The Stakes of Regulation : Perspectives on 'Bread, Politics and Political Economy' Forty Years Later

This work has a double agenda, firstly as a collection of essays dealing with the fraught question of regulation in its multiples guises: economic, social, political, cultural and psychological. At the same time it serves as a companion volume to the re-edition of Kaplan's landmark 'Bread, Politics and Political Economy during the Reign of Louis XV', which first appeared in 1976. The chapters that unfold reveal how Kaplan's thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual, epistemological, historiographical and sociopolitical environment, and to some of the significant scholarship that has been accomplished during the past forty years. This study is conceived as a commentary on and a dialogue with 'Bread, Politics' and with researchers who have written in and around the concerns of that book.