This volume reassesses Say's political economy by locating the author's ideas amidst the intellectual upheavels of the Ancien Régime and revolutionary France.

Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.

It is time for a major work of synthetic interpretation, and this is what The Jacobin Republic Under Fire offers.".

A history of the innovation and effects of the French Republican Calendar. The French Republican Calendar was perhaps the boldest of all the reforms undertaken in Revolutionary France. Introduced in 1793 and used until 1806, the Calendar not only reformed the weeks and months of the year, but decimalisedthe hours of the day and dated the year from the beginning of the French Republic. This book not only provides a history of the calendar, but places it in the context of eighteenth-century time-consciousness, arguing that the French were adept at working within several systems of time-keeping, whether that of the Church, civil society, or the rhythms of the seasons. Developments in time-keeping technology and changes in working patterns challenged early-modern temporalities, and the new calendar can also be viewed as a step on the path toward a more modern conception of time. In this context, the creation of the calendar is viewed not just as an aspect of the broader republican programme of social, political and cultural reform, but as a reflection of a broader interest in time and the culmination of several generations' concern with how society should be policed. Matthew Shaw is a curatorat the British Library, London.