M. Sonenscher: Before the Deluge

Titel
Before the Deluge. Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution


Autor(en)
Sonenscher, Michael
Erschienen
Anzahl Seiten
428 S.
Preis
£ 26.95
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Alan Forrest, University of York

The first thing that must be said is that this is a highly ingenious book, a study that focuses uncompromisingly on political and economic thought, but which succeeds in linking the theory to political practice and ideas about public debt to the onset of the French Revolution in an innovative and convincing way. This is no small achievement, the more so in that the sources that Michael Sonenscher uses are highly technical and often quite obscure, tracts and pamphlets that grappled with the threat – as eighteenth-century thinkers perceived it – posed by a spiralling of public debt, and which he turns to tackle the wider issue of representative government. Economists were largely agreed that the public were being drawn into uncharted waters by the ever-wider use of public debt, and most especially of life annuities, to make up the shortfall in government income and service public-sector debt. In part this was a problem of over-expenditure and unjustified risk-taking; the marquis de Mirabeau, father of the better-known revolutionary statesman, noted that it led to an unhealthy situation where wealth was being consumed before it was produced, thus putting further economic investment in jeopardy. Some looked back to the classics and the fate of ancient Rome, believing that unsupported credit brought with it the seeds of the decline and fall of present empires. For others it brought the threat of militarism, of a Europe where state spending knew no constraints and political leaders devoted themselves continuously to conflict and the preparation of their states for war. In either vision it could seem dangerously like the end of civilisation itself. This no doubt explains why so many political and economic thinkers, among them some of the foremost writers of their day, devoted so much energy to the subject of public credit and to the teasing question of how most effectively to control it.

It also explains the link to revolution. Not, it must be stressed, to the French Revolution as it subsequently took shape, but rather to the revolution which the eighteenth century had talked about, forecast and imagined. This revolution, Sonenscher explains, was the product of two linked forces across Europe, on the one hand huge standing armies, and on the other the equally huge financial pressures that came from debt. The combination had the potential to be apocalyptic. `Together’, he explains, `they were taken to be likely to lead, suddenly and brutally, to the emergence of a highly militarized dictatorial regime equipped with a capacity to destroy much of the civility, culture and liberty that had been built up in Europe since the Age of the Renaissance’. They foresaw the Terror, in other words, rather than the legal niceties of 1789. It may seem a heady claim, but it is the aim of the book to show how widely this vision was shared. It affected ideas about social equality and citizenship and influenced those who, like Sieyès, argued the case for representative government to legitimize decision-making and secure public credit without it becoming a threat to security. The alternative had been sketched out by the military reformer Jacques de Guibert in 1772 when he warned that the whole continent risked being enslaved `should a nation with the resources of France break through the forms of the civil constitutions of the period, shake off fiscal solicitudes by a general bankruptcy, turn her attention exclusively to military affairs and organise a regular plan of universal empire’. If the price of avoiding this nightmare was that the sovereign power of the nation had to be divided under a system of representative government, then so be it. If it meant that men had to be unequal, with some form of social hierarchy as a basis for the social order, then again, it was a price worth paying. Roederer argued that deputies had to be men suffused with `the sentiment of republican honour’; they had to be chosen from an elite who understood the meaning of public service. He saw this as a necessary safeguard if France were to avoid the perils of dictatorship.

Much of the book deals with the responses of philosophers and political economists to the problem of public debt, both during the eighteenth century and in the revolutionary decade. Suddenly this was more than just an abstract problem; it was a political question, too, when the established hierarchy was under threat and when Europeans were forced to contemplate a world made up of sovereign states with public debts. And across Europe thinkers grappled with it in contrasting ways. Montesquieu argued the cause of monarchy since it allowed luxury to offset inequality and encouraged private, not public credit; this in turn produced higher tax revenues. Rousseau, Mably, Hume and Turgot all discussed the interests of states in an age of expanding commercial activity. Was it possible, they asked, for commercially-driven states to co-exist peacefully? Could the modern world’s `over-commitment to industry, trade, empire, war and debt’ really last? Was there not, indeed, a moral difference as well as a practical one between trade based on agriculture and the production of food and trade based on urban industry? And did not the needs of trade demand greater inequality, greater representative government, and a transfer from public to private credit? Once again, the political and the economic case blended easily into a single argument, one with the issue of credit and state power at its core.

No one should pretend that this is an easy book to read. Eighteenth-century thought about the economy and its political consequences was complex, and the author makes few concessions to his readers, analysing the content of innumerable tracts and pamphlets as well as of major works of philosophy from England, Germany, France and the United States. Lesser figures are cited alongside the great, and their works are dissected when their ideas or their originality demands it. If the issue of public credit seems at first rather dry and unappetising, the reader should be encouraged to persist. For this is an impressive book, a novel and imaginative piece of intellectual history. It is also pleasingly lucid. It shows how persistent the issue of public credit remained, being resurrected long after the lessons of the French Revolution had been digested. Supporters and opponents of an expanded national debt continued to argue its merits, with the same arguments recurring in different contexts. The views of Alexander Hamilton in the infant United States are shown to replicate in a republican context those rehearsed a generation earlier by Necker in support of the French monarchy; while the now largely forgotten Schmidt-Phiseldeck took up the arguments of Immanuel Kant, even proposing a common market in Europe in a bid to banish the spectre of militarism. Once again, economics and politics were tightly interwoven, and as the age of industrialisation beckoned, the issue of public credit remained as topical as ever.

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