The French political and economic theorist Charles Irénée Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), was an early philosophe of the Enlightenment. His pamphleteering expressed the intellectual upheaval and fascination with affairs of state which marked this era.

Of noble lineage, in 1680 Charles Irénée Castel, who is known as the Abbé Saint-Pierre, left his native Normandy and boyhood dreams of a monastic vocation for the ebullient intellectual atmosphere of Parisian university studies. For 5 years he followed every course available in the physical sciences, drifting further and further away from preoccupations with his ecclesiastical state as well as from what remained of his faith. After 1685 he experienced a brief return to the concerns of ethics and moral theology before abandoning the divine again for what would be the area of his real intellectual vocation--political theory. Henceforth his religion and his "consecration...