Raphaël Fèvre

Université Côte d'Azur · GREDEG (Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion)

Today, ordoliberalism is at the center of the ongoing debate about the foundations, the present governance, and future prospects of the European Union—and yet we do not dispose of a comprehensive definition of it. Whenever we talk of the dominance of the German model, the discussion should involve a detailed picture of ordoliberal principles. This...

This paper deals with the initial reception of the Marshall Plan by Georges Bataille and François Perroux in light of the discussion they held in the journal Critique , during the second half of 1948. I argue that Bataille and Perroux took the Marshall Plan as an enigma that current economic and political theories were not able to explain fully. In...

This article aims to trace the hitherto little-known controversy involving Maurice Allais, François Divisia, Harold Hotelling, and Gérard Debreu in the immediate postwar years. The controversy turned on “dead loss,” a measure of the maximum value of available surplus serving as a gauge of economic efficiency and social welfare. The protagonists arg...

This paper aims to exploit fully the heuristic virtues of Keynes’ famous ‘old bottles’ story, deploying a multi-layered argument and drawing out its broadest implications. In essence, we show that through this story Keynes was making a very serious point about anti-crisis policies: the need for authorities to stimulate animal spirits by relying on...

This article traces the emergence of a new type of economist in interwar France—the conjuncturist—through a study focusing on Alfred Sauvy and Robert Marjolin. We argue that these neglected figures helped to shape a new, autonomous, field of expertise that consisted of diagnosing and forecasting the economic situation to guide public decision makin...

free online copies here : https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HJZJ6CUBAWABGCMQGGWH/full?target=10.1080/09672567.2024.2363142

This chapter aims to address the question of the evolution of economists’s reception of Marxism in France, and thus to complete the more general history of the development of Marxism among French academics. To do so, we follow the relationship to Marx’s work of the economist François Perroux, a priori typical of the reversal reception of Marxist id...

This chapter investigates the content and significance of The Social Crisis of Our Time by Wilhelm Röpke, and shows why this 1942 book can be regarded as a pivotal contribution within the broader context of his work. In this book, Röpke found his definitive voice, that of an economist-doctor keen to prevent the general collapse of Western civilisat...

Since the financial crisis of 2008, Ordoliberalism emerged from relative obscurity to become one of the crucial terms of analysis across a wide range of academic literatures and public discussion. In fact, it became the main reference for a number of issues, including assessments of the attempted resolution of the Eurozone crisis, arguments about G...

This paper aims to exploit fully the heuristic virtues of Keynes’ famous ‘old bottles’ story, deploying a multi-layered argument and drawing out its broadest implications. We show that with this story Keynes was making a very serious point about anti-crisis policies: the need for authorities to stimulate animal spirits by relying on people’s natura...

Ordoliberals studied the manifestations of power through a “morphological” lens (opposing the centrally administered economy to the economy of exchange), leading Eucken to take a stand in relation to two of the great international discussions of the discipline in the interwar years: the feasibility of a socialist calculation and the debate over imp...

L’usage de couples d’animaux pour incarner des comportements économiques structure certaines de nos représentations collectives. Dans les milieux boursiers par exemple, le taureau et l’ours symbolisent respectivement la confiance et la défiance vis-à-vis des cours financiers. Dans sa célèbre fable, Jean de La Fontaine opposait au comportement indus...

Cet article vise à interroger la manière dont le régime de Vichy fut l’occasion, pour certains économistes, de réviser leur vision de l’État en général, de son rôle économique en particulier. Cette révision passa notamment par une réflexion relative à leur propre positionnement vis-à-vis de l’exécutif, en tâchant d’asseoir la mission d’expertise de...

This last chapter outlines the ordoliberal discourse in the early postwar period (1946–1950) and the way it gained traction on the political stage. The author shows that the ordoliberals sought to establish a continuity between the economic order of the Third Reich and the administration of the Western Allies and thereby confronted political author...

The second chapter shows that, in the eyes of ordoliberals, power is the source of an epistemological problem . Eucken tried to acquire a scientific understanding of the driving forces underlying the economic order, what he called the actual economic reality. His ambition rested on a method to escape the given and immediate aspects of the reality,...

This first chapter outlines ordoliberals’ implicit philosophy of history, building a causal link between historical liberalism in the nineteenth century and economic planning as developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Ordoliberals based their historical interpretation on an anthropological hypothesis in which the instinct to acquire p...

From a political perspective, ordoliberals formulated a “new” social question based on the collapse of human freedom and autonomy in the face of the rise of private and public economic powers. Thus ordoliberals regarded the dispersion of economic power within the economic process as the key to overcome the social question. Finding an answer to the...

After having briefly summarized the content of the book, this concluding chapter uses the definition of ordoliberalism as a political economy of power to discuss what is today called the “ordoliberal core” of European governance. The conclusion shows that the word “ordoliberalism” refers to two separates—and at time conflicting—paradigms: an old fo...

The introduction outlines the purpose of the book, its perspective, and its approach. Having identified three chronological moments in the making of ordoliberalism, the author illustrates its main themes and objectives and their relations with the current debate on ordoliberalism. The author then summarizes the contents of the book and indicates it...

This article examines François Perroux’s corporatist thought from the interwar period to the Vichy period, in the light of his travels in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Portugal from 1934 to 1935. We will show that Perroux’s critical analysis of what he called “fascist”—politically authoritarian and economically corporatist—regimes is central to gras...

This paper deals with the initial reception of the Marshall Plan by Georges Bataille and François Perroux in light of the discussion they held in the journal Critique, during the second half of 1948. I argue that Bataille and Perroux took the Marshall Plan as an enigma that current economic and political theories were not able to explain fully. And...

This chapter explores how Walter Eucken situated himself in respect to John Maynard Keynes’s thought. It will be shown in particular that Keynes and Eucken were less alien to one another than is commonly assumed in the secondary literature. By considering together Keynes and Eucken’s letters to Hayek in response to The Road to Serfdom (1944), a som...

The chapter analyzes François Perroux’s institutional and intellectual activities under the Vichy regime (1940–1944) mainly by drawing on archival insights from Perroux’s papers. The authors argue that Perroux used his strategic position as general secretary of the Carrel Foundation (created by Marshal Pétain) to reshape French economics along a tw...

Walter Eucken’s methodological program is usually related to the search for a meaningful synthesis between the general-theoretical and the individual-historical aspects of economic life. Yet, overcoming this ‘great antinomy’ was only a step in achieving the vital methodological task Eucken assigned to economists: answering the challenge raised by p...

The article analyses the works of François Perroux from the inter-war years to the Vichy period (July 10th, 1940-August 20th, 1944). It shows in particular that through his conceptualisation of a "community of labour" as the fusion of both the activity and consciousness of a people, Perroux sought to bring together social mysticism (anti-rationalis...

Walter Eucken est la figure centrale de la pensée ordolibérale allemande. Il fait paraître « Le problème politique de l’Ordre » (1948) dans le premier numéro de la revue Ordojahrbuch. Remettant en cause le concept historiciste et marxiste de capitalisme, ce long article redéfinit les fondements de l’économie politique. Pour ce faire, il recourt au...

Nous proposons ici la traduction de l'article "Das ordnungspolitische Problem" que Walter Eucken publia en 1948 dans la revue Ordo. C'est la première traduction française d'un écrit de Walter Eucken, père de l'ordolibéralisme allemand. Cet article est un point d’entrée idéal à l’œuvre de Walter Eucken en particulier et à l’ordolibéralisme dans son...

L’activité de l’économiste François Perroux au moment de l’occupation a été analysée sous différents angles. Dans le travail qui va suivre, nous tâcherons d’éclairer l’activité de Perroux sous l’État français non pas à partir des nombreux ouvrages et articles académiques qu’il publie entre 1940 et 1944, mais plutôt en se consacrant à ses prises de...

This paper assesses French intellectuals’ early reception of the Marshall Plan in the light of the discussion Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and François Perroux (1903-1987) had in the journal Critique, by the second-half of 1948. I argue that Bataille and Perroux parallel efforts to go beyond what they perceive as the narrow boundaries of economics...

L’article analyse les écrits de François Perroux de l’entre-deux-guerres jusqu’à la période du régime de Vichy. Ce faisant,l’article montre en particulier qu’à travers sa conceptualisation d’une Communauté de travail,pensée comme la fusion des activités et des consciences, Perroux cherche à tenir ensemble mystique sociale et organisation politique....

Le présent article étudie l’inscription du régime de Vichy dans l’histoire de la mise en forme et de l’institutionnalisation des sciences sociales autour d’une « science de l’Homme ». Le modèle d’une science sociale unifiée est en particulier porté par la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains et son secrétaire générale, François Pe...

Léon Walras and the ordoliberals share the opinion that State intervention in favour of a competitive order is a central element of economic policy. Hence, can Walras be regarded as a forerunner of ordoliberalism? This study performs a methodological and ontological analysis of Walras’ and Eucken’s thoughts and sheds light on another common ground:...

Walter Eucken est la figure centrale de la pensée ordolibérale allemande et fait paraître « Le problème politique de l’Ordre » (1948) dans le premier numéro de la revue Ordojahrbuch. Remettant en cause le concept historiciste et marxiste de capitalisme, ce long article redéfinit les fondements de l’économie politique. Pour ce faire, il recourt au c...

Walter Eucken est la figure centrale de la pensée ordolibérale allemande et fait paraître « Le problème politique de l’Ordre » (1948) dans le premier numéro de la revue Ordojahrbuch. Remettant en cause le concept historiciste et marxiste de capitalisme, ce long article redéfinit les fondements de l’économie politique. Pour ce faire, il recourt au c...

Walter Eucken est la figure centrale de la pensée ordolibérale allemande et fait paraître « Le problème politique de l’Ordre » (1948) dans le premier numéro de la revue Ordojahrbuch. Remettant en cause le concept historiciste et marxiste de capitalisme, ce long article redéfinit les fondements de l’économie politique. Pour ce faire, il recourt au c...

Walter Eucken est la figure centrale de la pensée ordolibérale allemande et fait paraître « Le problème politique de l’Ordre » (1948) dans le premier numéro de la revue Ordojahrbuch. Remettant en cause le concept historiciste et marxiste de capitalisme, ce long article redéfinit les fondements de l’économie politique. Pour ce faire, il recourt au c...

Cet article donne un aperçu de la diversité des approches de la concurrence dans l’histoire de la pensée économique, d’Adam Smith à Friedrich Hayek. En abordant différentes définitions de la concurrence, souvent en tension entre pertinence empirique et sophistication axiomatique, l’article souligne également que ce concept économique fondamental pe...

Fèvre compares John M. Keynes’ and Walter Eucken’s respective ideas on the issue of economic power. This chapter analyses, in particular, the consequences this entails on both Keynes’ and Eucken’s visions of how to manage a market economy. Fèvre shows that while Keynes put his faith in the complementary nature of private and public bodies as a way...

Fèvre examines the difficulties of the commonly encountered qualification that Wilhelm Röpke’s early work is “proto-Keynesian.” By focusing on his 1936 Crises and Cycles and previous publications, Fèvre shows that Röpke attempted a synthesis by drawing upon various inspirations in business cycle theory. The major impulses stemmed from J.M. Keynes,...

Cette thèse propose une histoire intellectuelle de l’ordolibéralisme (1932-1950), centrée sur les travaux de Walter Eucken et Wilhelm Röpke, incluant également des références à Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow, Leonhard Miksch et Friedrich Lutz. Il s’agit de répondre à la question suivante : comment expliquer que la pensée ordolibérale ait eu les resso...

Market without Power: At the Core of the Ordoliberal Discourse This article aims at reconstructing the ordoliberal discourse around what appears as a core concept, the concept of “power”. If ordoliberalism fought against Marxism and historicism, it also inherits some of their research agenda: for instance, in their historical reading of liberalism,...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it is a reconstruction of Wilhelm Röpke’s [1899-1966] declinist discourse, its articulation and its singularity. It is subsequently an explanation of the author’s theoretical claims in the light of his historical analysis. Thus the article reveals the primarily moral concerns of Wilhelm Röpke and their impli...

On Röpke’s view of the twentieth century social crisis The characteristic features of the civilization crisis described by Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966) could be understood as an attack against collectivism and planning. Massification in all spheres of society reaches an apex in the economic field, mainly through big business’ concentration and the ens...