The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution
by: John Shovlin

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st pbk., 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 265 pages. Drawing on hundreds of political economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline. In their view, France's moral, political, and economic power depended not simply on expanding the national wealth but also on reviving civic spirit. The "political economy of virtue" held that luxury was the cause of the nation's economic and moral degeneration. When the monarchy failed to reform its political economic structures in the 1760s and 1770s, mid-level elites sought to eliminate the stranglehold of the plutocracy. Clean copy.