Political economy and revolution
Political economy illuminates the social and economic contexts that produced the French Revolution. In hundreds of books and pamphlets published between the 1750s and the 1780s, French political economists reimagined economic activity as a patriotic pursuit, and farmers, merchants and manufacturers as potential citizens. They condemned old regime France as a society based on illusory and corrupting forms of wealth and imagined economic foundations for a new order that would balance the need for wealth with the imperative for a virtuous citizenry.