The tradition that views Dupuit only as a brilliant engineer-economist who trained at the Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussees remained strong in the fifty years that followed World War II. Within this tradition, research on Dupuit mostly was focused on his publications on surplus theory, road...

Economic analysis (as we understand the term today) first appeared in France at the end of the seventeenth century as a consequence of Jansenist theodicy. Throughout the eighteenth century, political economy (the study of wealth, and not to be confused with economic analysis) was supposed to be...