From 1825 to 1832 the Saint-Simonians advocated an evolution of the economic and social order which resulted from their analysis of property right and its effects on the functioning of a society in which the property owners exploit the labourers. Improving the lot of labourers and economic...

Cournot develops a notion of competition with two essential characteristics: producers?' non-cooperation and their coordination on a common price. Edgeworth adopts a cooperative approach while referring to another duality, recontracting and contract, which he associates with the antinomy...

After Bertrand?s criticism [1883], Walras introduces the rule of no trade out of equilibrium in his pure exchange theory. But, in the production theory of editions 1-3 of the Éléments, disequilibrium transactions occur in the course of the tâtonnement. An endogeneous redistribution of wealth...

After the French revolution, the collapse of the French colonial empire is confirmed, even though at the beginning of the new century, Napoleon tried to subdue again lost colonies. This decline is accompanied by a very important criticism from economists, against the colonial institutions and...

This text compares Roy?s theory of the scale of needs (1943) to Dupuit?s theory of dearth (1859). It sets first Roy?s modelling of the scale of needs, his criticism by Marschak (1943) and the analysis of dearth by Dupuit. It shows that the hypotheses raised by Roy are exactly those posed by...

J.S. Mill is generally considered to be the theorist who gave birth to the concept of natural monopoly in its modern sense. Yet, no author has specified that Mill distinguishes two types of monopoly, the ?natural monopoly? and the ?practical monopoly?. I show that Mill?s notion of ?practical...

The French egalitarian law of bequests is a social device for distributing wealth from one generation to the other. The law of bequest is the result of a political debate within the Conseil d?État in which political considerations (the new democratic social state) are of considerable...

Hume?s analysis of economics is generally remembered for one point: its supposedly quantitative approach to money. But the chapters on money and credit only prove truly incisive when replaced within their philosophical corpus. Hume argues that the process of civilization entails a number of...

Restive to the passion for the industrial revolution, Sismondi pleads in favor of reason. We ought first to see how one technical shock disturbs the process of an equilibrium model of growth, he said. And we also ought to appreciate how the costs and benefits of new machines divide between the...

This paper shows that exists a continuity between the Mercantile System (Smith?s adversary) and the System of Natural Liberty advocated for in the Wealth of Nations. This continuity is founded on the distance between legislators and merchants. When this distance is too short, legislators are...