anthem Press and The Other Canon Foundation. The Other Canon – also described as ‘reality economics’ – studies the economy as a real object rather than as the behaviour of a model economy based on core axioms, assumptions and techniques. The series includes both classical and contemporary works in this tradition, spanning evolutionary, institutional and Post-Keynesian economics, the history of economic thought and economic policy, economic sociology and technology governance, and works on the theory of uneven development and in the tradition of the German historical school.

Series Editors

Erik S. Reinert – Chairman, The Other Canon Foundation, Norway and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Rainer Kattel – University College London, UK & Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Wolfgang Drechsler – Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Editorial Board

Ha-Joon Chang – University of Cambridge, UK

Mario Cimoli – UN-ECLAC, Chile

Jayati Ghosh – Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Steven Kaplan – Cornell University, USA

Jan Kregel – Bard College, USA & Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Bengt-Åke Lundvall – Aalborg University, Denmark

Keith Nurse – University of the West Indies, Barbados

Patrick O’Brien – London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK

Carlota Perez – London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK; University College London, UK; SPRU – University of Sussex, UK and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Alessandro Roncaglia – Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Jomo Kwame Sundaram – Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia

The Economic Turn

Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe

Edited by

Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2019 Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-855-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-855-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank The Other Canon Foundation in Norway for generously funding the conference that inspired this volume, organized on the islands of Tjøme and Hvasser, Norway, September 19–23, 2012, under the title Economies of Enlightenment: Physiocracy and Its Discontents. We would further like to acknowledge the contributions to that conference of Graham Clure, Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Erik S. Reinert, Anoush Terjanian, Liana Vardi and Francesca Viano. Finally, we are grateful to Robert Fredona, Kate Jenkins and Fernanda Reinert for editorial assistance.

CONTRIBUTORS

Antonella Alimento is associate professor of modern history at the University of Pisa. She has published widely on the eighteenth century and is the author of Riforme fiscali e crisi politiche nella Francia di Luigi XV: dalla tarifée al catasto generale (Olschki, 1995) and Finanze e amministrazione: Un’inchiesta francese sui catasti nell’Italia del Settecento (1763–1764) (Olschki, 2008), as well as the editor or coeditor of several volumes, including, most recently with Koen Stapelbroek, The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Jesús Astigarraga is professor of political economy at the University of Zaragoza. A specialist on the history of political economy in Enlightenment Spain and of the circulation of economic ideas more broadly, he is the author of Los ilustrados vascos: ideas, instituciones y reformas económicas en España (Critica, 2003) as well as numerous articles and edited volumes, including The Spanish Enlightenment Revisited (Voltaire Foundation, 2015) and, with Javier Usoz, L’économie politique et la sphère publique dans le débat des Lumières (Casa de Velázquez, 2013).

Loïc Charles is professor of economics at the University Paris 8—Vincennes and associated researcher at the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques in Paris. A historian of economic ideas, he has coedited Oeuvres économiques complètes de François Quesnay et autres textes (INED, 2005) with Jean-Claude Perrot and Christine Théré, and the volume Le cercle de Vincent de Gournay. Savoirs économiques et pratiques administratives en France au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (INED, 2011) with Frédéric Lefebvre and Christine Théré. He is also the author of a number of articles focusing on political economy in Enlightenment France.

Paul Cheney is professor of European history and the College at the University of Chicago. He is a specialist in old-regime France and its colonial empire, with interests in political economy, the history of political thought, and historical world systems theory. His first book, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Harvard University Press, 2010), is an intellectual history of how administrators, merchants, and philosophes understood the political and socially disruptive effects of primitive globalization. His second book, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a micro-historical exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of old-regime capitalism in France’s richest eighteenth-century colony.

Julie Ferrand is associate professor at the University Jean Monnet (Saint-Etienne, France). Her research focuses on the republican and liberal traditions in the French Enlightenment, on the science of commerce of the Gournay circle, and on the Physiocrats and Antiphysiocrats. She has recently published several papers devoted to the work of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably in the European Journal of History of Economic Thought and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen is assistant professor of history at Roskilde University, investigating historical trajectories of growth-critical economic thought. He has recently published Climate Justice and the Economy (Routledge, 2018) as part of an ongoing project funded by the Danish Independent Research Fund. Prior to this, Jacobsen was part of the research project History of Economic Rationalities (ECORA) at Aarhus University where he worked on a critical history of classical economic thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and shed light on different attempts to democratize political economy from below. He has published in Journal of Early Modern History, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Journal of World History.

Steven L. Kaplan is Goldwin Smith Professor of European History Emeritus at Cornell University. A historian of bread, work, and political economy, as well as the social history of France, he is the author of numerous prize-winning works including Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (2nd edition Anthem, 2015); Farewell, Revolution (Cornell, 1995); The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 (Duke, 1996); La Fin des corporations (Fayard, 2001); and Le Pain maudit: retour sur la France des années oubliées, 1945–58 (Fayard, 2008). His most recent book is Raisonner sur les blés: Essais sur les Lumières économiques (Fayard, 2017).

Michael Kwass is professor of history and department chair at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the prize-winning books Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Harvard University Press, 2014). His current book project, entitled Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800, reflects on the social, cultural, and political implications of Western consumption before the age of the Industrial Revolution.

Lavinia Maddaluno received her PhD in history from the University of Cambridge in 2017, where she was a member of Gonville & Caius College. She has been Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome and Brill Fellow at the Scaliger Institute in Leiden. Her research is at the intersection of the history of science and of political economy, with a focus on the early modern period and the Italian Enlightenment.

Lars Magnusson is professor of economic history and dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Uppsala. In Sweden he is also member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Board of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). He has written extensively on European economic history and the history of economic ideas. His books include Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (Routledge, 1994), The Tradition of Free Trade (Routledge, 2004), The Political Economy of Mercantilism (Routledge, 2015), and, most recently, A Brief History of Political Economy: the Tales of Marx, Keynes and Hayek (Elgar, 2016).

Ida Nijenhuis is senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and professor in source-criticism at Radboud University Nijmegen. Trained at Groningen University, she is best known for her work on Isaac de Pinto, including Een Joodse Philosophe: Isaac de Pinto (1717–1787) (NEHA, 1992). In the context of European political economy, she has also published on the contribution of early modern Dutch authors to the transnational debates on commerce, agriculture, and republicanism. She is presently working on a monograph on the history of Dutch commercial republicanism, 1600–1800.

Arnaud Orain is professor of economics at the European Studies Institute of the University Paris 8—Vincennes. He was Davis Fellow of the history department of Princeton University in 2015–2016. He has published and directed numerous articles and books devoted to the history of economic thought of the French Enlightenment, with a particular emphasis on AntiPhysiocracy on the one hand and culture and political economy on the other hand. He recently published La Politique du Merveilleux: Une histoire culturelle du Système de Law, 1695–1795 (Fayard, 2018).

Sophus A. Reinert is Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and an affiliate of the history department at Harvard University. His research focuses on the histories of business, capitalism, and political economy from the Renaissance to today’s emerging markets. He is the author of Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Harvard, 2011) and The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (Harvard, 2018), as well as numerous articles, cases, and edited volumes.

Philippe Steiner is professor of sociology at the University Paris I—Sorbonne and Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is among the editors of the Oeuvres économiques complètes de Jean-Baptiste Say (Economica, 2006). His recent research is devoted to the economic sociology of markets (La transplantation d’organes: un commerce nouveau entre les êtres humains, Gallimard 2010), the relationship between markets and morals (Calcul et morale: Coût du travail et valeur de l’émancipation, with C. Oudin-Bastide, Albin Michel, 2015; and Marchés contestés, with M. Trespeuch, Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2015), and the history of social sciences (Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology, Princeton University Press, 2011; and La Grande Performation: Une histoire de l’altruisme, Presses universitaires de France, 2016).

Christine Théré is senior researcher at the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques in Paris and received her PhD from the University of Paris I—Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research focuses on the emergence and development of economic publishing in early modern France and the historical sociology of its authors, most recently with a special emphasis on Physiocracy. She has coedited Oeuvres économiques complètes de François Quesnay et autres textes (INED, 2005) with Loïc Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot, and the volume Le cercle de Vincent de Gournay. Savoirs économiques et pratiques administratives en France au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (INED, 2011) with Loïc Charles and Frédéric Lefebvre. She has also published several articles in journals such as History of Political Economy and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Andre Wakefield is professor of history at Pitzer College and received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of science and political economy. He has written, among other things, about cameralists, early modern expertise, and Leibniz. His publications include The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago, 2009); the first English translation, with Claudine Cohen, of G. W. Leibniz’s Protogaea (Chicago, 2008); and, recently, a critique of the historiography of early modern expertise: Butterfield’s Nightmare: The History of Science as Disney History, History and Technology 30, 3 (2014): 232–251.

Chapter One

THE ECONOMIC TURN IN ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE

Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert

In a short article on "Bled ou Blé" (grain) in the wide-ranging 1770–1774 Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, Voltaire famously explained that

Around the year 1750, the nation, satiated with verses, tragedies, comedies, opera, novels, fantastical stories, even more fantastical moral reflections, and theological disputes about grace and convulsions, finally turned to reasoning about grain.¹

The citation is characteristically witty, but does it reveal something about the world of the Patriarch of Ferney, not just about the author? While he relished irony, indulged gladly in frivolity on occasion, and swore no oath of ethnographic accuracy, here he seems to be pointing to a multifaceted phenomenon that enjoyed real traction in French society, with analogies and extensions elsewhere. Grain must not only be understood as the massively present, palpable object that was a crucial everyday concern for the state and the vast majority of the population, but also as the privileged and powerful metaphor for the plethora of issues of policy and theory that increasingly came to be called political economy. In his essay, Voltaire hinted as well that what had once been a rather recondite matter now reached beyond the confines of the intellectual or specialist microcosms and mobilized the attention of a much more substantial audience, composed largely of elites of one sort or another, but quite diversely situated, including certain kinds of artisans and farmers along with seigneurs and affluent merchants (and their wives who could not distinguish between wheat and rye).

We believe that Voltaire was pointing to what we call the economic turn, a prodigious set of changes that did not happen all at once: far from it. Rather than a sudden swerve, the economic turn was a gradual, cumulative process that touched much of Europe, with variable degrees of intensity and significant time lags from place to place, and burst forth in different domains of activity, sensibility and mindfulness at different moments. It involved primordially the economic sphere, as our locution suggests, but not just, for we construe the economic as simultaneously material and symbolic, as relating to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, but also to their organization and regulation, to the discourses that generate or are generated by these practices, and to the conflicts that are inseparable from them.²

This is not the place to inventory the multiple forces that drive economic growth and mutation in the eighteenth century: technological innovation, agricultural development, population increase, industrialization, urbanization, expansion of credit facilities, improved transportation and communication, consumption, information management including advertising, overseas commerce and colonization, war, domestic institutional refoundation and shifting relations in the world-system all contributed to the economic turn.³ But so do changing ways of apprehending and understanding or interpreting the economy, of conceiving and correcting or revamping it. In our view, what used to be called modes of production do not have an ontological priority vis-à-vis modes of representation; ideas do not stand in heteronomous subjection to things; politics and culture are not relegated to the realm of a superstructure tasked to account or apologize for the singularly decisive actions of an infrastructure that monopolizes all the dynamism of which a society is capable. Economic practices and results stand in an always dialogic and sometimes dialectical tension with discourse. Ideas sometimes misrepresent or distort economic reality, deliberately or without intention, but the test of their interest rarely resides in the precision of the translation or narrative they provide. Moreover, many ideas seek to criticize and inflect that reality, while others attempt to explain and/or justify it; they constitute a parallel, commensurate and complementary reality. Representations accompany yet often precede fundamental transformations in the ways an economy behaves. Our discussion of the economic turn here focuses on the former rather than the latter, which has been treated by many highly knowledgeable scholars: on the prise de conscience signified by Voltaire’s reasoning about grain, a new consciousness of the weight, if not the primacy, of the economic.

Voicing a similar point of view, lawyer, journalist and iconoclast Simon Linguet, whose effrontery matched his perspicacity, was struck by the metamorphosis of the philosophical insect into the economic insect.⁴ Certainly, it had been developing in larva for at least several decades. It affirmed its transformation in the 1750s and 1760s as the Enlightenment itself took on an increasingly economic cast in its appetite to encompass all the domains of human activity, with an emphasis on those that favored citizenship and the general utility. The Encyclopédie epitomized this project, predicated on an omnivorously curious and critical spirit. In scores of articles, it treated the economy as a subject of practical, universal and urgent preoccupation, for the individual and the collectivity. The economic impulse made the case more strongly than ever that ignorance could no longer be regarded as an insuperable barrier to progress and that the state, blamed by certain economic thinkers for impeding development by throttling individual freedom and analeptic competition, had, at least during the embryonic phase of economic regeneration, to clear the law codes of dead weights and obstructions, even as enterprising farmers had to clear the land of hedges and stumps before it could be reclaimed and rendered fertile. The ubiquitous example of the English, in commerce and in agriculture as well as in government, in the metropole as well as in the colonies, in war as well as in peace, stimulated inquiry into economics, where their virtuosity seemed to account for many of their accomplishments. Traumatized by the Seven Years’ War, the French found their taste for anglomania increasingly rancid, but not their fancy for tracts on political economy and treatises on husbandry, planting and conservation that continued to cross the channel in all seasons.⁵

Independently of anglomania, agromania flourished in France and many other countries. A profusion of manuals, often written in a didactic vernacular, targeting both farmers with capital and those with mere ingenuity and motivation, appeared in numerous languages, and economic societies were established throughout the European world, from the Americas to Russia, from Denmark-Norway to Sicily.⁶ The ministry in France encouraged the organization of permanent agricultural societies to experiment with and promote innovation and efficiency, and the holding of periodic agricultural assemblies and fêtes to broadcast meliorist principles and practices. A priest with a reputation for profane language shocked the Académie française by preaching a sermon on holy agriculture. So much has been written on this matter [grain and agriculture], commented Voltaire, "that if a farmer [laboureur] planted as much weight in grain as we have of volumes on this product, he could aspire to the most ample harvest… ." (the philosophe might have mentioned that actual farmers—fermiers and laboureurs—were among the scores of writers who contributed articles to the economic press).⁷ Playfully, but not wholly comically, he announced that he had become farmer, vintner and shepherd: that is worth a hundred times more than being a man of letters in Paris. Of course, living in grand rusticity near the Swiss border, the Patriarch had perhaps forgotten that the shortest route to the countryside, then as now, often passed through Paris.⁸ He himself continued to participate in the economic work of academic life, participating, for example, in at least one of the periodic prize competitions organized by the Société d’Oeconomie et d’Agriculture à St.-Petersbourg.⁹

The Journal économique, whose very title heralded the changing times, noted with satisfaction that the genius of the nation seems turned almost entirely to the side of the economy. No longer a template dedicated to the management of domestic affairs, this economic perspective is henceforth decidedly public, social and political in its location, incidence and objectives. The economic turn revealed both micro and macro vocations: even as improvers ebulliently advocated economic manuring and a number of economic breads, so officials of the Atlantic port of St.-Malo yearned for a good economic government at about the same moment that jurist, venal-office holder, writer and future militant physiocrat, Guillaume-François Le Trosne envisaged the birth of economic science. The latter’s economist companions talked of the advent of economic philosophy and economic monarchy at about the same time. Inventors sought more cachet for their creations by styling them as economic. In the wake of agricultural assemblies, there were calls for more generic economic assemblies in France. Cast as an audacious program for the concurrent commercialization and industrialization of a crucial sector of the French economy, economic milling had myriad social and political implications beyond its central mission of feeding significantly more people with the same quantity of wheat.¹⁰ Throughout Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, one began—in lay as well as official circles—to employ frequently and systematially terms such as economic affairs and economic descriptions, and to theorize the means of improving economic government and the economy of states.¹¹ Strikingly, these preoccupations were also reflected in an increasing number of university chairs devoted to political economy in Continental Europe, and earliest of all in the Germanies, Sweden and on the Italian peninsula.¹²

The economic turn is manifest from the vantage point of book history. French publications on economic subjects, for example, exploded around 1750; not only did new works in the genre outpace even the publication of new novels by the 1760s, but in the 10 years following midcentury, more works appeared dealing with political economy, sensu lato, than in the previous half century.¹³ The economic periodical press emerged and thrived in this same era: the Journal économique (1751–72); the Nouvelliste économique et littéraire (1754–71); the Journal du commerce (1759–62); the different versions of the Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce et des finances (1763–83); and the successive incarnations of the Ephémérides du citoyen (1765—72), later the Nouvelles Ephémérides économiques (1774–76, 1787–88).¹⁴ Nor was this striking new coloration of publishing merely a French phenomenon. Internationally, too, the publication and translation of political economy came to occupy a markedly larger share of the European book trade in the same period, from Italy in the South to Sweden in the North.¹⁵ In Germany, Cameralist publications such as the Oeconomische Nachrichten, or Economic News, highlighted the need to "understand the economy [die Oeconomie]," while in Spain, journals like Discursos mercuriales, memorias sobre la agricultura, marina, comercio, y artes liberales y mecanicas (1752–1756) sought to emulate foreign advances regarding economic matters.¹⁶ And in Italy, such journals were numerous across the various publishing centers of the peninsula, from Naples through Florence to Milan and Venice.¹⁷ Grand tourists, too, increasingly came to travel in order to familiarize themselves with foreign theories and practices, further contributing to a continent-wide process of cumulative economic emulation.¹⁸ In short, rulers and subjects in a growing number of European countries became convinced that governance, in its most ambitious as well as its most quotidian senses, had to be economic, and not just in the narrow sense of doing proper accounting.¹⁹

To be sure, this economic turn was not without precedent or precursor, and many of its basic premises had been expressed for centuries. Indeed, economic concerns have been far more dominant, for far longer, than much recent historiography would suggest. Already the Florentine theorist and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli, supposedly an outlier by contemporary Renaissance standards for his conservative insistence on the importance of virtuous citizen militias rather than money and standing armies for winning wars, became adamant both in ambassadorial dispatches and private correspondence late in life that wealth not merely contributed to, but was necessary for, defensive and offensive warfare.²⁰ And Archduke Cosimo I de’ Medici followed suit, theorizing that without money one could neither augment nor maintain a state, his policies giving explicit inspiration to the gradual transformation of reason of state at the hands of writers such as Giovanni Botero and Antonio Serra into something recognizable as political economy.²¹ Yet even if economic concerns became prominent earlier than is often acknowledged, and a tendency to emulate certain prior theories and policies was manifest towards the 1750s, the sheer scale of the quantitative break in the number of economics books published and occurrences of variations of the word economy that could be observed at that time, along with fresh ways of thinking about the issues, and an unwonted vigor of expression, suggest a qualitative difference. We call this moment the economic turn [Figures 1.1–1.3].

Figure 1.1 Google Ngram of the Words économie and économique in French Publications, 1700–1800.

Figure 1.2 Google Ngram of the Words economy and oeconomy in English Publications, 1700–1800.

Figure 1.3 Google Ngram of the Words economia and economico in Italian Publications, 1700–1800.

There were many reasons why this economic turn took place, ranging from the intensification of international rivalries leading up to the Seven Years’ War and the evident economic factors behind Britain’s rise to power to more introspective and philosophical preoccupations with human nature and worldly melioration. Generally, though, the upsurge of interest in economic matters in the 1750s spoke to a growing sense that the cardinal issues of the time—from food-supply regulation to increasing conspicuous consumption, taxation, colonialism, international competition, forms of government, the practice of social relations in a polity and even the moral construction of a community—were fundamentally economic in nature. It was in this context that the category of political economy emerged as the preeminent epistemological lever with which to theorize, discuss, implement and resist change for an increasingly wide spectrum of society. Economic rhetoric—metaphors and myriad formulations—penetrated into elite language and occasionally percolated down to local officials, guildsmen and others situated in the so-called sanior pars of the non-elite universe. Indeed, one can speak of a certain economic idiom that acquires growing purchase in the course of the century. It was in this spirit that the polymathic Bishop Erik Pontoppidan of Bergen, in faraway Norway, could observe in 1757 that he lived in a seemingly economic century.²² In short, the very core of Enlightenment debates across Europe came to revolve around this multifaceted discipline of political economy.²³

It is important to emphasize that political economy was not just about promoting growth, increasing and managing wealth and enhancing power. Nor was it geared exclusively to statecraft and entrepreneurship. Synecdoche for the economic as we construe it, political economy touched virtually every aspect of life, public and private, to the extent that this frontier was readily identifiable. As political economy revealed its irredentist vocation, as much concerned with the moral as the material, the social and cultural as the political, the Economic Enlightenment supplemented and in some ways stood as a proxy for the Enlightenment tout court. The economic turn deeply reinforced the emergent anthropology and psychology of man, no longer burdened by the overwhelming onus of original sin. The working man did not toil primarily to expiate his sinfulness and enhance his chances of attaining salvation, but to contribute to the production of wealth. The dawning entrepreneurial man was no longer relentlessly suspect for pursuing mightily his self-interest and seeking to resist restraint—restricteurs, as Mirabeau called them were less and less passively brooked—and to maximize his autonomy along with his profit. The economic turn supposed a certain optimism premised on the conquest of and access to new knowledge, grounded in science.

The economic mood and manner were not, however, strictly reserved for elites, though they clearly predominated. The economic was a way of seeing and interpreting the world within one’s own environment, beyond which one tended to lean. It was a sensibility and a technique of constructing oneself. The economic was at once the object of one’s action and the tool-kit with which to deal with it. It was predicated upon a core phenomenological epistemology, that favored the diffusion of the economic way and fostered pragmatic ways of appropriating it. Yet it was an extremely heterogeneous avenue that allowed for a whole range of predilections and theoretical approaches, some of which followed Cartesian rather than Newtonian paths where doctrinal rigor trumped empirical, circumstantial tinkering. Economic mindfulness led frequently to the desire to improve everyday life, even as it opened opportunities for aggrandizing national power. The focus of the economic was here below and now. The economic attracted the elites, but among them were thinkers who tried to turn it toward a much larger audience, infinitely less preoccupied with theoretical lucubrations than solutions to problems at hand, sometimes urgent and anguishing matters. The most influential example of this might well be Benjamin Franklin’s fantastically popular and widely translated 1758 Way to Wealth, which durably codified the above-mentioned transformation of work from primarily being a vehicle of redemption to being one of wealth-creation and accumulation.²⁴ In this vein, even as Voltaire commented upon the fashionable women at the opera who prattled about cereals, so the pharmacist-chemist, subsistence scientist and food engineer Antoine-Augustin Parmentier—hardly a populist—summoned science to an economic orientation in turning from the firmament to the farms:

Without taking away the gratitude that we owe to the Aristotles, the Descartes, and the Newtons, whose genius shed light on the universe, would not it have been desirable that one of them, instead of gliding over the most elevated heights, dropped down to consider the primary needs of his fellow men? What does it matter to the ordinary man the course by which the stars follow their path, if during this very time they are dying of hunger.²⁵

To raise questions about living in this economic world implied an expansive series of forward and backward linkages, so many fundamental interrogations regarding social structure, the struggle over social classification, the prospects for and dangers of social mobility, the shifting axes of sociability and its networking ramifications, the grounds for assuring social tranquility and stability, the reassessment of the structural character of recurrent scarcity, the outlook for augmenting carrying capacity, the perils of excessive inequality and equality, the intuition that the social order was threatened by a protean social question, the realization that economic development (figured by growing wealth) could be corrosive of stability even as it fortified national power, the sundry ways to educate and the merits and risks of extending education, the reasons for and against the promotion of virtue and the curbing of vice, the claims that society and state make upon each other, the rethinking of modes of governance and their legitimacy, the efforts to re-imagine and restructure taxation in ways aligned with effective governance, the allure of contractualization and its application beyond its customary realm of mediation, the pretensions of groups and individuals to exercise certain rights, the legitimacy of various forms of domination, the meaning of worthy behavior, the denotation of the general good, the relation of city and countryside, the role of money, the availability and mechanisms of credit, the repercussions of the commodification of information, the mission of commerce, the emergence and efflorescence of a notion and practice of something that we could dub business that did not fit into established categories, the implications of the rehabilitation of egocentricity, the advantages and drawbacks of colonial entanglements, the benefits and penalties of warfare, the play of diverse hedonisms, the discussion of an embryonic idea of best practices in disparate domains of activity and the genesis of a concept of expertise, the power of fashion, the (dis-/re-)organization of production, the orchestration of buying and selling, and so on. Many of these questions were overtly or implicitly tied to the heritage rights expounded on the Locke-Jefferson axis—life, liberty, happiness, property, individual autonomy—which the economic turn subjected to fresh exegesis and deliberations. The unremitting tension between liberty and equality, which continues to structure debate about the architecture and dynamics of our societies, found its first full expression in the crucible of the economic turn.²⁶

Frequently classed a species of political theory and practice, a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, as Adam Smith famously put it, political economy profited from the economic turn to invert that relationship.²⁷ The state could be articulated by political theory, but it could henceforth be empowered only by political economy (Montesquieu serving as the perhaps demurring broker in this transaction). The economic turn accentuated the need to think the next stage of state-making (or state-recasting): how should the priorities and the instruments of state-doing change in face of new assumptions and a new environment? The question could not simply be abridged to more or less state, though this reductionist template served the interests of certain participants in the debate, then as well as now. How did the economic turn modify the governors’ field of action, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, implying issues of legitimacy as well as competence and competition?²⁸ The reconfiguration of the economic field(s) surely would inflect the morphology of the political, if one accepts the conception of society as an imbrication of fields. In the wake of the economic turn, we see that while different agents intervene in each field, some can act in several, depending upon their capital (cultural, symbolic, social or economic) and their aptitude. The state does not constitute a field, yet it is shaped by the interaction of the fields, which henceforth take place according to redrafted rules that bespeak the resources of the agents mobilized by the economic turn. The latter largely sapped the Machiavellian distinction between society and polity. This swerve jolted the social cosmos as well as the state, each of which must adjust to unaccustomed conditions and arrangements that are either chronicled or called for by political economy. For quite some time, the state had assumed the inherited task of attempting persistently to make of individuals a society through techniques of social classification and stratification. Yet the very nature of individuality changes as the organic corporate repositories crumble and atomizing individualism threatens to constitute the future dominant logic of social organization. Compelled to undergo a certain recomposition, state and society must also renegotiate the obligations and responsibilities that each owed to the other. For example, when the radical liberal reforms of the 1760s, repeated in the 1770s, in France (imitated or envisaged elsewhere, with varying degrees of intensity) disembedded the economy from its deep social nesting—when provisioning was no longer an ingrained mission of the economy—the state could no longer guarantee social cohesion. Indeed, this very undertaking was no longer within its legitimate each.²⁹

The economic turn intensified in particular concerns about the role of exchange in society, its organization and consequences.³⁰ And it cast into relief the potentially dynamic as well as dislocating role of what Steven L. Kaplan defined as the market principle in traditional societies.³¹ These societies had of course long contained markets understood as geographical sites, but, as Karl Polanyi long ago observed, early modern Europe increasingly saw the emergence of the market understood as a catallactic worldview, of market societies in which, as Italy’s first professor of political economy Antonio Genovesi argued on the eve of the economic turn, people observed the world through the eyes of a merchant.³² After decades of jagged and unevenly discreet development across Europe and beyond, marked by the gradual refining of its methods and the reticulation of its circuitry, capitalism increasingly made manifest its systematic exigencies (including its claims for political and social franchises and immunities and its understandings of private property, capital formation, the organization of production and distribution, wage labor, competition and price-making), which turned on relations between state and society.³³ Clearly many customary social (and sociopolitical) arrangements would not be able to withstand the tide of capitalism, however inchoate or ripe. Surfing on the economic turn, this progressively blossoming capitalism fed on a rationality that placed into question both the theory and practice of what is commonly called mercantilism, though it would be wrong to imagine that there congealed a consensus among thinkers, public administrators and economic actors that state intercession—or meddling—stifled growth and prosperity Rather than foreclosing options peremptorily, the economic turn placed them into sharp relief and invited a reevaluation of their consequences and compatibilities.³⁴ The 1750s witnessed a notable increase in awareness about the vexing relationships between markets and societies, individuals and communities, nations and their neighbors, government policy and all manner of economic activity, as well as the tortuous politics of embedding and disembedding economic life, of commerce writ large [Figures 4–5]. And political economy emerged as one of the principal tools at the time for producing and managing these tensions and vicissitudes.

Nothing better epitomized the stresses crystalized by the theme of exchange in the wake of the economic turn than the grain question. Grain was the pilot sector of the economies of most European nations: the source of much of the wealth of the elites and of the revenues of the state, the regulator of employment and, above all, the ration of survival for vast numbers of ordinary people. The best way to optimize the production and use of grain became the object of debate in a number of places before 1750, in England, for example, where the subsistence question was dramatically redefined and in France, in the work of Pierre Le Pesant Boisguilbert and then of Jean-François Melon, whose famous allegory of the three islands—one devoted to wool, another beer, a third grain—vividly distilled many of the issues that would come to dominate the debate in the second half of the century.³⁵ Socially imperative, economically determinate, everyday merchandise as strategic as it was banal, characteristically freighted with a panoply of variable or constant rules and controls, grain was the archetypal object of exchange whose administration (or politics) the economic turn thrust into quickened debate. Grain was the test issue for political economy, the indicator of where one stood on most of the other questions that really mattered in the affairs of the commonweal (rendered in the vernacular: tell me how you handle the grain question, I’ll tell you how you think about the fundamental issues of your time). Litmus of renewal (reform) or reaction (regression), simultaneously the thermometer and the fever that it was devised to measure, grain was the ur-marker of the embedded economy, whose functioning and outcomes were subordinated to and submerged in a social and political complex of customs, values, norms and expectations.

Economic critics of traditional grain policies made disembedding the commanding criterion of regeneration and progress. They assimilated grain regulation to the worst tyrannies of old-regime-type societies, a tentacular and asphyxiating Bastille that needed to be taken to free men to act creatively in their interest and, in so doing, to serve necessarily the general interest. The implications of this liberalism for the recasting of Europe over the next two centuries were incalculable. The debate provoked by liberal political economy and fiercely invigorated by the implementation of significant portions of the liberal program heralds one of the most influential vectors of the radical Enlightenment, as we construe it, a radicality capable of undoing society and state in the multiple senses of that word.³⁶ Aligned with one of the guiding principles of the Enlightenment from its outset—the quest for liberty in virtually every sector of human endeavor—this liberalism was immensely alluring in its argument (to many) and almost universally discomfiting, in light of its abstract prestige, to criticize. It required an organic conservative, a deeply apprehensive administrator or an intellectual killjoy to focus on the corrosive/toxic potential of the daunting power that boundless liberty would unleash rather than on its aptitude for appreciably enhancing individual and collective well-being. Paradoxically, given the fact that the European world was still largely under authoritarian sway of one kind or another, one needed more courage after mid-century to defend raison d’état than to acclaim liberty.

Figure 1.4 Google Ngram of the Word commerce in French Publications, 1700–1800.

Figure 1.5 Google Ngram of the Word commerce in English Publications, 1700–1800.

From this perspective, the economic turn bespoke a scientific/enlightened gaze upon society, state and economy, not merely to theorize about them, but to try actively to imagine ways in which it might be possible to change the way in which basic things were done and worked in the world, and change them for the better, according to a revised hierarchy of individual and collective value: ends as well as means were at stake here.³⁷ Perhaps, some ventured to argue, political economy could even eliminate the harrowing proto-Malthusian cycles of want, and the periodic horrors of dearth and famine, that characterized traditional societies.³⁸ The ideas that came to animate the economic turn were therefore far from abstract, and serve to demonstrate the dangers of confining intellectual history to the realm of ideas alone. There is, of course, much to be gained from rehearsing the articulation and aesthetic elegance of past thoughts.³⁹ Yet ideas issue in consequences of which they are not necessarily the sole authors, and invite us or oblige us to take the next step and to inquire into their origins and destinies.⁴⁰ We cannot take the full measure of Jean Calvin’s impact, for example, by looking purely at his liturgical prescriptions, much like it would require remarkable naïveté to consider twentieth-century debates over eugenics in isolation from the practical implementation of racial hygiene.⁴¹ Similarly, what was at stake in the economic turn was not merely a prize from some provincial academy, however important such institutional accolades were for the Enlightenment, but the daily life of everyone.⁴²

Ironically, the current of theorists called physiocrats (baptized a sect by a welter of their antagonists and by a somewhat ambivalent Adam Smith), who succeeded in appropriating for themselves exclusively the highly prestigious appellation of economists, were among the least closely and lucidly focused on the actual, short-term destiny that determined hunger and misery or even life or death for these millions.⁴³ In part because their promethean vision was so audacious and exhilarating, in part because they spoke a tongue both recondite and sublime, scientifically and aesthetically validated, in part because they seemed to have the ear of numerous public figures, in and around government, at home and abroad, and in part because they operated a remarkably effective multi-media platform of public relations and communications, they succeeded not only in catapulting themselves into the forefront of the arena of political economy in their time, but also in sustaining the posthumous fiction, in the domain of economic theory as well as historiography, that their enterprise was tantamount to the vulgate of the political economy of Enlightenment Europe, at least the lion’s share of it that mattered. Led by the redoubtable court physician François Quesnay and the Marquis de Mirabeau, a brilliant intellectual pied piper, the Physiocrats launched an extraordinary project to revitalize the French economy in the 1760s based, with great theoretical refinement, on a profound faith in the exclusive capacity of agriculture to create wealth and the self-evident efficacy of the natural laws of property and liberty which, if left wholly unencumbered, issued in the operation of self-regulating, equilibrium-making markets.⁴⁴ Exceptionally skilled at orchestrating the debate, and mobilizing support among various elites, the group was largely responsible, intellectually and to some lesser extent politically, for the stunningly bold policy of liberalizing the grain trade inaugurated in 1763. Unprecedented in its reconfiguration of fundamental relations between state and society, indifferent to the perils of a metamorphosis that cruelly lacked a modicum of infrastructure (transportation, communication/information, administrative coordination, public reeducation, formation of a new corps of grain merchants) and a minimal strategy of transition to the brave new world of unfettered commercial laissez-faire and consumer sauve-qui-peut, these liberal measures of 1763–64 coincided with a series of bad harvests and led to widespread suffering and unrest.⁴⁵

Physiocracy rose to prominence as an ideology of disembedding, and there was, from this perspective, something decidedly heroic about its call for human liberation. At the same time, many of their contemporaries warned that too rapid a disembedding would amount to a disemboweling. In hindsight, it is hard to ignore that Physiocracy prescribed policies whose outcomes were catastrophic and whose calamitous nature was systematically denied by those who theorized them. If one studies Physiocracy purely in internal terms, that is to say as if it were an exercise in abstract reflection, one can very well confine one’s concern to the elegance of its theoretical construction, to its sophisticated quantification of economic phenomena, its precocious modeling of national income and its long-term intellectual influence. But if one acknowledges that Physiocracy was an undertaking of a political as well as ideological nature and had as a major goal the redirection of public policy, that is to say changing the world, then one is obliged to look at its consequences much more intensively and extensively than most scholars so far have found necessary. We already know quite a lot about the intellectual formation of Physiocracy and its international reach in the eighteenth century; until now, scholars have paid little attention to the practical and intellectual consequences of its deficiencies, derelictions and ramifying discontents.⁴⁶

We have already pointed to some of the reasons why Physiocracy came to enjoy such a historiographically privileged position. As an intellectual movement, it was remarkably coherent, it had scientific pretensions, it was mathematical, innovative, even revolutionary, and its doctrine promised liberty rather than subjection to the complexities of the world. And it seemed, in the eyes of many, to be on the proverbially right side of history; on the side of the individual, freedom, markets (construed beatifically as institutions of emancipation as well as of allocation, coordination and equilibrium), and even world peace. It is certainly true that Smith stated in his Wealth of Nations that Physiocracy, with all its imperfections, is, perhaps, the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political oeconomy, and Dugald Stewart might have been right in claiming that Smith had considered dedicating his magnum opus to Quesnay.⁴⁷ Yet, as Istvan Hont demonstrated, Smith’s critiques of Physiocracy were trenchant, and he was read as an explicit Antiphysiocrat already in the eighteenth century.⁴⁸ Adam Smith’s decidedly equivocal relationship with the Physiocrats was, however, with time, flattened out to be a congenial consecration, marking the beginning of a long tradition of hagiography that still influences scholarship. The apotheosis of physiocracy, at once instrumentally logical and historically implausible, resulted in the marginalization, and in some cases the stigmatization, of robust intellectual countercurrents, moored not only in the Republic of Letters, but also in the domain of practical political economy of the business world, sensu lato, and of the precincts of public administration, low and high.

There are many reasons why these alter-economists of the eighteenth century—already christened "anti-économistes and antiphysiocrats by certain contemporary observers, whose negative, reactive characterization diminishes their originality and pays an unearned premium to physiocratic garrulousness—were largely relegated to the dustbins of history. The economic turn, for the alter-economists, was a turn to reality, an idea and a class of phenomena that they felt the need to theorize precisely because it was not evident, and to theorize in unvarnished terms, precisely because it was easily susceptible to distortion, caricature and hijacking. The reality that they targeted was unrefracted by the traditional orthodoxies, religious, political, moral and epistemological, or the no less mystifying and faith-based doctrines of the physiocrats. For the latter, the economic turn meant above all coming to terms with the advent of evidence, an epiphanic theoretical sesame that promised a safe navigation along the circuit of the Economic Enlightenment with one’s eyes closed, given the infallible character of the natural law to which evidence gave access. By their very posthumous triumph, the physiocrats, pure products of the economic turn, managed to obscure its larger and lasting significance, even as they eclipsed their antagonists. The confrontation between the proprietary" économistes and their critic was frequently acrimonious. Beyond issues of positioning and vanity that we should not dismiss, each side—in fact, there were more than two sides in their controversies—believed that the stakes were decisive for the present and the future. The physiocrats expressed indignation that their adversaries dared to challenge their leadership and their methodology in the realm of scientific political economy; for contesting certain physiocratic fundamentals that were also the basic values of the entire Enlightenment—liberty is the most striking example—the school of Quesnay pronounced anathema on their antagonists, tantamount to a demand for excommunication from the Republic of Letters. Outraged by physiocratic arrogance and intransigence, the alter economists fulminated against their insularity, fanaticism and convolution in thought and in style; to their great critic Ferdinando Galiani, Quesnay was no less than the Antichrist.⁴⁹

A double handicap encumbered the alter economists. On the one hand, they offered no simple solutions and no one-stop remedies; their theoretical endeavors were too diverse, and frequently too deferential to real conditions, perforce shifting endlessly, to become readily generalized and fashionable. On the other, they lacked the physiocrats institutional backing, their network, their penchant for public relations and their intellectual coherence. Indeed, there might be pertinent parallels between the other economists of the eighteenth century and the American institutionalist economists of the early twentieth century, whose ecumenical emphasis on realism similarly led to an ostensible theoretical deficit and an eventual decline of influence. As Malcolm Rutherford recently has demonstrated, however, this made them no less "mainstream" at the time.⁵⁰

These volumes seek to give the wider economic turn of the eighteenth century mainstream its rightful due. They remind us how Physiocracy was rejected with vehemence all across the European world, as the few cases in which it was implemented precipitated disasters.⁵¹ The Physiocrats lost every single battle on the ground, yet won the war of historiography, retroactively appropriating the economic turn, just as they hoarded for themselves the very term économiste itself. The time has come for us to turn back and reconsider eighteenth-century political economy in its entirety in order to restitute to the debate a richer and more historically accurate gallery of players, victims, theories, policies and events. The essays collected in these volumes profoundly recast our understanding of the Enlightenment origins of political economy by giving the other economists a voice, an ecology and a thicker history than they have ever collectively enjoyed before. While awaiting systematic prosopographies, we take note of some of the differences between the two classes of economists in terms of life-story, education, nationality, religion and formation of habitus. These competing writers and reformers whom we call alter economists—an extremely heterogeneous assemblage including thinkers and doers, businessmen and administrators, social critics and religious leaders (but by no means a group, save in retrospective engineering and analysis), functioning most often each on his own, with relatively direct little communication among them, without the benefit of networks of support—had much to say. If it would be rash to claim for them a wholly shared agenda, certainly they had significant affinities in their ways of apprehending the world and interpreting it. Frequently, they are best known to us because they criticized and/or refuted the methods and conclusions of the physiocrats, but a significant number had claims as writers/economists before physiocracy and without physiocracy and after physiocracy. If the sometimes brutal and dramatic confrontation between two kinds of thinking and thinkers sets the stage, we cannot stress too much the sterility of a strictly dichotomous template: in the wake of the economic turn, political economy is often radical, but not radically dualistic. Divided among themselves on many issues, despite many shared epistemological and sociopolitical assumptions and economic analyses, the alter economists do not align in tight agonistic formation against the physiocrats. Certain of them endorse physiocratic positions on certain questions (such as fiscality) while rebuffing others (on agriculture’s exorbitant hegemony or on grain’s exorbitant banality). Though there are certain truths in stark oppositions, such as liberty versus regulation, such binary formulations rarely describe faithfully or help to explain the issues and postures at stake. Indeed, the alter economists are so interesting in part because they are capable of great subtlety and flexibility, because they appreciate ambiguity, because they are frequently more concerned with making sense than with making points. Pluralists by intellectual conviction—though not on all matters or in all cases!—the alter-economists are most fruitfully treated with a segmenting approach. And it is fair to say that certain of the members/disciples of Quesnay’s school/sect and (especially) fellow travelers broke with specific points of orthodoxy over time, and adumbrated less strident and rigid positions.

Righting the balance in order to undo an injustice to important figures, overshadowed or forgotten or even vilified, is an incidental part of our task. In the following pages, we examine the sometimes dazzling and almost always engaging ideas and writings of thinkers who did not require physiocracy in order to make significant, powerful and imaginative arguments. They are concerned with a great many of the questions, crystallized by the economic turn, to which we have referred above. Generally, they are (fairly) associated with the notion of regulation, but each gives it his particular connotations. We learn that regulation is quite often a very ambitious concept, rather than a mere preoccupation with policing. It touches upon social structure and the social bond, the representation of the people, the rights and immunities as well as the obligations of proprietors, the various ways of promoting exchange and the kinds of markets that are most appropriate to specific functions, the play between the general interest and self-interest, the nature and legitimacy of sovereign power, the attributes and limits of state authority, the appropriateness and efficacy of state intervention (from paternalist and dirigiste vantage points), the coordination of central and peripheral administration, the fostering of economic growth, the inventory of the factors that imperil most acutely social and political stability, and so on. Clearly, their ideas cannot be pigeonholed; they cover a vast swathe of social, cultural, political and economic space. They construe political economy as an exigent exercise in every sort of governance. Their arguments and propositions, like their blind spots and blunders, have deeply marked the course of events and continue to weigh mightily in the grand and ongoing debates about what the French evocatively call the vivre ensemble in all of its domains. By dint of their vivacity, originality and influence as critics of the societies of Enlightenment Europe and as lawgivers of modernity, they have managed to overcome the opprobrium of their relegation to the sphere of the mere antis.⁵²

The second chapter reminds us that, even as we seek to take the measure of the alternative conceptions of political economy of the eighteenth century, there remains much to be reconsidered concerning the discourse and practice of Physiocracy itself. Loïc Charles and Christine Théré have crafted a vigorous critique of the historiographical assumptions that have largely underpinned representations of both the physiocratic movement and its theory, dominant interpretations that have deformed the very nature of physiocracy as well as its impact on French and European society, and in so doing have denied its proponents full membership in the Enlightenment. Building on the culturalist notion that consumption generates production through a rereading and re-appropriation of seminal concepts, Charles and Théré expose Quesnay’s hoax in refusing to reveal himself in his own writings and, subsequently, acknowledge the ways in which his disciples, sworn to uphold faithfully his doctrine, transformed it subtly yet decisively and (even) led the master to modify his own thinking. Historians who focus on Quesnay’s canonic texts will not be able to understand how the readers of the sixties—crucial decade in the articulation and policy application of the new political science—came under the spell of physiocracy. To fathom the process of recruitment and diffusion, Charles and Théré contend that one must seize the group dynamic and pursue the development and refinement of framing physiocratic ideas over time—and in antagonism to the confining telic narrative of a rise and fall—as the movement shifted from court to city, from center to periphery, from grandmaster to increasingly autonomous followers. Along with fresh actors, who rework foundational concepts, the movement establishes new networks, through institutions and periodicals, and will heretofore derive its real strength from its mooring in the Republic of Letters, where économistes are first of all philosophes. Displacing and, in a sense, recalibrating Quesnay, Charles and Théré take the sanguine position, thanks to the reconfiguration of the group, that the end of the first, defining moment of liberalization constituted merely a momentary setback to the movement and its theory.

In the third chapter, Paul Cheney examines the rise of Physiocracy in a global context and in light of an alternate genealogy of political economy born at the intersection of colonialism, imperialism and the administration of composite polities. Focusing on the etymological origins of political economy in the tense space between Greek notions of the polity and the household, the "polis and the oikos, Cheney argues that the problem of establishing sovereignty among the composite monarchies of Europe meant questions of empire and colonialism were integral to early modern political economy since its very inception. Far from an auxiliary to debates that largely were inward-looking and national, political economy emerges through Cheney’s treatment to have been a quintessentially global social science. This, in turn, allows him to shed new light on the Physiocratic conception of a monarchical empire," though it is true that the alter-economists were generally more voluble than their antagonists on the questions that preoccupy the author. Unlike the colonies of antiquity, which were meant to develop into independent polities of their own, modern colonies were traditionally designed for economic reasons. Unequal commercial terms between metropole and colonies could therefore be justified in terms of the investments and expenses made in their