It has become a commonplace that French political culture since the Revolution has been dominated by a ‘Jacobin’ ideology that has served to entrench a sharp polarity between an absolutist state, heir to the monarchy of the ancien régime, and the individual citizen. France, on this reading, has proved exceptional in its resistance to the development of an autonomous civil society alongside state institutions. It is this ‘Tocquevillian vulgate’ that Pierre Rosanvallon sets out to undermine in the latest of his works to appear in English, a translation of Le modèle politique français: la société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 2004). The Revolution gave birth to a widely shared aspiration towards what he terms ‘generality’, a desire for submersion within ‘le grand tout’. Institutions and associations that served in some way to mediate between individual and nation-state came to be regarded with the greatest suspicion, a tendency epitomized in the famous Le Chapelier Law. This was the essence of the ‘Jacobin’ hostility to civil society. However, Rosanvallon argues, its significance as a continuing feature of the French political landscape lies as much in the ease with which the culture of generality could be disassociated from revolutionary Jacobinism as in any continuing fascination that Jacobin ideology per se may have held. In the hands of nineteenth-century liberals such as François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, the principle of generality was recast as a conservative instrument of order, indicative of the distrust with which the political elite regarded popular political or economic mobilization, and it was in this form that it continued to dominate French political thought into the Third Republic.

Yet even as this conception of the state was consolidated in the nineteenth century it came under assault, both in theory, and through the emergence of a variety of licit and illicit forms of civil association. Rosanvallon charts the challenges posed to the Jacobin model from neo-corporatists, sociologists, the emerging trade unions and voluntary associations, following the shifting patterns of accommodation between state and civil society through into the twentieth century. Beneath the imposing edifice of statism, he argues, civil society has grown and flourished in France: French exceptionalism in this regard has been substantially overplayed. Rather France offers a particularly clear demonstration of a tension that lies at the heart of all modern democratic states, that between ‘generality’ and pluralism. As a corrective to over-simplified accounts of modern French political culture this book is undoubtedly invaluable, but the perspective it offers is wider than this would suggest, and it may best be read as one more chapter in Rosanvallon's continuing attempt to make sense of modern democratic politics in all its frustrating complexity.

A concern with the relationship between governance and civil society might also be seen in many of the contributions to Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann's notable collection, Markets in historical contexts. Bringing together the work of historians and sociologists of various stripes, the volume is premised upon the need to set both the operation and the theorization of markets within specific traditions of practice or discourse. Such an approach appears amply justified by, for instance, Saskia Sassen's analysis of the seemingly paradoxical concentration of finance capital markets in just a handful of major centres at a time when digitalization might have been thought to point towards a more diffuse market model. The key to the continuing success of London, New York, and Tokyo, she argues, lies in the complex networks of expertise and trust built up in these centres that are not easily replicated elsewhere. Similarly, the comparative study of consumer movements in twentieth-century Britain, Japan, and the United States offered by Trentmann and Patricia Maclachlan points to the continuing importance of national cultures in shaping attitudes towards the market.

However, there appears to be a wider ambition at work in many of the essays collected here, namely an attempt to recover alternatives to contemporary neo-liberal perspectives on the market, and a desire to subvert standard accounts of the development of economic thought. Thus James Livesey offers us non-market orientated, yet thoroughly rational peasants as active agents in the ‘Great Transformation’ of the eighteenth century, whilst Rob Jenkins demonstrates how the interplay of the various legacies of Gandhi's economic thought have shaped Indian economic debate and policies since independence. Intellectual history has a strong presence within the collection, with essays from David Eastwood on Tory conceptions of the market in early nineteenth-century Britain, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt on guild theory in nineteenth-century France and Germany, Jose Harris on Ferdinand Tönnies, and Axel Schäfer on American progressivism. Particularly of note in this regard are the contributions of Richard Whatmore and Donald Winch. Whatmore sets out to reshape understandings of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century political economy in France by placing Rousseau centre stage, and showing how the problem he identified of creating a stable republican government alongside a modern economy continued to vex thinkers down to Benjamin Constant and Jean-Baptiste Say. Winch, meanwhile, seeks to rethink the contrast between John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill, suggesting that in their thinking on environmental sustainability the gulf between the two may have been smaller than is often thought.

This is a collection of consistently high quality, and if one may raise doubts as to the extent to which the essays may be said to reflect in any interesting sense a common ‘interpretative’ approach such as the editors allege this in no sense lessens the interest of the volume as an important contribution to debates on the politics of markets in the modern world.