Thierry Demals’s research while affiliated with University of Lille Nord de France and other places

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Publications (12)


Prelude. From Scholasticism to the Enlightenment
  • Chapter
  • Full-text available

October 2023

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80 Reads

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Thierry Demals

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 of “review of the troops” proposed, mainly focusing on two main lines of thought: “commerce politique” – a French adaptation of the British “science of trade” – and what properly forms the novelty of the period, “philosophie économique”. The first group of authors includes for example Jean-François Melon, Richard Cantillon, J.C.M. Vincent de Gournay or François Véron de Forbonnais. The second group, Pierre de Boisguilbert, François Quesnay and the physiocrats, or A.-R.-J. Turgot and sensationist political economy. The theories proposed during this period, however, benefited from developments made during the previous centuries: this chapter identifies such themes, stressing in particular the importance of Scholastic writings.

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Pareto and Saint-Simonianism. The history of a criticism

April 2020

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25 Reads

European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

The purpose of this article is to understand Vilfredo Pareto’s reading of the Saint-Simonian system, namely the project of a new social order based on an industrial organisation. Why did Pareto rank this system among modern socialist systems and why did he qualify it as a pseudo-scientific system and nothing more than a religious system? The reason why he perceived Saint-Simonianism as a non-science can be inferred from both pure theory of political economy and the theory of social evolution. The identification of Saint-Simonianism with a religious system probably derives from the first historians and commentators of socialism in the mid-nineteenth century.




Forbonnais, the two balances and the Économistes

April 2015

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21 Reads

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10 Citations

European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

The link established by François Véron de Forbonnais (1722–1800) between two balances, the balance of trade and the balance of power, takes its full meaning in the context of the science of trade or “commerce politique” the author developed in his works. In polemical stance against the Économistes – the Physiocrats – and starting from the irremediable fact of the division of nations rather than their union, he intended to promote two goals: peace in Europe and the prosperity of nations through foreign trade. His approach was disputed by the Économistes who proposed instead a confraternal vision of nations in a free trade environment. This paper analyses Forbonnais' arguments, the answers of the Économistes and Forbonnais' final reply, and stresses the different views of politics this polemic denotes.


Is Amartya Sen's sustainable freedom a broader vision of sustainability?

June 2014

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777 Reads

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29 Citations

Ecological Economics

For several years now, the theme of sustainable development (thereafter “SD”) has been approached through the capability approach (CA). Recently this notion has been used by Sen to propose a redefinition of SD in terms of “sustainable freedom” (SF), meaning: enjoying the actual freedom to choose a standard of living rather than another without affecting negatively the freedom of generations to come. For Sen, this concept is aimed at broadening current understanding of SD. This article seeks to show that Sen's broader concept of sustainability whilst it generates many questions has not actually expanded the concept itself.



Citations (3)


... This conception of self-interest, essential to understand exchange and value, evolved from Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert's religious individualistic definition to utilitarianism in the works of François Quesnay and the physiocrats, and others such as Turgot, Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin, Condillac, Nicolas de Condorcet and the Idéologues, and Say. Conversely, the "commerce politique" was the French adaptation of the British "science of trade," established from William Petty's political arithmetic and adopted by Jean-François Melon, Nicolas Dutot, Montesquieu, Ferdinando Galiani, and especially the circle of Vincent de Gournay-François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais, Claude-Jacques Herbert, Louis-Joseph Plumart d'Angeul, among others (Demals and Faccarello 2016). We argue that Achille-Nicolas Isnard should be added to this list. ...

Reference:

RARENESS IN THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF WALRAS’S THEORY OF VALUE
French Enlightenment

... For most of the authors of this current, thinking about trade as an element of politics meant, from the point of view of States, considering trade as a means of establishing more peaceful international relations; it meant diverting the most powerful among them from their tendency to behave like a universal monarchy, to aim at conquest rather than conservation and to regulate world affairs by military means. In short, it meant transforming the rivalry of nations into commercial emulation, which Forbonnais (1754, I, 90) summarised by saying that henceforth the balance of trade was truly the political balance of nations (Demals and Hyard 2015). ...

Forbonnais, the two balances and the Économistes
  • Citing Article
  • April 2015

European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

... 46-71;Fabiano, 2021), peraltro da riformularsi in termini ancor più compatibili con le sfide della sostenibilità e della costruzione di un'equa e pacifica comunità globale. La sostanziale adozione da parte di Sen (2010) del principio responsabilità (Jonas, 2009) nei confronti delle generazioni future e delle altre specie viventi, nel tentativo di adeguare alla sfida della sostenibilità il capability approach, non riesce a trascenderne pienamente i presupposti antropocentrici (Demals, Hyard, 2014) e individualistici (Colazzo, Manfreda, 2019, pp. 100-104). ...

Is Amartya Sen's sustainable freedom a broader vision of sustainability?
  • Citing Article
  • June 2014

Ecological Economics