Books by Henry C. Clark

For the 250th anniversary of the founding of Dartmouth College, the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth assembled a stellar cast of junior and senior scholars to explore the systemic conditions facing those seeking to found a new college two hundred fifty years ago. What were the key political, economic and religious parameters operating in the Atlantic world at the time of the College's founding? What was the religious scene like at the moment when the Rev. Samson Occom of the Mohegan nation and the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock of Connecticut, two men from very different backgrounds whose improbable meeting occurred during the Great Awakening of the early 1740s, set about establishing a new school in the northern woods in the 1760s? How were the agendas of contemporaries differently mediated by the religious beliefs with which they acted, on the one hand, and the emerging thought world of political economy, very broadly understood, on the other? These are among the rich and variegated topics addressed in Dartmouth and the World, which breaks the mold of the traditional commemorative volume.

This volume provides an integrated and wide-ranging set of primary-source readings on the relationship between moral values and economic activity, as articulated by some of the leading figures in Western civilization.

Compass of Society rethinks the French route to a conception of 'commercial society' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Henry C. Clark finds that the development of market liberalism, far from being a narrow and abstract ideological episode, was part of a broad-gauged attempt to address a number of perceived problems generic to Europe and particular to France during this period. In the end, he offers a neo-Tocquevillian account of a topic which Tocqueville himself notoriously underemphasized, namely the emergence of elements of a modern economy in eighteenth century France and the place this development had in explaining the failure of the Old Regime and the onset of the Revolution. Compass of Society will aid in understanding the conflicted French engagement with liberalism even up to the twenty-first century.