Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in this book. The book aims to investigate various aspects of the science known as 'political economy' in eighteenth-century France. It explores this science from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on the ideas for social reform proposed prior to the French Revolution. The book is devoted to the Physiocrats while discussing the somewhat different positions of Turgot or Smith with regard to the pattern of capital accumulation and the source of national wealth. It focuses on French political economy in the age of Enlightenment, and concentrates on the corpus of ideas on social reform that it produced. The book, arguing from different positions on the role of money in the economy, produces the first implicit debate on the role of macroeconomic policy. Social reform in eighteenth-century France began with John Law's great experiment, which tried to solve the twin economic problems of a monetary crisis and a financial crisis.