Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France

by Henry C. Clark

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.

410 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Maja Solar]

This is an interesting book, it does not focus only on the opinions of great intellectual figures such as Fénelon, Montesquieu, Turgot and other Physiocrats, Sieyès, but equally analyzes writings, tracts and pamphlets of intellectual figures as Vincent de Gournay, Georges Butel-Dumont, François-André-Adrien Pluquet, abbé André Morellet and so on. Important topics of the book revolve around the luxury debate (especially, though not exclusively, concerning the trade). The book also shows how the positions of thinkers, reformers, propagandists and merchants, which are usually in the political and economic history clearly appointed as liberal, anti-liberal, protectionist etc., are not so stable and don't have so predictable character, because of their complexity and heterogeneity. The main drawback of this book is an approach that does not take into account the relations of production, but only describes the area of trade and “science of commerce” by analyzing the seventeenth&eighteenth-century discourse.