The history and science of commerce in the century of Enlightenment: France,1713--1789.

详细信息   

• 作者：Cheney ; Paul Burton.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2002
• 导师：Woloch,Isser,eadvisor
• 毕业院校：Columbia University
• ISBN：9780493624204
• CBH：3048111
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：14691254
• Pages：323

文摘

This dissertation describes the historical and comparative methods of French political economy,situating its developments in the context of an expanding world economy. The growth of colonial commerce,and the attendant competition between European states,laid bare the socio-political foundations of economic success (or failure) with particular urgency,calling into question many of the structures of old regime society in the process. Over the course of the eighteenth century,French thinkers elaborated a brand of economic thought intended to shed light upon questions of value and distribution,but through their "science of commerce" they also sought a rigorous analysis of how the characteristic social,political and cultural norms operating in different states (among them England,Holland,Spain and France) led to,or undermined,economic progress. This analysis,which was reform-minded and often highly critical,ultimately drew more inspiration from the historical methods of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois than the ahistorical abstractions of Quesnay's Tableau Economique,which is usually taken as the central document of French economic science. Using a combination of printed monographs,journal articles and ministerial archives (including the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres and the Marine),this dissertation makes three related contributions to the field of intellectual history. First,it situates the development of the preeminent social science of the Enlightenment---political economy---in its properly global context. Secondly,it reevaluates the seminal importance to eighteenth-century economic thought habitually accorded to the Physiocrats. Third,by recovering the "science of commerce" that was elaborated in this global context and weighing it against the Physiocratic contribution,it makes possible a new,more accurate intellectual genealogy,one that traces how political economy in the age of Enlightenment drew upon the study of history,geography,natural law and comparative politics. In this reading,the economic science that was pursued during the French Enlightenment bears little relation to the esprit de systeme that animated the Physiocrats. Readers of this dissertation will better understand the long-term intellectual origins of Raynal's Philosophical and Political History of the European Colonies in the Two Indies,and the factors that made this work an eighteenth-century bestseller.