Herbert Simon claimed that his work at the Cowles Commission was decisive in his winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Simon’s 1955 classic paper, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice”, his most cited article among economists, was written in part while he was at the Cowles Commission. Though various scholars have provided accounts of his activities as a Cowles research consultant, few have provided an in-depth analysis of the development of Simon’s modelling strategy and how he interacted with members of the Cowles Commission throughout that process. The aim of this article is to fill that gap by linking up historical and rational reconstructions, and to show that Simon’s relationship with the Cowles commission and its members was a bittersweet one. It started enthusiastically on both sides but ended surrounded by scientific indifference. We offer two main explanations for this bittersweet relationship. First, if both the Cowles Commission members and Simon shared a stated desire to formalize decision making problems, Simon and Cowles commission members had different ways of approaching mathematical tools and “boundaries of rationality.” Second, Simon’s and the Cowles Commission’s research agendas were not stabilized during this period, which explains the enthusiastic as well as the indifferent phase, and once they were stabilized (after Simons left Cowles), they took different directions.



This paper analyzes the foundations and implications of Thorstein Veblen’s interpretation of World War One, through the lens of his project for an institutional and evolutionary economics. It first points out the anthropological and institutional foundations of war which Veblen highlights throughout his history of societies. It then emphasizes the institutional conditions, in the technological, economic and political fields, in which, according to him, WWI is rooted. In this perspective, the Great War appears as the outcome of a singular historical situation characterized by the combination of mechanization, big enterprises based on absentee ownership and imperialism. Finally, our interpretation allows us to make clear Veblen’s analysis of the conditions required for the establishment of a lasting peace and the criticisms he addresses to Keynes’ (1920) essay.



Even if they share numerous findings, Marxists were highly critical of the managerial literature. This critical reception can be explained by the ambiguities in Marx’s works. In fact, there is, when he dealt with corporations, a tension between his realistic effort to address the issue and his analytical framework. The aim of the paper is to show how he tried to integrate in his framework the changes of the “Great Industry” era, especially the emergence of corporations. To that end, I discuss the conceptual distinctions made by Marx between the financial capitalist, the industrial capitalist, the director and the manager. I demonstrate that these categories led to reappraise his theory of social classes, as it has been done by the authors dealing with the “managerial revolution” or more recently Duménil and Lévy (2011, 2018). 



This paper seeks to reexamine Nietzsche’s views on work as an activity. Instead of explaining Nietzsche’s positions on work through his philosophy, I shed light on his philosophy—particularly his rejection of both liberalism and socialism—based on his criticism of work. This methodological approach enables to fully take into account both aspects of his criticism of work and his abhorrence of modernity and its political ideologies, which are its byproducts.