This new and up-to-date edition of a book that has been central to political philosophy, history, and revolutionary thought for two hundred years offers readers a dire warning of the consequences that follow the mismanagement of change. Written for a generation presented with challenges of terrible proportions--the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions, to name the most obvious--Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France displays an acute awareness of how high political stakes can be, as well as a keen ability to (...) set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory. (shrink)

Condorcet's understanding of the application of the philosophy of natural sceince to social science.

In his article on « Vampires », in the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire both evokes the phenomenon of the so-called « vampire plague » which hit Central Europe during the 1730s and recalls the controversial interpretations of this phenomenon in France and abroad. He takes advantage of the occasion to renew his anti-religious polemic, with a caustic irony that doesn’t spare even a sincere Voltairian like Jean Baptiste Boyer d’Argens, who had offered a penetrating analysis of this phenomenon in his Lettres (...) Juives. In his text, Voltaire chooses satire rather than an inquiry into causes of the phenomenon, revealing a superficial anthropological approach as well as the limits of an argument conceived as pure ideology. (shrink)

Stephen Miller attempts to confute the idea that capitalist accumulation characterised the agriculture of the Île-de-France prior to the Revolution. Instead he tries to assimilate the agriculture of the north into theAnnalesmodel of neo-Malthusian agricultural cycles and Chayanovian subsistence economy which is supposedly characteristic of the Midi. I argue instead that the notion of a northern capitalist agriculture is rooted not only in the extensive modern research of Moriceau but in the political-economic writings of Turgot and Marx which have been (...) largely ignored. Accumulation in the sense of the growth of fixed and variable capital and emerging technological progress characterised northern agriculture. The persistence of small producers which Miller sees as an index of unchanging stasis might better be investigated in terms of the evolution over time of a reservoir of wage labour for larger-scale enterprises as pointed out by Kautsky. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is not to propose an alternative to recent explanations of 1789, but simply to place these explanations in a more precisely delineated context. Its argument, quite simply, has been that a public debt places the public in a rather awkward relationship to itself, raising an even more awkward question about the relationship between the entity to which the debt belongs and the entity responsible for its day-to-day management. Solving that conundrum, in 1789, entailed a great (...) deal of hard thought, and quite a lot more vigorous action, to define and untangle the two entities, the state and the government, responsible for the debt. In the short term, this combination of hard thought and vigorous action was not a formula designed to guarantee civil peace. Some of the ideas were incomprehensible, others unacceptable, and there was a great deal of scope, on either score, for further action. (shrink)