The Stakes of Regulation

Steven L. Kaplan

Description

The author’s critical engagement with his own pathbreaking work of 1976 and the scholarly work published since, in the context of the fraught question of regulation from the 18th century to today.

Scholars have long regarded ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV’ (1976) as marking an important moment in the study of the social, political and cultural history of eighteenth-century France. ‘The Stakes of Regulation’ is the companion volume to a new edition of this landmark study, revealing how Kaplan’s thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual, epistemological, historiographical and socio-political environment, and to the significant scholarship that has been accomplished during the past forty years. Kaplan remains faithful to his original premise: that the subsistence question is at the core of eighteenth century history, and that the issues joined by the struggle over liberalization continue to shape our destiny today through the bristling tension between liberty and equality, and the debate over the necessity, legitimacy and character of regulation.

Introduction; 1. (Re-)Thinking Regulation: Police, Prices, Markets; 2. Agriculture and the French Economy of the Old Regime; 3. Collective Action and Its Actors: The Moral Economy and the Market, the People and the Elites, Disorder and Order; 4. The Parlements in the Age of Economic Enlightenment; 5. Kings and Ministers: Politics and Policies, Finance and Subsistence; 6. The New Historiography of Political Economy; 7. Famine, Dearth, and Food (In-)Security; Afterword; Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• General officer
• Social sciences
• General
• France
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783084784
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Stakes of Regulation
ANTHEM OTHER CANON ECONOMICS
The Anthem Other Canon Economics series is a collaboration between Anthem Press and The Other Canon Foundation. The Other Canon - also described as reality economics - studies the economy as a real object rather than as the behaviour of a model economy based on core axioms, assumptions and techniques. The series includes both classical and contemporary works in this tradition, spanning evolutionary, institutional and Post-Keynesian economics, the history of economic thought and economic policy, economic sociology and technology governance, and works on the theory of uneven development and in the tradition of the German historical school.
Editorial Board
Erik S. Reinert (series editor) – Chairman, The Other Canon Foundation, Norway and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Rainer Kattel (series editor) – Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Wolfgang Drechsler (series editor) – Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Ha-Joon Chang – University of Cambridge, UK
Mario Cimoli – UN-ECLAC, Chile
Jayati Ghosh – Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Steven Kaplan – Cornell University, USA & University of Versailles, France
Jan Kregel – University of Missouri, USA & Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Bengt-Åke Lundvall – Aalborg University, Denmark
Richard Nelson – Columbia University, USA
Keith Nurse – University of the West Indies, Barbados
Patrick O'Brien – London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK
Carlota Perez – Judge Institute, University of Cambridge, UK
Alessandro Roncaglia – Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Jomo Kwame Sundaram – Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy
The Stakes of Regulation
Perspectives on Bread, Politics and Political Economy Forty Years Later
Steven L. Kaplan
Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2015 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Steven L. Kaplan 2015
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 476 0 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 476 6 (Hbk)
“La Porteuse de pain” by Jules-Félix Coutan (1882), Square St.-Jacques, Paris (destroyed by Vichy government, 1942) © Collection Roger-Viollet / Roger-Viollet
This title is also available as an ebook.
For Marie-Christine, toujours complice
CONTENTS Introduction Chapter I. (Re-)Thinking Regulation: Police, Prices, Markets Chapter II. Agriculture and the French Economy of the Old Regime Chapter III. Collective Action and Its Actors: The Moral Economy and the Market, the People and the Elites, Disorder and Order Chapter IV. The Parlements in the Age of Economic Enlightenment Chapter V. Kings and Ministers: Politics and Policies, Finance and Subsistence Chapter VI. The New Historiography of Political Economy Chapter VII. Famine, Dearth and Food (In-)Security Afterword Index
INTRODUCTION
All politics starts with a grain of wheat. —Mirabeau 1 No bread, no politics. —Ange Goudard 2 I like reality, it has the taste of bread. —Jean Anouilh 3
I wrote Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV as a doctoral dissertation at Yale. I had been studying the history of the American South with C. Vann Woodward, a wonderful teacher and splendid person whose deep social humanism and wise criticism I have never forgotten. My fascination with the South began at Princeton, a university deeply marked by its historical ties with the South. Princeton was still home to descendants of slaves manumitted by their student masters at graduation, some of whom worked in the eating clubs for which the university was (in-)famous. It also still attracted some of the South s best and brightest, as the formula put it, who were in search of an Ivy education in quasi-familiar terrain, a number of whom became my roommates and club mates. This was the more exotic component of a Brooklyn Jew s encounter with the wider Wasp world. If Princeton helped to incarnate a certain image of the South, my involvement in the civil rights movement had already drawn my interest to the southern experience. In retrospect, I suspect that my keen interest in the South, so deeply, emblematically and enigmatically an expression of America, had something to do with my own conflicted sense of needing or wanting to become more American, residue of a long-simmering feeling, not rare among the children of immigrants, especially early in their lives, that I did not belong.
I did not live this sentiment of unrootedness traumatically. On the contrary, it enhanced my curiosity for everything unfamiliar. I saw it as a sort of availability or receptivity. The burden of being an outsider had marked me indelibly, but I had begun to espy its advantages as well. I suspect that my French turn spoke to this quest to construct my “self.” Perhaps in order to anchor one identity, I needed to acquire another. Indeed, I had nourished a long-standing flirtation with things French, begun in undergraduate courses taught by Charles Gillispie, Ira Wade, Albert Sonnenfeld and David Bien, kindled at work in a wine factory at Ivry-sur-Seine for three months (1962), and subsequently fostered by a Fulbright year at Poitiers (1963–64). I was not fully aware of the extent to which it had taken control of my for intérieur until the time of quasi-irrevocable choices came at Yale: selection of a thesis project and plans to undertake research in the field.
I had become engrossed by the symbolic and pragmatic vision of transforming the still inchoate nation by building a transcontinental railroad, some of whose investors were French. Woodward had brilliantly shown that the story of railroads (like that of grain) was not merely technological but quintessentially political and cultural. 4 A paper I wrote for Woodward on the Memphis, El Paso and Pacific Railroad seemed to open the path to an interesting dissertation project that could lead me in multiple directions, in the South and beyond. From what I was able to discern from afar, my major archival trove was situated in Paris, Texas—giving me a claim of moral anteriority to Wim Wenders. Later, the town erected a 65-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower, coiffed with a red cowboy hat, not quite a phrygian cap, yet an affirmation of liberty in northeast Texas. It seemed like a pleasant enough place, an opportunity to learn about (yet) another America. At the same time, psychologically and emblematically, it compelled me to confront the smoldering issue that I had repressed under Woodward s spell-binding aegis: was I really prepared to give up, more or less definitively, the other Paris? Though I remained strongly attracted to Woodward s (old/new) South—perhaps more to the tangled populist ideology of a Tom Watson and the People s Party, where a critique of unchained laissez-faire commingled with a strain of anti-Semitism and a resurgent racism that later engulfed him, than to the more irenic and sanguine message of Henry Grady—I knew in the end that, if I continued to do history, my work would be in France. 5
Total History: Program and Conceit
I had already chosen my camp in France, within the fiercely contested terrain of French historiography, after having read every issue of the Annales in the Bloch-Febvre and then the Braudel incarnations. The notion of total history captivated me: at the age of 25, I had no critical perspective on it at all. Nor was there anyone at Yale in French history at that time to bridle my untainted, albeit jejune, ardor.
It seems strange, even implausible in retrospect, but in the 1960s, Fernand Braudel was not a classroom-word in the American academic community. Between the early, mixed reception of La Méditerranée at the beginning of the 1950s and its second coming in the early 1970s, Braudel commanded little scholarly press. Probably representative of the prevailing American point of view in the early years, Bernard Bailyn, at the dawn of a brilliant career, harshly reproached this sprawling, rambling book for failure to achieve “the integration of its parts that could result from the posing of proper historical questions.” While Braudel is barely mentioned in the pages of the American Historical Review in the 1960s, Americans began to hear increasingly of the Annales and what cinephile (and Francophile) historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the French nouvelle vague in history.” Yet even as Robert Forster, specialist of the French nobility, hailed Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie s Paysans de Languedoc as a ground-breaking study in line with the pioneering work of “an entire school of French scholars” (that did not nominally include Braudel and that he christened elsewhere “the Labrousse school”), Richard Cobb unleashe