ABSTRACT
“Commerce and industry are everywhere invoked, and their introduction produces an astonishing fermentation with the remainder of the ferocity of the feudal constitution.” 1 This judgment is representative of the growing exasperation of the liberated minds of Europe in the eighteenth century with the resistance exerted by the inherited structures of the past in the face of this profound dynamic that energized the economy and shook existing social relations. It also represents the commonly received wisdom about the sources of these antagonisms that tore society apart. Two worlds were pitted against one another before being brutally overcome, as the forces that drive modernity were being shackled by the chains of the past. This story is often told as a conflict between the ancients and the moderns, between the adepts of progress and the defenders of archaic privileges.
