History of Political Economy Research Papers

In 1964, Buchanan wrote an article in which he criticized the definition of economics given by Robbins in his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. This article is remarkable because it represents Buchanan's attempts... more

Recension de : Laurence Fontaine, Le Marché. Histoire et usages d’une conquête sociale, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, 464 p., 22,90€.

H-HistGeog, August 2014

A look at the current arguments surrounding Adam Smith's theology. Includes an analysis of his main texts The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments in an attempt to prove Smith's commitment to a Deistic philosophy.

The Coase theorem is associated with Stigler because Stigler coined the term. The object of this paper is to show that Stigler's Coase theorem is Stiglerian for deeper – namely, methodological – reasons. We argue that, convinced as he was... more

Historia de México II

The early twentieth-century weird writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft is today best remembered for his genre defining style of academic noir pulp fiction. Yet in focusing on certain tropes of his work, such as the many memorable monsters he... more

Gino Arias (1879-1940), storico ed economista fiorentino di origini israelite, fu, nella sua maturità, tra i massimi teorici del corporativismo fascista, cui approdò al termine di un itinerario intellettuale ancora largamente inedito.... more

This essay analyzes what is likely Benjamin Franklin's best known text, “Father Abraham’s Speech” from the last ever edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack (1757), and it maps, on the basis of a new bibliography available on the affiliated... more

This paper sketches the intellectual history of the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, founded at Harvard in 1948, which helped established the contours of business history as a discipline. This history was shaped by the rivalry... more

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- by Sophus Reinert and +1
  Robert Fredona
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- 20
  Entrepreneurship, Business History, History of Political Economic Thought, History of Capitalism

version auteur d'un article publié dans Eve Chiapello, Antoine Missemer et Antonin Pottier (dir.), Faire l'économie de l'environnement, Presses des mines, 2020

The paper makes a plea for engaging with the racist components of past thought as opposed to either ignoring them or exploiting them for the sake of propaganda. The case of Alfred Marshall is used to illustrate how facing the idea of race... more

"Empirical Statecraft" reconstructs how and why information gathering became a central focus of Spanish imperial governance over the course of the eighteenth century. Convinced that Spain suffered from a shortage of “useful” information,... more

This paper, developed from my Istvan Hont Memorial Lecture of 2015, considers the work of Alfred Marshall in Cambridge not from the perspective its eventual outcome, but instead from that of its slow and complex genesis, in the context of... more

The aim of this text is to analyse the origin of Volume I of "Das Kapital". I discuss the subsequent manuscripts of Marx’s project to critically present the social reality of capitalist societies. I’m trying to show, how Marx, while... more

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- by Mikołaj Ratajczak
- •
- 9
  Marxism, Marxist political economy, Marxist philosophy, Karl Marx

After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of modern socialism and developed an alternative creed of economic chivalry. The paper interprets both criticism and alternative in light of... more

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- by Simon J Cook
- •
- 40
  History, Intellectual History, Sociology, Cultural Studies

This is an English summary of my book on economic philosophy of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. The book was originally prepared as a PhD thesis in the Faculty of Economics, Istanbul University, and was defended in 1980. The thesis was published... more

Corpus. Revue de Philosophie, 2014, p. 17-36. Au titre des « droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l'homme », la Déclaration de 1789 mentionne dans son article 2 : « la liberté, la propriété, la sûreté et la résistance à... more

Corpus. Revue de Philosophie, 2014, p. 17-36.
Au titre des « droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l'homme », la Déclaration de 1789 mentionne dans son article 2 : « la liberté, la propriété, la sûreté et la résistance à l'oppression ». Si le dernier de ces droits n’a rien de physiocratique, les trois autres susmentionnés ne sont rien d’autre que la reprise d'une formule typique des « Économistes », disciples du Dr. Quesnay, cette école d’économistes français et théoriciens d’une « Science morale et politique » complète. Leur défense intransigeante de la propriété privée ne peut être détachée d’un projet politique global et ambitieux, dont le slogan, « Liberté, Propriété, Sûreté », constitue l’emblème. Pourtant, les physiocrates restent d’éminents candidats au titre de précurseurs de l’utilitarisme, car ils ne séparent jamais la défense irréfragable du droit individuel de propriété (à en disposer absolument et exclusivement) de la maximisation de l’utilité collective, au risque d’une tension entre les deux. Ainsi l’économie politique « agricole » prétend trouver ce que Rousseau appelait « l’accord admirable de l’intérêt et de la justice », dans l’articulation entre liberté personnelle, propriété des choses et sûreté publique, qui forment un système pleinement intégré1. À quel point la propriété est-elle définie par la physiocratie comme un droit absolu, exclusif et illimité à disposer de ses biens ? Quel projet politique sous-tend sa théorie de la propriété, sachant que la physiocratie, par sa fixation sur l’agriculture et la propriété terrienne, est difficilement classable (mi-bourgeoise, mi-féodale ?) ? On avancera que cette théorie ne peut être alors dominantes de la propriété, marquées par les privilèges et la féodalité. Sous l’Ancien Régime, eu égard à la pluralité des régimes d’appropriation des biens, toute contestation de la propriété ne concerne pas exclusivement la propriété privée « bourgeoise », absolue et exclusive. En ce sens, la conception physiocratique apparaît comme une mise en cause globale de l’ordre aristocratique dominant, non pas au nom d’une bourgeoisie à l’existence encore incertaine, mais d’un projet de refondation politique globale en faveur d’un État assumant pleinement le monopole de l’autorité politique, qui s’appuie sur une nouvelle hiérarchie sociale en rupture avec l’ordre féodal, menée par une nouvelle élite éclairée de propriétaires terriens.

We present a short history of the Virginia School of Political Economy in its institutional settings of University of Virginia (UVA), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or Virginia Tech (VPI), and George Mason University... more

Abstract: This article proposes to reassess Hayek's theory of cultural evolution in the light of Darwin's Descent of Man. It is shown that Hayek and Darwin refers to the same theory of human nature which is borrowed from the founding... more

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- by Alain Marciano
- •
- 9
  Evolutionary Biology, History of Economic Thought, Biology, Darwinism

In the past decade, political economy scholarship has paid considerable attention to the intellectual contexts that fundamentally affected the formation of modern economic thinking by the period of the High Enlightenment. In this course,... more

In the past decade, political economy scholarship has paid considerable attention to the intellectual contexts that fundamentally affected the formation of modern economic thinking by the period of the High Enlightenment. In this course, new findings on interstate relations, the transmission and dispersion of economic ideas, and practices on sub-national and supra-national levels led to a reappraisal of the old labels of mercantilism, physiocracy, and cameralism. Especially in case of the latter, the renewed interest in revising the old interpretation raised doubts concerning its simplistic elements, in particular its elusive character and its identification with German economic theory. The ongoing debates on cameralist thought revealed two main sources of these pretensions in historiography created partly by Anglo-French writers on political economy and partly by German economic historians, both of whom labeled cameralism primarily as a German variation of mercantilism. By deconstructing this old vision, according to which cameralist policy was a coherent, static, and systematic phenomenon, the most recent investigations have detected subversive synergies and sought to inspect cameralist thought as a changing and European subject, all the while bringing the problems of normative political language, existing practices, and disciplinary boundaries to the fore. Reflecting on these issues, the past years witnessed the evolution of two conceptualizations. The most recent development is connected to Martin Seppel and Keith Tribe (Cameralism in Practice: State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe. Woodbridge-Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2017), which concentrates on the pragmatic side of cameralism, characterizing it as a living and European discourse centered around the local university culture and the coexistence of early modern administration and economy. The other alternative, based on a reevaluation of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi's place in the eighteenth-century world (Ere Nokkala.

L’économie politique apparaît désormais comme une dimension centrale des Lumières européennes : c’est l’ef- fet d’une petite révolution historiographique qui affecta les études dix-huitiémistes depuis plus d’une trentaine... more

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- by Arnault Skornicki
- •
- 26
  History, European History, Intellectual History, Political Economy

Castellano: En este trabajo pretendemos analizar la situación de la hacienda real valenciana después de la revuelta de la Germanía a través del examen de los libros de cuentas de la Bailía general de València, la más importante... more

The historiography of political economy is currently undergoing a cultural turn, as abstract histories of economics on the model of Joseph A. Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis give way to more nuanced studies of economic ideas in... more

La catégorie d’humanisme commercial, forgée par J. Pocock, désigne les transformations de la langue républicaine moderne (ou humanisme civique) sous l’effet de la montée en puissance du capitalisme marchand : en tentant de concilier la «... more

Although it has been argued that Cameralism had a prominent place in the formation of the modern economic mind and that public happiness was a crucial intersection of early modern economic discourses, its (re) discovery by mainstream... more

Book review

In November 1779, the group of Irish militias known as the Volunteers rallied around a statue of King William III in Dublin protesting for free trade between Ireland and Britain. The episode kickstarted a series of political negotiations... more

Review of “Pluralistic Economics and Its History” edited by Ajit Sinha and Alex M. Thomas

The present article will explore some significant moments of the patronage bond between the Piarist Bartolomeo Gandolfi and Prince Andrea Doria Pamphilj Landi, patron of arts and science and one of the most powerful members of the Papal... more

Arnault Skornicki et Eva Debray, « Après et avec Hirschman : topographie d’un lieu commun », Astérion [En ligne], 20 | 2019, mis en ligne le 09 juillet 2019, consulté le 12 juillet 2019. URL : http://... more

Arnault Skornicki et Eva Debray, « Après et avec Hirschman : topographie d’un lieu commun », Astérion [En ligne], 20 | 2019, mis en ligne le 09 juillet 2019, consulté le 12 juillet 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/asterion/3820

Dans un célèbre petit volume, Les passions et les intérêts, l’économiste Albert O. Hirschman retrace la formation du lieu commun opposant commerce et violence à l’époque moderne. Se concentrant en particulier sur la manière dont Montesquieu et James Steuart se sont emparés du thème du « doux commerce » pour justifier le libre essor des activités marchandes en leur attribuant des vertus pacificatrices, il évoque également, plus rapidement, des versions « dissonantes » du thème. Ce dossier interdisciplinaire propose d’explorer plus spécifiquement ces versions, afin d’éprouver la plasticité de ce thème. Qu’il s’agisse de marchands, d’économistes, d’experts ou de philosophes, ce thème a donné lieu à diverses variantes et stratégies argumentatives dans de multiples contextes théoriques et politiques, notamment au moment de l’émergence de la société marchande aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, lors de la révolution industrielle ou encore à l’avènement du capitalisme néolibéral au XXe siècle. Des mercantilistes à la rhétorique de l’Union européenne en passant par Rousseau, les Lumières écossaises, les industrialistes de la Restauration et la relecture hayékienne du doux commerce, ces contributions donnent ainsi à voir sur une longue durée la pluralité des usages de ce thème.

After and with Hirschman: topography of a commonplace
In a famous little book, Albert O. Hirschman traces the formation of the commonplace that opposed trade and violence during the early modern period. According to Hirschman, the doux commerce thesis appeared during the 18th century to give political argument for profit-oriented trading activities. In its standard version, known as “Montesquieu-Steuart vision”, the doux commerce thesis has justified the free development of private acquisitive pursuits by attributing peaceful virtues to them. Hirschman also shortly evokes “discordant” versions of the doux commerce: this interdisciplinary issue proposes to explore these ones more specifically, in order to test the plasticity of this liberal commonplace. Concerning merchants, economists, experts and philosophers alike, this theme has given rise to various variants and argumentative strategies in multiple theoretical and political contexts, from the emergence of the commercial society during the Early modern period, the industrial revolution until the advent of neoliberal capitalism in the 20th century. From mercantilists to the rhetoric of the European Union, including Rousseau, the Scottish Enlightenment, the industrialists of the Restoration and the Hayekian re-reading of the doux commerce, these papers show over a long period of time the plurality of uses of this commonplace.

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- by Arnault Skornicki and +1
  Eva Debray
- •
- 20
  History of Ideas, International Trade, Liberalism, History of Political Economic Thought

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century a new imperial program took shape in the very heart of the Spanish Monarchy. Its intellectual architects included officials who served in the new Bourbon ministries, the Junta de Comercio, and... more

History of Political Economy

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