The Great Demarcation

Reviews / Votes

Deeply original....The book's elegant argument proposes a simultaneous birth of a modern state and a modern property regime. * John Markoff, American Historical Review * The Great Demarcation will be highly useful to specialists of old regime and revolutionary France. The great merit of this book is that it clearly explains many of the categories and distinctions in old-regime property law that exercised so much quiet influence over social life in France, even beyond 1789. Another is the verve with which Blaufarb asserts the coherence and radicalism of the revolutionary project. * Paul Cheney, History * [Rafe Blaufarb's] book provides something more: a history of the united, self-conscious efforts of the lawyer deputies who reworked the historical and legal reasoning of their era to achieve the Great Demarcation of property from power. For this, we are in his debt. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the French Revolution. * Joseph F. Byrne, French History * The Great Demarcation describes the efforts of French revolutionaries to make 'a radical distinction between private property and public power.' Blaufarb's wonderful monograph describes the long, difficult process of creating this separation in the laws of the land...[Blaufarb] not only illuminates a complex, poorly understood legislative and legal campaign but also makes important contributions to the understanding of the French Revolution itself...Essential. * CHOICE * This is a major piece of scholarship which will be required reading for economic historians and historians of the French Revolution alike. Based on exhaustive research, masterfully argued, and lucidly written, it shows how the French Revolutionaries worked to separate public power and private property, thereby taking a crucial step towards the creation of the property regimes that we still live with today. It also shows clearly that they consciously pursued this goal from the very start, thereby reasserting the Revolution's ideological coherence and radicalism in this hugely significant domain. * David Bell, author of Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present * Everyone knows that the French Revolution established a new regime based upon absolute private property. But until this splendid book, we had no idea what a momentous and difficult labor this entailed. This great demarcation established an entire set of binaries fundamental to the modern condition: the political and the social, state and society, sovereignty and ownership, the public and the private. As lucid as it is learned, The Great Demarcation is a work of profound scholarship-a fundamental contribution not only to the history of the French Revolution but also to the emergence of the modern world. * William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago * With sparkling clarity, Blaufarb analyzes one of the most important and hitherto under-conceptualized aspects of modern life: the French Revolution's demarcation of state power and private property as distinct legal, political, and institutional realities. Deeply researched and cogently argued. * Rebecca Spang, author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution * When the French revolutionaries abolished 'feudal' property, they thought they had cut a gordian knot. Rafe Blaufarb shows, in convincing detail, how in practice they were forced to unpick it strand by strand. Establishing property rights on a fresh basis proved hideously complex. It took many years to complete, and even the Napoleonic Code did not tie up all the loose ends. The Great Demarcation is a cool and masterly account of how one of the greatest changes undertaken by the French Revolution was painstakingly brought about. * William Doyle, author of The Oxford History of the French Revolution * A seminal piece of work in the western liberal canon of property literature....Treating the French Revolution as a property moment may be novel; and Blaufarb's contribution allows us to see more clearly how that moment contributed to the ongoing demarcation between public and private politico-legal power as central to the concept of property. * Paul Babie, International Journal of the Semiotics of Law
* Blaufarb's impressive and erudite work...will likely garner the widespread respect of, and generate vibrant discussion among, French Revolutionary and economic historians alike....Its many virtues include Blaufarb's skill in explaining complex concepts and terms as well as his clear writing style....Above all, the merit of Blaufarb's book hinges on its original reconceptualization of the topic of French property regimes. * Anthony Crubaugh, H-France
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