As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions. Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters. Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski "Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation." —-Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead "Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power." —-J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment "Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history." —-Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley "Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice." —-Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review
Author
Jacob Soll is professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa, a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and a Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge University. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur Fellowship. Soll’s first book, "Publishing The Prince" (2005), examines how Machiavelli's work was popularized and influenced modern political thought. It won the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. In his second book, The Information Master (2009), Soll investigates how Louis XIV's famous finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert fused financial management and library sciences to create one of the first modern information states. His most recent book, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014), presents a sweeping history of accounting and politics, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting can used to both build kingdoms, empires and entire civilizations, but also to undermine them. It explains the origins of our own financial crisis as deeply rooted in a long disconnect between human beings and their attempts to manage financial numbers. The Reckoning, reviewed in major newspapers and publications around the world, has sold more than 60,000 copies worldwide, and has been translated into five languages. His new books include Free Market: The History of a Dream (Basic Books), an analysis of classical philosophy, natural law, history and contemporary economic culture; a history of libraries and Enlightenment (Yale University Press); and the first English edition of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s economic writings (Anthem). Soll has been a correspondent for the Boston Globe, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Politico, the New Republic, PBS, Salon.com and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Soll is currently meeting with political and financial leaders across the globe to promote accounting standards and financial transparency. Recent journal and chapter publications include: • “Jean Baptiste Colbert: Accounting and the Genesis of a State Archive in Early Modern France,” Proceedings of the British Society, forthcoming 2017. • “From Virtue to Surplus: Jacques Necker’s Compte Rendu (1781) and the Origins of Modern Political Discourse,” Representations 134 (216), pp. 29-63. • “The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition,” in Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing, eds., For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 2, pp. 1019-1032. • “Intellectual History and the History of the Book,” in Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, eds. A Companion to Intellectual History, (Chichester: John Wiley And Sons/Blackwell, 2016), pp. 72-82.
