As in other European countries, political economy emerged and developed in France with the rise of national and international commercial exchanges and the slow but irreversible transformation of nations into market economies - or “commercial societies” as they were called by eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers.
This process accelerated during the Ancien Regime, or more specifically during the Enlightenment period which, sensu lato, lasted more than a century and stretched from the end of the seventeenth century to the 1789 French Revolution and the fall of the Bourbon monarchy.
This period saw a progressive but important development of books and pamphlets on almost all aspects of economic life. Economic themes apparently left the ground of religious ethics and political treatises where they had been embedded for centuries. But this shift towards an autonomous science of economy was largely illusory, because some developments were themselves fuelled by political or religious controversies and also because political economy itself turned out to be, albeit in a more or less disguised way, an ethical and political doctrine. Indeed, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, it was included in the new “moral and political sciences”.However, these developments did not emerge out of nothing, and authors were able to draw on debates and ideas expressed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially after the rediscovery of writings dating from Antiquity - those of Aristotle in particular. That is why this introductory chapter,[3] after outlining the Enlightenment period in terms of economic thought, briefly states some examples of the legacy that previous ages left to our period of interest.
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More on the topic As in other European countries, political economy emerged and developed in France with the rise of national and international commercial exchanges and the slow but irreversible transformation of nations into market economies - or “commercial societies” as they were called by eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers.:
- As in other European countries, political economy emerged and developed in France with the rise of national and international commercial exchanges and the slow but irreversible transformation of nations into market economies - or “commercial societies” as they were called by eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers.
- Postlude