Gilbert Faccarello

Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris, France · Economics

The first volume of this History of Economic Thought in France is devoted to the period of Enlightenment, during which political economy started to develop as a new discipline – the number of publications on economic matters dramatically increased in the second half of the eighteenth century. The main features of the period are defined, and a kind...

At the end of the seventeenth century, France had to face serious economic problems, linked in particular to agricultural crises and a huge public debt. The government of Louis XIV had also to deal, since decades, with the religious and intellectual troubles caused by an important strand of Catholicism: Jansenism. It is in this context that, from 1...

This chapter deals with a current of thought, which deeply influenced the developments of political economy. Based on sensationist philosophy – sensations are the source of all knowledge and a guide for the behaviour of the agents who seek pleasures and avoid pains – sensationist political economy presented two main aspects, both in a free trade co...

Important aspects of the evolution of political economy in France regard the various attempts at the quantification of economic variables and the formalisation of economic discourse. This chapter first deals with attempts at quantification, in which, for economic and political reasons, what is called today demography played a central role in the pr...

This chapter concludes the volume devoted to the Enlightenment period. It first stresses the importance and meaning, in the second half of the eighteenth century, of translations into French of works published in other languages. During the 1750s, J.C.M. Vincent de Gournay and a significant group of disciples published many translations of British...

The second part of this volume is devoted to the various critiques addressed to (liberal) political economy. The present chapter forms an introduction and an analytical complement to these critiques, illustrating the intellectual context in which they were formulated. Critiques of the free trade approach started early in the nineteenth century and...

Keywords: Comparative advantage. Four magic numbers. International trade. David Ricardo.

During recent decades, David Ricardo’s ideas on international trade have been sub- mitted to new scrutiny. This research has led to a new understanding of the so-called ‘principle of comparative advantage’ and shown that the alleged ‘Ricardian’ model of foreign trade is based on a misunderstanding of Ricardo’s text. In this story, the parts played...

In this chapter, we focus on the French economists that, all along the eighteenth century, formed what we call “philosophie économique”. In Section 2, this current of thought is precisely defined: a review of the troops shows how its members (Boisguilbert, Quesnay, Turgot, Condorcet and Say) refer to a new view on the nature and role of self-intere...

Malthus’s works were extensively discussed in France during the nineteenth century, raising numerous lively controversies. The present chapter is a first outline history of these receptions. The circumstances and intellectual context in which Malthus’s works circulated in French-speaking countries have first to be highlighted: an assessment of some...

This introduction to the book sums up the main results developed in the different chapters and emphasises the basic features of the reception of Malthus’s works and ideas in Europe, America and Japan. In particular, it stresses the importance of the French editions in this reception in Continental Europe, the neglect of Malthus’s theological views,...

This is the English translation of a paper published in French in 1983: 'La loi de la valeur et le problème de la coordination des activités économiques' (in 'L'homme et la société', n. 67-68, 1983, pp. 153-177).

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the emergence of “économie politique chrétienne”, with the aim of founding a new school of political economy, marked the French intellectual landscape. The name of J.-P. A. de Villeneuve-Bargemont is usually cited in this context. But, before Villeneuve-Bargemont, Charles de Coux had launched this...

Introduction to the special issue of EJHET on 'Religion and political economy'.

Special issue of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 24 (4).

Russian translation of a paper published in French in 1983, 'La loi de la valeur et le problème de la coordination des activités économiques', L'homme et la société, n. 67-68, 1983

To be posted on https://elgarblog.com/

This paper deals with some difficulties presented by Ricardo’s texts on international trade, taking seriously Ricardo’s account of the systematic interaction of real and monetary phenomena. After a brief reassessment of the main features of Ricardo’s views on foreign trade, some basic questions are examined, concerning the method of analysis and th...

ADDENDUM, 2024 — Readers interested in this topic may also wish to refer to a more recent and comprehensive paper – “'Every transaction in commerce is an independent transaction'. Ricardo on Foreign Trade” – published in 2023, which can also be downloaded from this site.

http://ejpe.org/pdf/7-1-int.pdf

It is always fascinating to see how the writings and ideas of authors — be they philosophers or scientists — are progressively taken into account, discussed, accepted or rejected in their own countries according to various historical intellectual circumstances. It is even more interesting to study how these writings and ideas cross borders and spre...

The relationship between economics, religion and morals are by far more complex than usually stated. It is possible to show that, at some crucial steps of the development of economics, religious thought gave it a decisive impetus, lying thus at the heart of this development. But it is also true that religious thought developed a strong critique of...

"This book is a coherent and unique collection of chapters exploring the reception and diffusion of David Ricardo's writings in different languages. The book highlights the similarities and differences between them. This book seeks to delineate the diffusion of Ricardo's theory in various parts of Europe and Japan. While there may have been case st...

The developments of political economy in France between 1750 and 1776 did not allocate a central place to the discussion of the nature and functions of money. The object of this paper is to account for this fact and what it denotes: the disappearance of money as a central object in the discourse on economy and society. We outline the context of thi...

Many important economic and political debates today refer to the nature and the role of the State: should governments intervene in the economy and interfere with the operations of markets? On what occasion and how? In order to better understand these questions and the controversies they have raised, Studies in the History of Public Economics re-con...

In nineteenth-century France, the nature and functions of the State were an almost constant subject of debate among liberal economists. The aim of this paper is to analyse and restate some hitherto neglected discussions and to discover some bold ideas that could form the hallmarks of a French approach to the question. The enquiry starts at the turn...

Drawing inspiration from aspects of the sensationist philosophy of the time and also the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin (1727-1790) — a fierce critic of Physiocracy — developed a remarkably coherent political economy based on a “three stages” theory of society, a labour theory of normal prices and distribut...

There was in early-nineteenth-century France a widespread revival of religious sentiment, after the turmoil of the Revolution and the intellectual onslaught on religion so central to the French Enlightenment. Simultaneously, political economy became more prominent among “publicists”—educated people or theoreticians writing as journalists—and politi...

For many centuries religion dominated the thought and behaviour of peoples. From the end of the seventeenth century, however, it was progressively replaced by political economy, which in turn developed its full influence during the nineteenth century, imposing a new 'ethos' and a new 'conduct of life'. So that we might better understand this fact,...

In matter of history of political economy, one thought during a long time that the primitive authors’economic considerations were only incidental, and tightly bound to their political philosophy or their theological concerns. However, from the 16th to the 18th century, economy, having cut every link with religion and religious morals on one side, a...

This paper examines some ideas developed in the field of public economics by French Sensationist political economists, from Turgot and Condorcet to the young Jean-Baptiste Say. An ideal-typical account of their position is based on the fact that issues raised by public expenditure and revenue are not dealt with independently. Instead, a strong link...

Les pages qui suivent constituent la version remaniée de l’ouvrage du même titre publié en 1986 – Paris : Anthropos. ISBN : 2-7157-1135-2. Cette nouvelle version a fait l’objet d’une publication en langue anglaise sous le titre : The Foundations of Laissez-faire. The Economics of Pierre de Boisguilbert – Londres : Routledge, 1999. ISBN : 0-415-207...

Two controversies concerning Marx’s theory of value were of particular importance during the 1960s and 1970s. The first is well known and has attracted most of the attention of Marxian scholars during these decades: I allude to the celebrated ‘transformation problem’2 and to the spirited debates that followed the publication of Sraffa’s Production...

The problem of the transition to a market economy provoked a lasting and important debate in eighteenth-century Ferance. The climax was reached during the 1760s and the 1770s with the two important pre-revoluntionary attempts, in 1763–64 and 1774a–76, to liberalize the French economy and, initially, the grain market. During these controversies, the...

La présente contribution souligne tout d’abord l’adoption par Marx de la démarche classique en termes de prix naturels et désigne en celle-ci l’origine des principales difficultés rencontrées dans Le Capital. Il est ensuite montré qu’il existe, chez Marx, une autre cohérence fondée sur l’absence de régulation a priori de la production dans une soci...