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Article: Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- March 22, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. By Michael Sonenscher. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 415. $39.95.)
This brilliant book offers a remarkably fresh approach to how eighteenth-century intellectuals understood revolution before and during the French Revolution. Although their principal referents harked back to Aristotle's Politics and ancient Rome, these men--most well known, such as David Hume, the Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but some less so, like Francois Veron de Forbonnais and Pierre-Louis Roederer--knew their own times differed markedly as a result ...