The place assigned to Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785) in contemporary historiography is far from trivial when one takes an interest in his critique of Physiocracy. From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, the matter seemed to be settled: like a Meslier, a Morelly or a Dom Deschamps, Mably was an avant-garde thinker of utopian socialism. In reaction to this canonical interpretation, the work of Procacci or Maffey has tried on the contrary to make of him an authentic reactionary. Expelled from the Enlightenment, Mably became a scholastic monarchist, a realist in the service of absolutism, and even, he who did his secondary studies in a college run by the Congregation, a “Jesuit”! This return of the pendulum, which had little repercussion, was useful in the sense that it made it possible to discuss and partially re-examine the utopian character of Mably's thought. But it erred in the other direction by minimizing the critique that the philosophe addressed to private property and especially to inequalities.

At almost the same time, the “revisionism” that followed the work of the Cambridge school and in particular of the famous Machiavellian Moment of J. G. A Pocock succeeded in extricating that thought from its anachronistic interpretations, whether “progressive” or “reactionary.” The idea then was to combat the traditional notion of the emergence, then the triumph, of Lockean liberalism over the course of the eighteenth century by showing that another tradition, that of “civic humanism” or “classical republicanism” was at work at that time. Highly critical of the “consumer revolution,” of free trade and enrichment as an end in itself, this tradition is said to have used a different vocabulary, that of “virtue,” “civic spirit,” the refusal of “luxury,” and praised citizens’ active participation in the exercise of power. Although it had found a place in the Anglo-Saxon world, this interpretative grid was long left aside by French historians of the Enlightenment until the recent work of Wright, Baker, Kwass and Shovlin. The first two looked particularly at Mably, and their work undeniably enabled some progress in our understanding of the philosophe's thought by extricating him from the earlier dead ends.