Adolphe Landry’s Theory of Profits

The paper provides a critical assessment of Adolphe Landry’s contributions to the theory of capital and interest. His analysis represents one among several variants of marginal productivity theory. The distinguishing feature of his variant is that he considers entrepreneurship a scarce factor of production alongside with the usual factors labour, land and capital. He thus tries to put entrepreneurship - the innovative agens, as Schumpeter saw it - into the Procrustean bed of marginalist theory. It is not clear whether Landry’s combination of various ideas to be found in the contemporary literature generates a coherent whole, because his argument is often suggestive and vague and lacks analytical rigour.