This work has a double agenda firstly as a collection of 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 reedition of Kaplans landmark Bread Politics and Political Economy during the Reign of Louis XV which first appeared in 1976. The chapters that unfold reveal how Kaplans thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual epistemological historiographical and sociopolitical environment and to some of the significant scholarship that has been accomplished during the past forty years. This study is conceived as a commentary on and a dialogue with Bread Politics and with researchers who have written in and around the concerns of that book. show more