Historians of ideas have frequently misunderstood the founders of classical liberalism. They often write that authors like Adam Smith or Turgot are inconsistent in their adherence to a supposed “principle of non-intervention” by Government, since they propose many types of public...

Contrary to a wide-spread opinion, it was not Ricardo who developed the gold-points theory, but Thornton. Thornton did it in complement of its lender in last resort theory to justify the suspension of payments and to explain the high price of bullion. Ricardo rejected the Thornton's gold points...

The team which has proposed three years ago a critical revival of Clément Juglar contribution and nowadays the edition of his texts, has been led rather quickly to admit that if there is no doubt that Juglar contributed to modern business cycles theory, his reputation clearly surpassed his...

Starting from the historiographical contribution of Quesnay’s works edition INED 2005, the article shows the historical and analytical issues that editing raises for the historian of economic thought. The authors argue that editing can be a major stage in the work of interpretation. The...

This article deals with a French edition of Jeremy Bentham’s Selected Economic Writings. It aims at explaining the editorial choices that will be made, and underlining the difficulties faced by such an edition. Two kinds of difficulties are stressed: on the one hand, the singularity of...

What do we mean when we speak about the value of work? This article tries to provide an answer to this question by analysing the notions of value and its different forms: absolute and relative value, use value and exchange value, evaluation and the creation of value. It draws especially on...

The aim of this paper is to examine the concepts of freedom used by John Rawls and Amartya Sen in the light of two well-known pairs of freedom: the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns defined by Constant and the pair negative freedom/positive freedom defined by Berlin. After a...

The article takes a position on an approach that puts economic philosophy in a field consisting of three types of intersection: between political economy and social philosophy, between normative economics and moral philosophy, and finally between economics and philosophy of science. It shows,...