The political economy of the French Revolution struggled to reconcile the promises of economic abstraction and the challenges of embodying wealth. In their attempts to realize these dual aims, revolutionaries drew not only on Enlightenment ideas about laissez-faire but also on an economic theology of money and consumption with roots in alchemy and the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. Both strains of thought had radicalizing effects. Proponents of laissez-faire cast society as a self-regulating field of reciprocal exchanges, thereby obviating the need for fiscal redistribution and frustrating those demanding social welfare and manufacturing subsidies. When the anticipated prosperity of laissez-faire failed to materialize, revolutionaries put their hopes in the new paper currency, the assignat, believing that it would generate wealth ad infinitum and circulate it justly. Breaking with laissez-faire but still committed to economic theology, radicals such as Jacques Roux and Maximilien Robespierre joined the Parisian popular movement in justifying government oversight to ensure the satisfaction of an ever-expanding panoply of needs. Whereas historians now tend to explain the Terror as the outcome of ideological, psychological and institutional contingencies, the fate of laissez-faire suggests that political radicalization was intimately linked to revolutionaries’ abstract economic principles and beliefs.

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摘要与具体化：法国大革命的政治经济学

法国大革命的政治经济学努力调和经济抽象的承诺和体现财富的挑战。在试图实现这些双重目标的过程中，革命者不仅借鉴了关于自由放任的启蒙思想，还借鉴了植根于炼金术和天主教圣体圣事的货币和消费的经济神学。这两种思想都有激进的影响。自由放任主义的支持者将社会视为一个自我调节的互惠交换场，从而消除了财政再分配的需要，并挫败了那些要求社会福利和制造业补贴的人。当自由放任的预期繁荣未能实现时，革命者把希望寄托在新的纸币——指布币上，相信它会无限地产生财富并公正地流通。雅克·鲁（Jacques Roux）和马克西米连·罗伯斯庇尔（Maximilien Robespierre）等激进分子打破了自由放任主义，但仍然致力于经济神学，他们加入了巴黎民众运动，证明政府监督的合理性，以确保满足不断扩大的各种需求。尽管历史学家现在倾向于将恐怖解释为意识形态、心理和制度偶然事件的结果，但自由放任的命运表明，政治激进化与革命者的抽象经济原则和信仰密切相关。