Consumption and the World of Ideas: Consumer Revolution and the Moral Economy of the Marquis de Mirabeau

Abstract

This article explores the intellectual transformations that accompanied the rise of consumption in eighteenth-century France by examining a best-seller, L'Ami des hommes (1756), by the marquis de Mirabeau. The most popular work of political economy of its time, L'Ami des hommes made a particularly important intervention in the luxury debate. Straddling two seemingly contradictory strains of eighteenth-century political and social thought—a classical republicanism that looked backward to ancient civic virtue and an economic liberalism that looked forward to material progress—the book offered readers the best of both worlds: a moral economy of prosperity. This article analyzes Mirabeau's pathology of consumption and places his moral economy of prosperity in the broader context of Enlightenment thought.

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