What do you think?
Rate this book
Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV: Volume One
I Modern times has invented its own brand of Apocalypse. Famine is no longer one of the familiar outriders. The problems of material life, and their political and psychological implications, have changed drastically in the course of the past two hundred years. Perhaps nothing has more profoundly affected our institutions and our attitudes than the creation of a technology of abundance. - Even the old tropes have given way: neither dollars nor calories can measure the distance which separates gagne-pain from gagne-hi/leek. 1 Yet the concerns of this book seem much less remote today than they did when it was conceived in the late sixties. In the past few years we have begun to worry, with a sort of expiatory zeal, about the state· of our environment, the size of our population, the political economy and the morality of the allocation of goods and jobs, and the future of our resources. While computer projections cast a malthusian pall over our world, we have had a bitter, first-hand taste of shortages of all kinds. The sempiternal battle between producers and consumers rages with a new ferocity, as high prices provoke anger on the one side and celebration on the other. Even as famines continue to strike the third world in the thermidor of the green revolution, so we have discovered hunger in our own midst.
- GenresHistory
Hardcover
First published September 1, 1976
20 people want to read
About the author
Steven Laurence Kaplan
28 books7 followersSteven Laurence Kaplan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University and Visiting Professor of Modern History at the University of Versailles, Saint-Quentin. His many books include a guide to the best bread in Paris, Cherchez le pain: Guide des meilleures boulangeries de Paris, and The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1770–1775, also published by Duke University Press. The French government has twice knighted Kaplan for his contributions to the “sustenance and nourishment” of French culture.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 5, 2020
useful for studying
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
---
[Turgot - wikipedia]
[Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne; 10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), commonly known as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Originally considered a physiocrat, he is today best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. He is thought to be the first economist to have recognized the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.]
[In 1760, while travelling in the east of France and Switzerland, he visited Voltaire, who became one of his chief friends and supporters.]
[He was fond of verse-making, and tried to introduce into French verse the rules of Latin prosody, his translation of the fourth book of the Aeneid into classical hexameter verses being greeted by Voltaire as "the only prose translation in which he had found any enthusiasm."]
[As minister of the navy from 1774 to 1776, he opposed financial support for the American Revolution. He believed in the virtue and inevitable success of the revolution but warned that France could neither financially nor socially afford to overtly aid it. French intellectuals saw America as the hope of mankind and magnified American virtues to demonstrate the validity of their ideals along with seeing a chance to avenge their defeat in the Seven Years' War.]
[Turgot, however, emphasized what he believed were American inadequacies. He complained that the new American state constitutions failed to adopt the physiocratic principle of distinguishing for purposes of taxation between those who owned land and those who did not, the principle of direct taxation of property holders had not been followed, and a complicated legal and administrative structure had been created to regulate commerce.]
---
[In character Turgot was simple, honourable and upright, with a passion for justice and truth. He was an idealist, his enemies would say a doctrinaire, and certainly the terms "natural rights," "natural law," frequently occur in his writings. His friends speak of his charm and gaiety in intimate intercourse, but among strangers he was silent and awkward, and produced the impression of being reserved and disdainful. On one point both friends and enemies agree, and that is his brusquerie and his lack of tact in the management of men; August Oncken [de] points out with some reason the schoolmasterish tone of his letters, even to the king.]
[Encyclopedia Brittannica 1911]
Schumpter on Turgot
[wiki]
[Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous History of Economic Analysis,[23] although some of his judgments seem idiosyncratic and sometimes cavalier[according to whom?]. For instance, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th century economist was Turgot, not Adam Smith, as many consider, and he considered Léon Walras to be the "greatest of all economists", beside whom other economists' theories were "like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth".]
[Schumpeter criticized John Maynard Keynes and David Ricardo for the "Ricardian vice." According to Schumpeter, Ricardo and Keynes reasoned in terms of abstract models, where they would freeze all but a few variables. Then they could argue that one caused the other in a simple monotonic fashion. This led to the belief that one could easily deduce policy conclusions directly from a highly abstract theoretical model.]
---
Books
Douglas Dakin - Turgot and the Ancien Regime in France - Methuen 1939
Peter D. Groenewegen - Eighteenth-Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their Contemporaries - Routledge 2002
Steven L. Kaplan - Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV - Nijhoff 1976
Ronald L. Meek - Social Science and the Ignoble Savage - Cambridge 1976
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot - The Turgot Collection: Writings, Speeches, and Letters of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune - Mises Institute 2011
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
---
[Turgot - wikipedia]
[Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne; 10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), commonly known as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Originally considered a physiocrat, he is today best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. He is thought to be the first economist to have recognized the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.]
[In 1760, while travelling in the east of France and Switzerland, he visited Voltaire, who became one of his chief friends and supporters.]
[He was fond of verse-making, and tried to introduce into French verse the rules of Latin prosody, his translation of the fourth book of the Aeneid into classical hexameter verses being greeted by Voltaire as "the only prose translation in which he had found any enthusiasm."]
[As minister of the navy from 1774 to 1776, he opposed financial support for the American Revolution. He believed in the virtue and inevitable success of the revolution but warned that France could neither financially nor socially afford to overtly aid it. French intellectuals saw America as the hope of mankind and magnified American virtues to demonstrate the validity of their ideals along with seeing a chance to avenge their defeat in the Seven Years' War.]
[Turgot, however, emphasized what he believed were American inadequacies. He complained that the new American state constitutions failed to adopt the physiocratic principle of distinguishing for purposes of taxation between those who owned land and those who did not, the principle of direct taxation of property holders had not been followed, and a complicated legal and administrative structure had been created to regulate commerce.]
---
[In character Turgot was simple, honourable and upright, with a passion for justice and truth. He was an idealist, his enemies would say a doctrinaire, and certainly the terms "natural rights," "natural law," frequently occur in his writings. His friends speak of his charm and gaiety in intimate intercourse, but among strangers he was silent and awkward, and produced the impression of being reserved and disdainful. On one point both friends and enemies agree, and that is his brusquerie and his lack of tact in the management of men; August Oncken [de] points out with some reason the schoolmasterish tone of his letters, even to the king.]
[Encyclopedia Brittannica 1911]
Schumpter on Turgot
[wiki]
[Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous History of Economic Analysis,[23] although some of his judgments seem idiosyncratic and sometimes cavalier[according to whom?]. For instance, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th century economist was Turgot, not Adam Smith, as many consider, and he considered Léon Walras to be the "greatest of all economists", beside whom other economists' theories were "like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth".]
[Schumpeter criticized John Maynard Keynes and David Ricardo for the "Ricardian vice." According to Schumpeter, Ricardo and Keynes reasoned in terms of abstract models, where they would freeze all but a few variables. Then they could argue that one caused the other in a simple monotonic fashion. This led to the belief that one could easily deduce policy conclusions directly from a highly abstract theoretical model.]
---
Books
Douglas Dakin - Turgot and the Ancien Regime in France - Methuen 1939
Peter D. Groenewegen - Eighteenth-Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their Contemporaries - Routledge 2002
Steven L. Kaplan - Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV - Nijhoff 1976
Ronald L. Meek - Social Science and the Ignoble Savage - Cambridge 1976
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot - The Turgot Collection: Writings, Speeches, and Letters of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune - Mises Institute 2011
Displaying 1 of 1 review