Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution - Rilegato

Spang, Rebecca L.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674047036 ISBN 13: 9780674047037

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats—a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”—to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions.

But Spang’s book is also a new history of the French Revolution, one in which radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals and the realities of daily life. Money played a critical role in creating this gulf. Wed to the idea that liberty required economic deregulation as well as political freedom, revolutionary legislators extended the notion of free trade to include “freedom of money.” The consequences were disastrous. Backed neither by the weight of tradition nor by the state that issued them, the assignats could not be a functioning currency. Ever reluctant to interfere in the workings of the market, lawmakers thought changes to the material form of the assignats should suffice to enhance their credibility. Their hopes were disappointed, and the Revolution spiraled out of control.

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the heart of the Revolution and hence to that of modern politics.

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Recensione

A Financial Times Best Book of 2015

Brilliant What [Spang] proposes is nothing less than a new conceptualization of the revolution Spang s innovation is to shift attention from these higher-flown interpretive constructions to the basic notion of "practice." What people thought, she reasons, came about as an inevitable response to what they "did" or, more specifically, to the limitations placed on what they "could" do by the material medium through which they transacted business, i.e., money Spang s book is distinguished not only by its theoretical advances but also by fine writing and keen perception Spang s greatest contribution is her theoretical reorientation of revolutionary studies from causes to practices, from precursors to processes. She has provided historians and not just those of France or the French Revolution with a new set of lenses with which to view the past We study history because, in the hands of a gifted historian like Rebecca Spang, it reveals the true nature of the human predicament. --Arthur Goldhammer"Bookforum" (12/01/2014)"

...it constitutes a deeply impressive scholarly attempt both to refocus historians attention and to rethink the lessons of the revolution today. In our world of economic uncertainty and limited political horizons, this history of the French Revolution could hardly be more relevant. --Financial Times

"This is a quite brilliant, assertive book" -- Times Literary Supplement

"It's a great subject - and it looks every bit as compelling as Spang's history of the restaurant in France" --Bee Wilson, Times Literary Supplement

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Harvard Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674047036
• ISBN 13: 9780674047037
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 350
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile