In 1851 the French Social economist Auguste Ott discussed the problem of gluts and commercial crises, together with the issue of distributive justice between workers in co-operative societies. He did so by means of a ‘simple reproduction scheme' sharing some features with modern intersectoral...

This paper examines Juglar's theory of periodic crises, comparing its various ingredients with the state of the contemporary literature on the subject. It is argued that, except for the introduction of the systematic use of statistics which was a real novelty, Juglar did not break new grounds,...

This article examines the contribution of Clément Juglar to the theory of periodic crises in the context of the evolution of the doctrine towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Juglar's original contribution (1862) and its evolution to the final form of his doctrine are described in...

This chapter examines Charles Coquelin's contribution to the theory of crises in his own and Guillemin's Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (1852). The constantly operating cause he identified lies in the monopoly of the bank of issue. This causes a cumulation of tension within the system, as...

Although Gerolamo Boccardo did not contribute an original theory of crises in his own Dizionario della economia politica (1857) - he relied, in fact, on the one formulated a few years earlier by Charles Coquelin - he introduced some interesting innovations. In particular, he examined the...

In his Dictionnaire des sciences politiques et sociales (1854), Auguste Ott (an otherwise obscure systematizer of Philippe Buchez's theory of social economic) contributed one of the few French criticisms of Say's law, and formulated a theory of crises based on the systematic disappointment of...

Overstone's celebrated description of the states through which trade periodically revolves is often interpreted as an early account of the business cycle. This impression is seemingly strengthened by some graphical representations of these phases in a circle. Yet neither Overstone nor the...

John Wade formulated, in 1826 and 1833, two models of cyclical fluctuations most likely to be the first in the literature. They are fully endogenous, based on a cobweb-like mechanism affecting not agricultural production, as was customary at the time, but manufacture. Wade's earlier model relies...

In a paper read in 1848 before the Dublin Statistical Society, James Anthony Lawson propounded a theory of commercial crises based on a credit – overtrading – speculation mechanism. This view was quite widespread at the time, but it was couched in an original reinterpretation of the causal...

Clément Juglar is widely perceived nowadays as the pioneer of the theory of the business cycle, the one who developed in the early 1860s the view that economic life follows a rhytmical pattern and thereby lay the main bricks for the evolution of the older theories of crises into a theory of the...