Maxime Menuet’s research while affiliated with University of Orléans and other places

Todeschini’s chapter successfully shows the role of Franciscanism in the emergence of some of the basic categories in the economic way of reasoning of Westerners. Early Franciscan authors developed the notion of voluntary poverty, legitimated interest-bearing loans concerning investment loans, and used the idea of “capital.” Moreover, money was viewed as ethical because of its role as an intermediary for exchanges and should circulate as much as possible. In contrast, its role as a store of value was condemned because of its hoarding behavior. This vision can be seen as a preview of the theory of French physiocrats, for example. Finally, from a charisma that saw the poor not as a problem but as a resource, Franciscanism could be the source of different types of banks or financial institutions as entire fundamental organizations for the development of a civil economy.

This paper reassesses the links between the Christian theology and political economy during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by focusing on the beginnings of the Jansenist movement—a powerful and intellectually rich Christian movement of the time in France, Austria, and Holland. This paper examines through three study cases–the vision on labour and poverty, the issue of socially acceptable outcome, and the interest-bearing loans—how the main features of the Jansenism theology helped the emergence of new political economy ideas that will be carried over into the 18th century by some philosophers, lawyers, or economic theorists.

In recent decades, many western countries engaged in Military Operations Abroad (MOA), sometimes with over-stretching military engagements such as antiterrorism, peacekeeping, or humanitarian interventions. These aggressive postures pose a heightened risk to future deployment capacities and the ability to ensure a deterrence strategy in the long run. This study investigates a theoretical model to analyze the sustainability of military operations over time. In our setup, we define military capacity as a stock variable that can regenerate itself and deplete when a country engages in MOA. We present a sustainability theorem with the identification of tipping points in the conduct of MOA. Especially, engaging in excessive military operations leads to a relative ‘demilitarization syndrome.’ This underlines a fundamental trade-off between economic conditions and strategic ambitions. The model sheds some light on the dynamics of the military capabilities of a group of major western military powers.