While the history of luxury, as a craft activity, is a very long one, the luxury goods industry as we currently know it, is relatively young. At the end of the 19th century some entrepreneurs created a new industrial logic focused on luxury goods. Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin-Cliquot (Champagne),...

The Schneider company, founded in 1836, by Eugène and Alphonse Schneider is presented in this article as an answer to a double scientific issue. On the first hand, we analyse the tight links between industrial development and military activity, and in the other hand the basis of the individual...

Economists often praise entrepreneurs' merits since they challenge market routine and give life to capitalism. But, paradoxically (?), the entrepreneur holds a marginal place in economic progress historical approaches. Is he a deus ex machina who intervenes when economists do not know how (or do...

For keynesian economists, social economy is able to solve the problems of unemployment and poverty in industrialized countries. However, neither poverty nor the debates on social economy are new. 200 years ago, socialists and other utopians imagined a society where market principles were...

Since the beginning of the 1990?s, the social entrepreneur has become a fundamental actor within capitalism. But, what is a social entrepreneur, one must ask? The question is debated and defies consensus. Is an entrepreneur social because he founds a nonprofit enterprise? If so, then how can he...

The economic science was born officially in 1776 with A. Smith, ecology in 1866 with E. Haeckel. However, the economists have not been really interested in this subject until the 1960/1970's, when the evils of industrialisation and of innovation gained ground. History shows that pollution is not...