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.".

Following the cataclysmic events of 1789 some of those involved in the Revolution began to take seriously the possibility of a French republic. Various ideas developed about the form this should take and the models on which it could be based, from those of ancient Greece and Rome, to modern republics such as Geneva or the United States of America. However, a small number of thinkers - centred around the radical, Paris-based Cordeliers Club - looked to the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republicans for guidance about realising ancient republican ideals in the modern world. This book offers an intellectual history of the Club, through a close analysis of texts and the relationships between their authors. Its main focus is on individual club members and their translations of and borrowings from the works of such thinkers as Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney and Thomas Gordon: the author shows how the Cordeliers adapted and developed those ideas so as to make them serve contemporary circumstances and concerns, and demonstrates that even after the establishment of a French republic in 1792, members of the Cordeliers Club continued to make use of English republican ideas in order to respond to key constitutional and political questions.