In Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, Rothschild attempts to draw parallels between the intellectual climate of Smith and Condorcet’s Enlightenment and our time-or more accurately, the time of her writing in 2001. She claims that not only the rhetoric of freedom and commerce is just as conspicuous in our day as it was in the era of the French Revolution, but so was the sense of living in an era of universal commerce and universal uncertainty (2). Certainly, the debates that typified the Enlightenment era continue today: the role of the state and laissez-faire, the individual versus the public interest, the overlap of political and economic spheres.
The argument that Rothschild advances are complex and intertwined:
