Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton); Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France.

"This is intellectual history as free jazz. Sonenscher rips and riffs through the links to be made between all manner of ideas across several generations of salon conversation and erudite writing. . . . This work's contribution . . . to illuminating the complexity of eighteenth-century French intellectual history cannot be gainsaid."---David Andress, Times Literary Supplement

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton); Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France.

"This is intellectual history as free jazz. Sonenscher rips and riffs through the links to be made between all manner of ideas across several generations of salon conversation and erudite writing. . . . This work's contribution . . . to illuminating the complexity of eighteenth-century French intellectual history cannot be gainsaid."---David Andress, Times Literary Supplement

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton); Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France.

"This is intellectual history as free jazz. Sonenscher rips and riffs through the links to be made between all manner of ideas across several generations of salon conversation and erudite writing. . . . This work's contribution . . . to illuminating the complexity of eighteenth-century French intellectual history cannot be gainsaid."---David Andress, Times Literary Supplement