Political economy, John Shovlin asserts, can illuminate the social and economic contexts out of which a revolutionary impulse developed in France. Beyond the role of political economy in political life, massive public engagement with problems of economic order mediated an enduring cultural transformation. Economic activity was reimagined as a patriotic pursuit, and economic agents―farmers, merchants, and manufacturers―came to be viewed as potential citizens. Drawing on hundreds of political economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline. In their view, France's moral, political, and economic power depended not simply on expanding the national wealth but also on reviving civic spirit. The "political economy of virtue" held that luxury was the cause of the nation's economic and moral degeneration. When the monarchy failed to reform its political economic structures in the 1760s and 1770s, mid-level elites sought to eliminate the stranglehold of the plutocracy. Shovlin argues that the Revolution grew out of a debate on how to establish a commercial society capable of fostering both wealth and virtue, and the revolutionaries sought to create such a society by destroying the institutions that channeled modern wealth into the hands of courtiers and financiers. Explores how French elites in the eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries sought to balence their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline. Discusses political economy and public life in eighteenth-century France; commerce finance and the luxery debate; constructing a patriot political economy; regenerating the patrie―agronomists, tzx reformers, and physiocrats; patriotic commerce and aristocratic luxery; political economy and the prerevolutionary crisis; the agrarian law and the republican farmer; and the political economy of the notables. ― Journal of Economic Literature This absorbing study of how French writers portrayed economic pursuits in the second half of the eighteenth century is a crucial contribution to the literature on the cultural origins and consequences of the French Revolution. Describing in lucid detail prerevolutionary debates about what might constitute a 'virtuous' or 'patriotic' economy, John Shovlin helps us to understand how French thinkers imagined, and eventually brought about, an entirely new social world. -- Sarah Maza, Northwestern University "John Shovlin's learned, penetrating, and clearly written account of political economy in eighteenth-century France focuses on neglected but key debates and policies in which French writers and statesmen struggled to reconcile the demands of virtuous citizenship with the exigencies of a modernizing economy. The Political Economy of Virtue throws dense and rewarding light on the character of the political and cultural crises of the Ancien Régime and makes a signal contribution to the rethinking of the origins of the French Revolution."--Colin Jones, University of Warwick This absorbing study of how French writers portrayed economic pursuits in the second half of the eighteenth century is a crucial contribution to the literature on the cultural origins and consequences of the French Revolution. Describing in lucid detail prerevolutionary debates about what might constitute a 'virtuous' or 'patriotic' economy, John Shovlin helps us to understand how French thinkers imagined, and eventually brought about, an entirely new social world."--Sarah Maza, Northwestern University "The Political Economy of Virtue offers a thoughtful and engaging interpretation of political economy in the second half of the eighteenth century. John Shovlin identifies key turning points in the development of French political economy and shows how the resulting ideas contributed to the collapse of the old regime in 1789 and the making of a new order during the French Revolution."--David Bell, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University "John Shovlin identifies and defines a coherent discourse, which he calls 'the political economy of virtue,' and suggests persuasively that it dominated eighteenth-century French political economy. The period's famous attacks on luxury, he argues, were directed less at new forms of consumption than at the growing influence of financiers and their alliance with the high aristocracy."--Michael Kwass, University of Georgia John Shovlin is Assistant Professor of History at New York University.