A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably

by Johnson Kent Wright

Overview

This is an intellectual biography of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-85), who emerges as a central figure in the history of republican thought in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

This book has two related aims. The first is to fill an important gap in historical scholarship. Although Mably, whose career as a historian and political theorist stretched from 1740 to the eve of the French Revolution, clearly played a major role in the intellectual history of his era, there has been no study of his life and thought in English for nearly seventy years. At the same time, the book seeks to advance a novel interpretation of Mably's thought. He has most often been portrayed in two sharply contrasted ways, either as one of a handful of utopian communists and a precursor of nineteenth-century socialism, or as a deeply conservative enemy of the Enlightenment. This study sets forth a different reading of Mably's thought, one that shows him to be a classical republican, in the sense this term has acquired in recent years for students of early modern political thought.

Mably was the author of the most comprehensive and influential body of republican thought produced in eighteenth-century France—a claim with implications that go beyond the merely biographical. These are explored in a final chapter, which draws some conclusions about the character of classical republicanism in France and about the French contribution to the republican tradition in Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804764971
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1997
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	592 KB

About the Author

Johnson Kent Wright is a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University.

Read an Excerpt

An extravagantly good alternate-universe Horatio Alger story for the teeming billions, affirming all that's right--and wrong--with economic globalization. "The whites of your eyes are yellow," writes Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 2007, etc.), "a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood. The virus affecting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum." The "you" in question is the unnamed protagonist, addressed throughout, unusually, in the second person through the fictive frame of a self-help book that is fairly drenched in irony. But, like Hamid's debut novel, Moth Smoke (2000), there's more than a little of the picaresque in this bildungsroman. As our anonymous hero comes of age and goes well beyond majority, he confronts the challenges not only of chasing out the hep E virus, but also of finding love, work and satisfaction in life--the stuff of everyday life everywhere. The younger subject's family lives in an overcrowded, urban slum in some unnamed South Asian nation--perhaps, to judge by a few internal clues, the author's native Pakistan, though he is careful not to specify--where his father's small salary as a cook ("he is not a man obsessed with the freshness or quality of his ingredients") is at least enough to fend off the starvation so many of their neighbors endure. The family, like many of the people our hero will meet, is displaced from the countryside, having followed an early lesson of the vade mecum: "Moving to the city is the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia." Indeed, he attains material success, but he's always just out of reach of the true love of his life--and if anything else, this exceptionally well-written novel is not about the Hobbesian grasping and clawing of first impression, but about the enduring power of family, love and dreams. Another great success for Hamid and another illustration of how richly the colonial margins are feeding the core of literature in English.

Table of Contents

Introduction: placing Mably 2. A Royalist debut 3. About face: from the Parti des Modernes to the Parti des Anciens 4. Dialogues: conversations with Stanhope and Phocion 5. Contemporaries: communists, physiocrats, Rousseau 6. History: the politics of the French past 7. Last works: constitutions and the consolation of philosophy 8. Conclusion: classical Republicanism in eighteenth-century France Abbreviations Notes' Bibliography Index.