Early in the 18th century, before the birth of political economy as a discipline, two of the earliest novels in the English language were published: Robinson Crusoe (1719) by writer and economic entrepreneur Daniel Defoe, and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by the cleric and political adviser...

Two of the earliest novels in English, Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, are widely perceived as an entertaining adventure story and a pioneering work of science fiction. Viewed by modern economists, however, they appear as expressions of...

The present study addresses the question of uncertainty in individual deliberation in Rousseau’s philosophy. Accordingly, it intends to consider in a new light his account of virtue and citizenship which cannot possibly be defined as systematic obedience to the general will. Weakness of the...

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was one of the most important economists of the world. He got fortune, he became banker and then he turned towards the study of Political Economy. What did this important economist bring new within the economic thinking, considered by the economic critics as a...

This article explores the connection between Bernard Mandeville and Jeremy Bentham. Their analyses are complementary on two points: first, the descriptive sense of the utility principle, main axiom of Bentham's utilitarianism, relies on an implicit anthropological conception which Mandeville...

Bodin’s monetary writings are mainly centred on the relationship between currencies and sovereignty. He aims at designing a monetary system that would be forgery, debasement and degradation proof. Having explained his conception of money and false money, we expose the way Bodin seeks to...

Rousseau shares with neo-classical theory a characterization of the economic agent, as a producer, based on the figure of Robinson. But whereas neo-classical economy expresses, through Robinson, the rational behavior of any economic agent, Rousseau considers on the contrary that the individual...

In the Rousseauist tradition, the idea of sovereignty generally refers to the sovereignty of the body politic. Rousseau never yields nevertheless to the holist temptation. Individual is at the core of his system. The aim of this paper is to question the idea of moral autonomy, in particular in...

This article shows the influence of Turgot over Gustave de Molinari's studies in efficient allocation of productive means in a decentralized markets economy. From Turgot's works on spatial organization of markets's grain as an answer to the spatial information problem, Molinari makes deeper the...

The received idea is that he could not miss the science of modernity. But if we investigate what can be considered as the economic thought of Rousseau, we must be distinguish two different lines of thought: one which has to do with the division of labour (to be mostly found in Emile and the...