• When Berle and Galbraith brought political economy back to life: Study of a cross-fertilization (1933-1967), History of Political Economy, August 2023,  55(4),639-676  

This article reconstructs the intellectual cross-fertilization between Adolf Berle Jr. (1895–1971) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) to account for their institutionalist challenge to “conventional economics” that revived political economy. It goes back to the origins of The Modern Corporation and Private Property before analyzing Berle and Galbraith's answers to a set of fundamental questions. What is the nature of modern competition? What is the nature of the modern corporation? What is the role of the state? And how should American liberalism be reinvented to cope with the social issues raised by the transformation of American capitalism in the postwar era? Their answers to these questions reveal the deep affinities between the theoretical and political dimensions of their work. This research contributes, then, to the history of the institutionalist movement in the postwar period and its affinities with qualitative liberalism. 

• Convergence on inflation and divergence on price control among post Keynesian pioneers: insights from Galbraith and Lerner, avec Basile Clerc, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 2023, 47(1), 189-235.

This article proposes a historical and analytical reconstruction of a debate that never happened between John Kenneth Galbraith and Abba Lerner over the issue of price controls. While they adopted a similar analysis of underemployment inflation, shared by many post Keynesians, Lerner and Galbraith remained fundamentally opposed as to the effectiveness of price controls. Indeed, while both agreed on the relevance of price controls in the specific context of World War II, they disagreed over including price controls within the conventional framework of economic policies, as illustrated by their respective stances in the debate surrounding the stagflation of the 1970s. Throughout the paper, we provide the rationales behind their divergence on price controls by investigating its theoretical, epistemological, and normative roots. Finally, we put into perspective the contemporary debates about price control in the context of resurgent inflationary pressures with some salient points drawn from our reconstruction of the debate that opposed these two pioneering post Keynesians economists. 

• The correspondance between Baumol and Galbraith (1957-1958) : An unsuspected source of managerial theories of the firm, Research in the history of economic thought and methodology, 40(B), 49-75, 2022. 

Baumol’s impact on the development of managerial theories of the firm is investigated here through the material found in Galbraith’s archives. In 1957, Galbraith published a paper claiming that the impact of macroeconomic policies varies with market structures (competitive versus oligopolistic). That publication prompted Baumol (1958b) to send Galbraith a manuscript dealing extensively with a crucial question of managerial theories of the firm, namely, the trade-off between sales and profits. I argue that Baumol’s critiques and Galbraith’s answers largely explain the way Baumol (1958a, 1959) framed his alternative model of the behavior of corporations. He reasoned in terms of maximization of sales with a profit constraint as their main objective. In return, Business Behavior, Value and Growth fostered the development of Marris’ (1964) and Galbraith’s (1967) theories of the corporation. While Tullock (1978) provides a narrative in which the sales maximization hypothesis has two main branches – Baumol for the one and Galbraith–Marris for the other – the paper demonstrates that these branches are intimately connected. 

• Oligopoly, mutual dependence and tacit collusion: the emergence of industrial organisation and the reappraisal of American capitalism at Harvard (1933–1952), avec Thibault Guicherd, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 29(1), p. 112-145, 2022.

This article looks back at the early development of industrial organisation at Harvard. It seeks to understand the emergence of the “Harvard tradition” around the spread of a set of common and identifiable tools and concepts. The paper identifies a specific subject of study bringing together a group of economists. This is the hypothesis of “mutual dependence recognized,” which fosters the development of the theory of tacit collusion in oligopoly. This theory was developed by Edward Chamberlin and gradually taken up in several contributions from the 1930s and early 1940s by economists like Bain, de Chazeau, Galbraith, Kaysen, Mason, Schumpeter and Triffin. These authors, who all had connections with Harvard, appropriated Chamberlin’s theory in pursuit of four goals. First, the possibility of tacit collusion in oligopoly allowed them to provide theoretical grounds for explaining price rigidities. Second, the oligopoly issue fostered the development of new tools for identifying oligopolies and accounting for firms’ behaviour and strategic interaction. Third, these tools were regularly mobilised in debates among economists about the “basing point system”. This pricing method was used at the time in the iron, steel and cement industries and led these economists to address the question of how effective antitrust laws were. Fourth, it led some Harvard economists to entirely reappraise the very nature of mid-century American capitalism. 

• A reappraisal of Galbraith’s challenge to Consumer Sovereignty : Preferences, welfare and the non-neutrality thesis, European Journal of History of Economic Thought, 27(2), p. 248-275, Juin 2020. 

The aim of the paper is to provide an exegesis of Galbraith’s theory of consumption and the conception of preferences on which it is grounded, which has often been misunderstood. From the point of view of the history of economic thought, this paper sheds new light on the origins of Galbraith’s analysis of consumption. This reappraisal also leads us to show that the latter is bound to a challenge to the Consumer Sovereignty Principle. Consequently, Galbraith’s theory contradicts the logic underlying Welfare Economics. Thanks to this exegesis, I finally explain the rationale behind Galbraith’s endorsement of the thesis of non-neutrality on the problem of value judgments in economics, which is illustrated by his presidential address to the American Economic Association. 

•  Economic analysis of education in Post-War America : New insights from Theodore Schultz and John Kenneth Galbraith, avec Charlotte Le Chapelain, Journal of History of Economic Thought, 42(1), p. 61-78, mars 2020. 

Human capital theory has suffered much criticism. The filter theory of education (Arrow 1973), the theory of education as a “signal” (Spence 1973), and the theory of “screening” (Stiglitz 1975), for instance, have seriously challenged it from within mainstream economics, and heavy criticism has also come from other paradigms, with Franck Bailly (2016) recently documenting the critique from the radical school. Within this set of ideas that flourished in the post-WW II period and challenged human capital theory, John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the dynamics of the education process is often neglected. In his original institutionalist and firm-based approach to the evolution of education, Galbraith placed great emphasis on the issue of the requirements of the planning system when he tackled the issue of human capital investment. More surprisingly—since he is unanimously recognized as the “founding father” of the “human capital revolution”—Theodore Schultz himself developed a substantial critique of human capital theory that shares some ground with Galbraith’s. The aim of this contribution is to provide new insights into the history of post-WW II ideas in the field of economics of education by reviewing Schultz’s and Galbraith’s respective analyses of education and highlighting their proximities. Both authors raise doubts regarding the idea that the aggregation of individual choices must be regarded as the relevant generative mechanism of the dynamic of education and the basis of the allocation of education resources. Consequently, both question the equivocal concept of student sovereignty. 

•  La société industrielle d’Aron et Galbraith : des regards croisés pour une vision convergente ?, Cahiers d’Economie Politique, Vol 76, n°1, p. 47-87, juin 2019. 

This paper provides a comparative study of Raymond Aron’s and John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the Industrial Society. The aim of the article is to show that despites obvious differences, which are contextual, disciplinary and methodological, both develop a convergent vision of post-war society. Our study leads on the one hand to catch specificities of their respective thoughts and on the other to deal with the intellectual spirit of the era they belong to. The relationship between the so-called thesis of the Managerial Revolution, the idea of the end of ideology, the idea of the institutionalization of social conflicts and convergence theories is demonstrated. The paper ends with Aron’s and Galbraith’s analysis of the concept of power, which is at the heart of their critical vision of the Industrial Society. 

•  When Galbraith frightened conservatives : Power in Economics, Economists’ Power and Scientificity, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 59, n°1, p. 31-51, mars 2018.

In this article, I first expound John Kenneth Galbraith’s general theory of power. Galbraith always took into account phenomena of power in economics, and shed light on the power of economists in particular. I then show how the reaction of conservatives to the broadcasting of the Age of Uncertainty highlights the relevance of Galbraith’s theory. Letters exchanged by conservative Lords in an effort to fight against Galbraith’s ideas paradoxically illustrate his theory. This leads to questions about the status of economists, popularizers, and experts. Finally, I argue that convictions have a crucial role in scientific production, and that Robert Solow’s distinction between the “serious scholars” and the proselyte economist is irrelevant because of its incapacity to understand how economists produce knowledge. 

•  John Kenneth Galbraith et l’évolution des structures économiques du capitalisme : d’une théorie de l’entrepreneur à une théorie de la grande entreprise ?, avec Bernard Baudry, Revue Économique, Vol. 69, n°1, p. 159-187, janvier 2018. 

In this article, the concept of technostructure produced by John K. Galbraith in The New Industrial State is revisited, by being replaced in the context of the passage from entrepreneurial capitalism to the planning system. Distinguishing the figure of the entrepreneur from his functions allows to show that the individual entrepreneur has certainly disappeared, but not his fonctions, which are now performed by the members of the technostructure. Then, to confront Galbraith’s point of view with other theories of the entrepreneur and managerial theories of the firm leads one to highlight the specificity of his analysis. In fact, Galbraith proposes a theory of big corporation directly derived from his managerial conception of the entrepreunarial functions.