The genesis of Chinese political economy can be traced to the Warring States era (453–221 bce), which was marked on one hand by rapid economic progress (the spread of iron metallurgy, advances in agricultural productivity, the invention of coinage, and the emergence of a private merchant class) and on the other hand by the rise of autocratic states (accompanied by the centralization of political power and mass mobilization for war). The economic principles and policies that later shaped the formation of the first unified empires – what I will designate the militarist–physiocratic state – were enunciated by leading ministers of the most successful autocratic states, such as Li Kui in Wei and Shang Yang in Qin, and set down in works such as The Book of Lord Shang and Han Fei Zi.

Enlightenment thinkers rarely used the word “consumption,” but they spoke incessantly of “luxury,” a multivalent term that became the principal idiom through which writers discussed the moral, social, and political implications of consumption. Controversy over luxury was a proxy for the first modern debate on consumption. The discussion of luxury shifted decisively at the turn of the eighteenth century, when two writers – François Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville – laid the foundations for a vigorous Enlightenment debate. Drawing on ancient and medieval critiques, Fénelon argued that luxury corrupted morals, scrambled the social order, and destroyed states. Mandeville countered by advancing a bold apology for luxury. Far from weakening states, he argued, luxury generated prosperous and powerful nations. Gender would play a key role in the debate that ensued. Whereas critics of luxury like Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that excessive consumption effeminized men, rendering them unfit for public service, defenders of luxury like David Hume claimed that material well-being was the sign of a civilized society in which men and women frequently interacted. In the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers sought to resolve the debate. Political economists argued that if consumption was directed toward productive ends, wealthy and powerful nations would avoid corruption and endure. Meanwhile, luxury producers incorporated critiques of luxury by designing natural and healthy products. Criticism of luxury did little to slow the pace of consumption.

It is now well acknowledged that socio-economic rights were already recognised and defended at the time of the French Revolution. The aim of this chapter is not simply to extend the genealogy of socio-economic rights farther back. I wish to show that both socio-economic and political rights, during the French Revolution, came from the same intellectual source, namely the belief in a naturally regulated economic sphere. This belief would find its peak expression in Physiocracy, but it also informed a number of other liberal movements. Going back to the late seventeenth century, one even finds the assertion of socio-economic rights before that of political ones. Economic liberalism, in this sense, came before, but also paved the way for, political liberalism. This process extended up to the French Revolution, where it was deputies with strong Physiocratic attachments who pushed for both socio-economic and political rights.

Eighteenth-century political writers in France such as Abbé de Saint-Pierre or Abbé de Mably developed schemes for perpetual peace and used the idiom of Droit public de l’Europe (European public law) to found the administration of foreign affairs on a scientific analyses of the real, instead of imagined, interests of the state. But once the calculative orientation was pushed far enough, it turned into a speculation that received its most advanced articulation in the physiocratic theory about optimal relations between economic actors. The state works best, they argued, once both the sovereignty of the ruler and property rights are both conceived as absolutes. Many revolutionaries shared these views and aimed to realise them by abolishing noble privileges and declaring all French white males free and equal. At one stage, the revolutionaries even tried to write these principles into the foundation of a new law of nations. Nothing became of this, however, and while restoration elites briefly flirted with applying the scientific pretensions of the enlightenment to the business of government, the post-Napoleonic moment returned to the forms of old-regime diplomacy.

Chapter 7 analyses in depth the notion of class, with a particular emphasis on its relationship with the understanding of the past. After a short semantic analysis of the term, the chapter examines the role of the physiocrats, A.R.J. Turgot, the abbé de Sieyès, and the Duke de Saint-Simon in shaping its modern meaning. In particular, the chapter considers the growing politicization of the term, arguing that, from the 1770s onwards, it was increasingly used to define historical actors endowed with their own, specific complex of memories, myths, and values. The chapter especially considers the role of the author of Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat in identifying a specific class – the Third Estate – with the whole of society, thus rejecting the hierarchical opposition mode of representation and arguing for a perfect identification between the ruling elite and the entire nation – almost prefiguring the Marxian ‘total class’. Examining the works of Saint-Simon, the chapter stresses the latter’s role in theorizing ‘class struggle’ as the real engine of history. As is shown, this led many authors of the Restoration period to consider classes as ethnic groups with a history and a memory of their own which historians had to ‘re-discover’.