This paper aims at considering money, not as a simple aspect, but as the logical starting point of the whole schumpeterian research project: grasping the complex phenomena underlying a capitalist economy. Schumpeter’s monetary theory is based on the concept of social accounting, providing us...

The analysis here aims to explain Smith’s and Condorcet’s ideas about public education, stemming from their common adhesion to the principles of the “Liberalism of Liberty”. Their Liberalism makes public intervention necessary for education, so as to ensure the equality of natural rights...

This article examines the diverse aspects of the “conversion” of J. C. L. Simonde of Sismondi, in 1817 with the Political Economy. The moment and the contents of the conversion of Sismondi present two kinds of difficulties of interpretation. The first one concerns the role which plays the...

Over the past two centuries, the process of emergence of the institutional approach in political economy has seen an opposition between two conceptions of the relation existing to between economy and institution. From its foundation until today, orthodox liberal economics has tried to reduce the...

Institutionalism uses the notion of institution according to large and static definitions of the modem authors. Until the semantic revolution of the eighteenth century, institution is, on the contrary, a rare word, used in restricly and dynamic meaning. In early modem societies, status and...

Commons sketches an institutionalist theory of property based on debt, that is a potential of expected income, and the vector of which is the monetary system. His monetary theory of the credit cycle inspires from Wicksell and Fisher’s debt-deflation theory, rather than from Fisher’s quantity...

Schumpeter’s business cycle and growth theory encompasses two distinct types of superposition. The first one is well known from its graphical representation provided in Schumpeter’s Business Cycles [1939], namely the superposition of different waves or cycles of varying magnitude. There...

Provision of last resort facilities cannot be caracterized as temporary deviations from a non inflationary long term predefined growth rate of the money supply. We show that its analytical foundations lie in Thornton's banking theory as the latter introduces a link between credit and money. Bank...

In 1933, Knight launched a violent attack against the Austrian theory of capital. Beyond an apparent opposition on the average period of production, the conflict concerns more profoundly the capacity of the Austrian theory to ground a general theory of production and to build on a dynamic...

The perception of individuals plays a central role in the business cycle theory that Hayek developed in the 1930s. Yet it does not make use of the psychology of perception which he had worked out in 1920, and which was published in 1952 as The Sensory Order. Is this a paradox? No! The Sensory...