'A revealing and instructive piece of scholarship. By situating Physiocracy within Enlightenment culture, Vardi adds significantly to our understanding of both, employing a lively and innovative biographical approach.' David A. Bell, Princeton University 'In The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment, Liana Vardi unlocks the mental world of the Physiocrats. Often narrowly viewed as mere proto-economic theorists, the Physiocrats emerge as major intellectual figures whose interests ranged across the disciplines, from the arts through politics and sociology to linguistics and the study of ceremony and myth. Vivid, richly textured and engagingly written, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Enlightenment and its cultural, political, and economic legacies.' Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London, and author of The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon 'In this important and original study, Liana Vardi goes beyond the economic and political theories of the Physiocrats to probe the group's underlying philosophical, epistemological, and 'aesthetic' assumptions. With remarkable erudition, she examines and integrates virtually all of the writings of the principal theorists of the school - even those writings with little or no bearing on economic doctrine. She thus offers fascinating reflections on how their intellectual and life experiences influenced their understanding of the eighteenth-century world in which they lived.' Timothy Tackett, University of California, Irvine
