This book has a double agenda. First, it is a series of free-standing 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 in 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...