Before the Deluge Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution

We now think of the French Revolution as a political revolution that had a social effect, but 'the eighteenth century's concern' was of an 'extant and ongoing social revolution that would soon have political consequence'. This is the central insightt of Michael Sonenscher's new book. [In this] highly interesting book...Sonenscher's emphasis on public credit is novel and useful. [I]t is a genuinely meaningful contribution to the history of Enlightenment Europe.
(Patrice Higonnet Times Literary Supplement )

Underrated: Before the Deluge, Michael Sonenscher (Princeton). Most modern political debates can be traced back to rival stories about the French revolution; but this tough, fascinating book shows that these stories were constructed out of materials (concerning political ruin and public debt) that were circulating before the event--which makes the whole of modern politics look rather different.
(Jonathan Ree Prospect Magazine )

The best history-of-political-thought volume I read this year was Michael Sonenscher's Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution, which goes to show how the eighteenth-century political economy scholarship of the last generation or so can be put to work to address the really big historiographical questions.
(Christopher Brooke The Virtual Stoa )

This brief review cannot begin to capture the nuance and sophistication of Sonenscher's careful, complex archaeology of the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. He reminds readers that all the thinkers he profiles experienced the creation of the modern European world over a lifetime, changing their minds, reformulating questions, and reexamining inherited ideas as events unfolded, trying to hit on if not universal then at least workable solutions to the perdurable problems of balancing liberty with security. We can appreciate the difficulties they encountered during their journey if only because it continues in our own day, and for that abiding lesson we have much for which to thank Michael Sonenscher.
(Michael Wolfe The Historian )

Before the Deluge provides an intellectual history of French political life in the eighteenth century which, for the first time, makes the events of 1789 explicable in their own terms. . . . The result is a perspective on the early revolution, its ideological origins and consequences, that is brilliant, politely iconoclastic and thoroughly revisionist.
(Richard Whatmore History of Political Thought )