For almost four hundred years this treatise languished in deep obscurity. For various reasons it was scorned, unread, and misunderstood, hardly rising even to the status of a minor work. Nevertheless, it persisted. In the past few decades there has been a real push toward its canonization—this is the second edition to appear since 1999 and it has featured in a modest but steady stream of studies. This volume, featuring a broadly conceived introduction to the text and its fortuna alongside modernized spelling and punctuation, works hard to push that process forward. The attempt may still be somewhat premature, and there are flaws in its execution, but it certainly has value.

The treatise was printed at Rouen in 1615, in what was probably a small run, in two states with the chapters arranged differently. There is good reason to think that the author preferred the arrangement used in the royal presentation copy and Laudet is right to follow it, unlike François Billacois's 1999 edition. Maybe half a dozen copies survived, with the definitive version being confined to the reserves of the royal, and then national, library, so that access to Montchrestien's work has long been difficult. Until Billacois, it was known mainly from a drastically abridged edition produced by Théodore Funck-Brentano in 1889. Now, however, the royal presentation copy has appeared on the Bibliothèque nationale's Gallica service (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8610768t), so scholars will have no difficulty consulting the definitive version. Laudet's edition, then, with its modified orthography, will mainly be of interest to a less specialized audience.

His introduction makes an interesting case for Montchrestien's significance. Laudet analyzes the treatise in the language of Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms, suggesting that it responded to a crisis of social and political thought at the dawn of the Baroque age by advancing a new conceptual framework based on individualized labor and its control by royal authority. If this approach failed to achieve recognition it was due to political conjunctures around both royal propaganda—making Montchrestien into a prototypical rebel immediately after his death, of which he gives a particularly detailed and interesting account—and the factional struggles of nineteenth-century French political economy, combined with Funck-Brentano's mutilations. This account brings out an important side of Montchrestien's thought even as it stretches Kuhnianism farther than it will go. It could also use more extensive development: in particular, Laudet does little to situate Montchrestien among the proto-economic thinkers of his day, who shared several of the characteristics Laudet identifies in Montchrestien, tending to strengthen his stature as an important respondent to the crisis of his age.

The treatise itself is diffuse and hard to summarize. Its four books cover industry, trade, navigation and colonization, and royal policy. Montchrestien was notable, though not unique, for his appreciation of the fact that France was operating in a qualitatively new economic order in which it was struggling to assert itself. That said, and as Laudet rightly points out, his stress was on the political rather than the economic aspect of his subject. He was confident in the king's (and queen mother's) ability to master this new world order. And he was likelier to treat royal power with the tools of Neo-Stoic philosophy or rhetorical panegyric than with anything that might today be considered economic analysis. The breadth of Montchrestien's vision is impressive and his work is dotted with interesting insights and anecdotes. But the fact remains that, for the reasons Laudet outlines, the treatise represents a more or less stillborn tradition of analysis, and readers will probably find it more valuable as a guide to a kind of alternate history of French social thought than as a text that exercised a force of its own.

Laudet provides explanatory notes, glossaries of places and names, a bibliography, and an index, all of which are of high quality (even if a few of the explanations are slightly redundant: it seems either unduly optimistic or unduly pessimistic to think that a reader of this text might not know who Bacchus was). One highly distracting peculiarity, though, is that the introduction is absolutely rife with typographical errors—mostly bad homophones, as if it were transcribed from voice by software and then insufficiently proofread. The actual edition, thankfully, is in much better shape, but readers may have lost some confidence by the time they reach it.