Pauvreté et économie au XIXe siècle

Poverty was an ubiquitous theme in the literature of the beginning of the 19th century, and its analysis shifted from political or charitable perspectives to embrace a young science, namely the political economy. Stendhal’s example shows how political economy had become the only legitimate approach to viewing poverty. This article examines two economic theories that explained the causes of poverty and the means of eradicating it. One is liberal and the other is reformist. They were formulated by two emblematic authors, Ricardo and Walras. Divergences between the two theories arise less from their ideological and doctrinal oppositions than from their epistemological differences.