Chapter III - The Origins of Liberty

Summary

A dramatic innovation, liberalization, I shall argue, took shape directly from the needs and circumstances of the early 1760's. Yet insofar as it embodied a certain vision of public administration and economic life—a theory of political economy—it had an ample critical tradition upon which to draw. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to sketch a history of the development of political arithmetic or political economy in the Old Regime, though such a study, fully integrated into the context of political, economic, and social change, is sorely needed. Nor can it attempt to do for the idea of liberty what Mauzi did for “happiness” and Ehrard for “nature,” though such an undertaking, too, would be of great value. I wish only to suggest that liberalization had an important intellectual as well as political and economic preparation, leaving it to others to pursue these connections in detail. I have already discussed on several occasions the critics of the police. Most of them were part of what became the movement for liberalization. I refer to all persons who favored a fundamental reform of the police in the direction of greater liberty as liberals. By liberalism I mean to indicate nothing more than those political, economic, and social ideas that informed the attitude of the grain trade reformers and their allies. To others, too, I leave the task of charting out the links between this grain-centered liberalism of the Old Regime and the Liberalism which triumphed in the nineteenth century.

I

Like many of the notions that became preoccupations of the Enlightenment, the liberal idea crystallized during the reign of Louis XIV. It appeared in several versions in the anti-mercantilist, Christian-agrarian, and utilitarian currents which traversed the kingdom in the second half of the seventeenth century. Already the landowners were plotting the political resurgence and the revenge taken in prices and profits which the eighteenth century would allow them. A large part of the merchant community rejected Colbertism on grounds that would become familiar to eighteenth century reformers. Political dissenters criticized the methods of government for their arbitrariness and their oppressiveness—that is, for their excessive police in all domains of life: administration, religion, and foreign policy as well as the economy.