Tracing the origins of modern political thought through three sets of arguments over history, morality, and freedom In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions. What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought.

How the history of a word sheds new light on capitalism and modern politics What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what's at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism, Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it. "Capitalism" was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for.

When Istvan Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, which explores the birth of economic nationalism and other social effects of expanding eighteenth-century markets. Markets, Morals, Politics brings together a celebrated cast of Hont's contemporaries to assess his influence, ideas, and methods. Richard Tuck, John Pocock, John Dunn, Raymond Geuss, Gareth Stedman Jones, Michael Sonenscher, John Robertson, Keith Tribe, Pasquale Pasquino, and Peter N. Miller contribute original essays on themes Hont treated with penetrating insight: the politics of commerce, debt, and luxury; the morality of markets; and economic limits on state power. The authors delve into questions about the relationship between states and markets, politics and economics, through examinations of key Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment figures in context-Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, and many others. The contributors also add depth to Hont's lifelong, if sometimes veiled, engagement with Marx. The result is a work of interpretation that does justice to Hont's influence while developing its own provocative and illuminating arguments. Markets, Morals, Politics will be a valuable companion to readers of Hont and anyone concerned with political economy and the history of ideas.

Tracing the origins of modern political thought through three sets of arguments over history, morality, and freedom In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions. What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought.

This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, Sans-Culottes examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, Michael Sonenscher opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself.

Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives. In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems-and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised-were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it. Building his argument on the similarity between Smith's and Rousseau's theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics-the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.

The abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748-1836) distinguished himself as the chief theoretician of the French Revolution--and as a revolutionary constitutional and social theorist in his own right--through his rigorously analytical theory of representative government and its corollary, the representative character of social life in general. He expressed the essence of his thought in a series of three pamphlets published in the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789. This volume presents all three essays-- Views of the Executive Means , An Essay on Privileges , and What Is the Third Estate? --in their entirety. The third essay, in a new translation by Michael Sonenscher, is followed by Sieyes's 1791 newspaper debate with Tom Paine on the merits of monarchy versus republicanism. Elucidated by Sonenscher's insightful Introduction, these texts will fascinate anyone interested in the history of the French Revolution, the history of social and political thought, or the origins and character of modern liberalism.

Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Apres moi, le deluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. But decades before the Bastille fell, French writers had used the phrase to describe a different kind of selfish recklessness--not toward the flood of revolution but, rather, toward the flood of public debt. In "Before the Deluge," Michael Sonenscher examines these fears and the responses to them, and the result is nothing less than a new way of thinking about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution.

In this nightmare vision of the future, many prerevolutionary observers predicted that the pressures generated by modern war finance would set off a chain of debt defaults that would either destroy established political orders or cause a sudden lurch into despotic rule. Nor was it clear that constitutional government could keep this possibility at bay. Constitutional government might make public credit more secure, but public credit might undermine constitutional government itself.

"Before the Deluge" examines how this predicament gave rise to a widespread eighteenth-century interest in figuring out how to establish and maintain representative governments able to realize the promise of public credit while avoiding its peril. By doing so, the book throws new light on a neglected aspect of modern political thought and on the French Revolution."

The abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748-1836) distinguished himself as the chief theoretician of the French Revolution--and as a revolutionary constitutional and social theorist in his own right--through his rigorously analytical theory of representative government and its corollary, the representative character of social life in general. He expressed the essence of his thought in a series of three pamphlets published in the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789. This volume presents all three essays-- Views of the Executive Means , An Essay on Privileges , and What Is the Third Estate? --in their entirety. The third essay, in a new translation by Michael Sonenscher, is followed by Sieyes's 1791 newspaper debate with Tom Paine on the merits of monarchy versus republicanism. Elucidated by Sonenscher's insightful Introduction, these texts will fascinate anyone interested in the history of the French Revolution, the history of social and political thought, or the origins and character of modern liberalism.

"With deftness, wit, and great erudition, Michael Sonenscher traces the complex and unexpected pre-Jacobin history of the phrase 'sans culottes' to its origins in the rivalries and concerns of the Parisian salons. This probing history brings to life the patronesses, philosophers, wits, and hacks of the ancien regime and illuminates the contending uses of ancient philosophy and visions of society and personal virtue that circulated among them. The analyses of competing Ciceronian and Cynical views of fashion, and of the gulfs between Rousseau and his self-designated acolytes, are particularly powerful. This book will be sure to transform irrevocably our understanding of the notorious emblem of Jacobinism."--Jennifer Pitts, author of "A Turn to Empire"

"With this book, Michael Sonenscher establishes himself as one of the most significant authors in the world today writing on the French Revolution. Focusing at the outset on the apparently unpromising question of how the revolutionary sans-culottes got their name, Sonenscher takes his readers on an extraordinary journey of discovery to the heart of the French Enlightenment and revolutionary politics. A brilliant tour de force, based on a dazzling command of eighteenth-century political and economic writing and razor-sharp analytical skills, this book will be required reading for any scholar or student interested in the origins and outcomes of the revolution."--Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London

"A pathbreaking account of the emergence of the concept of republican citizenship in the eighteenth century, Michael Sonenscher's "Sans-Culottes" is also one of the most ambitious, original, and satisfying accounts of theeighteenth-century resonance of Rousseau's arguments regarding human nature, culture, and politics that I have encountered."--E. J. Hundert, professor emeritus of history, University of British Columbia

"Drawing on a dazzling array of texts--from the most well known to the totally arcane--Michael Sonenscher reveals that the sans-culottes of revolutionary France were the cultural offspring of a deep and densely argued eighteenth-century philosophical divide. The story is utterly fascinating and will come as a surprise, especially to social historians. There are few scholars working today who can rival the breadth or depth of Sonenscher's command of eighteenth-century European intellectual culture."--Carla Hesse, University of California, Berkeley

First published in 1989, this paperback edition of Work and Wages comes with a new Preface, entitled 'Fashion's Empire', that positions the book's argument within the broader context of historical thinking about eighteenth-century France and the origins of the French revolution. It also comes with an updated set of bibliographical notes linking recent historical writing on industry before industrialisation to the picture of the eighteenth-century French trades presented in Work and Wages. Together, they add up to a fresh way in to one of the books that has changed the direction of historical thinking about artisans, small businesses and the political economy of eighteenth-century France.

The internal organisation of production before the development of the factory system is still shrouded in historical mystery. How goods were made before machines, how work was organised before the factory system, how artisans and labourers perceived and lived their work are questions to which we have only hesitant and tentative answers. Hitherto, historians have been too concerned with the emerging features of the modern industrial capitalist order to seek to understand how another and different economy and community worked in its own terms. The essays in this book are intended to begin to remedy this neglect.