Peer-Reviewed Articles

Abstract | This paper aims to exploit fully the heuristic virtues of Keynes’ famous ‘old bottles’ story, deploying a multi-layered argument and drawing out its broadest implications. In essence, we show that through this story Keynes was making a very serious point about anti-crisis policies: the need for authorities to stimulate animal spirits by relying on people’s natural impulse to action. Rather than taking the place of entrepreneurs and paying people to dig holes, Keynes seems to be arguing that public authorities should put entrepreneurs in a situation where they are so enthusiastic that they go into debt to dig holes, just like during a gold rush. At the same time, it is a question of restoring the banks’ willingness to lend for these overoptimistic projects in a period of total depression. This article explores the conditions that make public intervention as effective as possible through the enthusiasm and individual initiative that can be generated by an artificial gold rush. Such intervention therefore can be as minimal as possible, without having to resort to the opposite authoritarian solution of war. Since the gold rush builds cities and war destroys them, Keynes spent considerable energy convincing his contemporaries that liberal-democratic countries would have to take the former path if they wanted to avoid the latter.

Abstract | After the Second World War, optimal pricing in the public sector became an important topic internationally. The welfare enhancing properties of marginal pricing were a key concern, yet, the technical computation of marginal costs also proved difficult. It was unclear how to compute marginal costs, mainly in view of the discontinuities of the cost function. In the context of post-war reconstruction and of practically implementing a marginal pricing policy, this technical debate was closely linked in France to the “Calais traveller paradox” and the emergence of a new generation of engineer-economists contributing at the same time to the theoretical debate and to the practical implementation of marginal cost pricing. Maurice Allais and Marcel Boiteux, as well as Gabriel Dessus and Roger Hutter contributed to developing national solutions that also spread theoretical thinking internationally. This debate connects with the history of economic calculus and the rise of public economics, as well as the possibility of computing optimal welfare enhancing prices in the face of market failures.

Abstract | This article aims to trace the hitherto little-known controversy involving Maurice Allais, François Divisia, Harold Hotelling, and Gérard Debreu in the immediate postwar years. The controversy turned on “dead loss,” a measure of the maximum value of available surplus serving as a gauge of economic efficiency and social welfare. The protagonists argued about how it should be expressed mathematically, the hypothesis underpinning it, and its general significance. The paper draws heavily on unpublished materials (letters and notes) to unfold the different stages of the dead loss controversy and shows that it was driven by an intricate interlacing of technical advances in welfare economics with Allais’s personal ambition to spearhead the revival of French economics. Eventually, this controversy (and the tense exchange between Allais and Debreu that came with it) proved a remarkable—although tacit—driving force behind Debreu's contributions of the early 1950s.

Abstract | This chapter aims to address the question of the evolution of economists’s reception of Marxism in France, and thus to complete the more general history of the development of Marxism among French academics. To do so, we follow the relationship to Marx’s work of the economist François Perroux, a priori typical of the reversal reception of Marxist ideas in the 1950s, moving from open hostility to enthusiasm. Indeed, an incisive critic of Marx’s writings before the war, then head of the scientific institution of the Vichy regime, Perroux became in the postwar period a leading figure in the diffusion of Marx’s ideas in France. He founded the ISMEA (Institute of Mathematical and Applied Economic Sciences) which published the journal Études de marxologie, and eventually penned the preface to Marx’s economic works in 1963 for the Pléiade. By following this sinuous path, we show that the way Perroux related to Marx’s work helps us shed light on the various shifts in Perroux’s relationship to the science and politics of his time.

Abstract | This paper deals with the initial reception of the Marshall Plan by Georges Bataille and François Perroux in light of the discussion they held in the journal Critique, during the second half of 1948. I argue that Bataille and Perroux took the Marshall Plan as an enigma that current economic and political theories were not able to explain fully. In response, both authors contributed a unique and sophisticated economic analysis to transcend what they perceived as the limited scope of economics. By focusing on this interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper is intended as a contribution to a history of economic thought, taking in the economic inquiry of non-economists and the ways in which they relate to professional economists.

Résumé | This article aims to explore how the Vichy regime offered an opportunity for some economists to revise their vision of the state in general and of its economic role in particular. This revision involved a reflection on their own position vis-à-vis the executive, especially by trying to underpin the economist’s mission of expertise. This article will focus mainly on a small group of economists gathered around François Perroux (1903–1987), who was not only a notable intellectual figure in the regime, but also a leading scientific entrepreneur at the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems. From this high position in the regime’s scientific production, Perroux set up a Center for the Study and Theory of Economics in order to take the discipline a step forward—an experience that was indeed brief but that did continue in a new form after the Liberation. Focusing on Perroux’s trajectory thus invites us to overcome the hypothesis of a “Vichy parenthesis” regarding French economics.

Abstract | This article examines François Perroux’s corporatist thought from the interwar period to the Vichy period, in the light of his travels in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Portugal from 1934 to 1935. We will show that Perroux’s critical analysis of what he called “fascist”—politically authoritarian and economically corporatist—regimes is central to grasp his intellectual and institutional trajectory. To do so, we reconstruct Perroux’s original diagnostic regarding these regimes, stressing the way he distinguished the totalitarian model of Italy and Germany from the national-Catholic model outlined by Austria and Portugal. Then, we show that Perroux’s travels influenced his economic thought, both theoretically and methodologically. Eventually, the diagnostic he drew from his mid-1930s tour within foreign experiences will also help shed light on the way he welcomed and tried to guide Vichy France’s socio-economic reforms.

Résumé | The activity of François Perroux at the time of the German occupation was analysed from different angles. In the work that follows, we will try to shed light on Perroux’s activity under the French State, not on the basis of the many books and academic articles he published between 1940 and 1944, but rather by focusing on his speeches as a public intellectual. To do this, we will use Bourdieu’s concept of “representation”.

Abstract | This article analyses the works of François Perroux from the interwar years to the Vichy period (July 10th, 1940-August 20th, 1944). It shows in particular that through his conceptualisation of a “community of labour” as the fusion of both the activity and consciousness of a people, Perroux sought to bring together social mysticism (anti-rationalism) with economic and political organisation. Such a synthesis needs to be personified by a political leader as the main custodian of a national myth which should guide the community of labour from above. This interpretation helps to situate Perroux vis-à-vis some of the structuring elements of Vichy discourse.

Abstract | Walter Eucken’s methodological program is usually related to the search for a meaningful synthesis between the general-theoretical and the individual-historical aspects of economic life. Yet, overcoming this ‘great antinomy’ was only a step in achieving the vital methodological task Eucken assigned to economists: answering the challenge raised by power issues. The paper shows why and how Eucken aimed at overcoming an epistemological obstacle consisting of the ideological veil placed by power groups over reality to favour their own interests. The introduction of this epistemological obstacle in Eucken’s methodological program is crucial for three reasons. First, it sheds light on another aspect of Eucken’s dissatisfaction with the Historical School, regarding both the Methodenstreit and Schmoller’s ethical postulate. Second, it contextualizes Eucken’s normative programme within the Weberian enterprise for a value-free science. Third, it shows that the ordoliberals’ politics regarding the dispersion of power was actually rooted in specific methodological foundations.

Abstract | This article analyzes François Perroux’s institutional and intellectual activities under the Vichy regime (1940–1944) mainly by drawing on archival insights from Perroux’s papers. The authors argue that Perroux used his strategic position as general secretary of the Carrel Foundation (created by Marshal Pétain) to reshape French economics along a twofold trend: unifying economics with other social sciences, on the one hand; and developing its most analytical aspects, on the other hand. Thus, Perroux seized the opportunity to push for the introduction and dissemination of foreign theoretical studies within French economics, quite counter-intuitively to the expected nationalistic fallback accompanying authoritarian rule. In the end, the Vichy regime proved a suitable vehicle for the advancement of Perroux’s ideas and career: he managed in fact to make the best of a highly uncertain situation in 1940 and especially in 1944, with the impending Liberation of France. The authors show that Perroux used different strategies to neutralize those aspects of his work associated to Vichy’s ideology.

Abstract | Léon Walras and the ordoliberals share the opinion that State intervention in favour of a competitive order is a central element of economic policy. Hence, can Walras be regarded as a forerunner of ordoliberalism? This study performs a methodological and ontological analysis of Walras' and Eucken's thoughts and sheds light on another common ground: philosophical idealism. By taking different inclinations – Walras' Teleological Realism vs Eucken's Historicist Conceptualism – these authors reveal different relations with reality and methodological stances, which result in opposing philosophies of History. Paradoxically, by revealing tenuous epistemological bonds, we set a new distance between Walras and the ordoliberals.

Abstract | This article analyzes the ordoliberal discourse in the early postwar period (1946–50) and the way it gained traction on the political stage. My contention is that the ordoliberals sought to establish a continuity between the economic order of the Nazis and the administration of the Western Allies, and thereby confronted political authorities with the fact that proper denazification could succeed only if Nazi planning methods were rejected. This argument has been constructed around various kinds of documentation, including advisory reports, newspaper/magazine articles, and academic publications. The paper contributes both to a better definition of ordoliberal ideas (especially of their critical scope) and to a better knowledge of competing ideologies in the early Cold War context.

Abstract | This article aims at reconstructing the ordoliberal discourse around what appears as a core concept, the concept of "power". If ordoliberalism fought against Marxism and historicism, it also inherits some of their research agenda: for instance, in their historical reading of liberalism, which stresses the irrepressible rent-seeking behaviour of private agents as a driven force for institutional change. Ordoliberalism nevertheless reinvests the issue of power through a liberal response that finally comes close to the “Walrasian neoclassical” tradition. In doing so, the ordoliberal thought emphasizes the defence of the competitive order, leading them to a particular meaning of competition mechanism as a disempowerment tool of economic power.

Abstract | The article aims at reconstructing the ordoliberal discourse of Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke on the Social Question. The article shows the socialist and historicist roots of ordoliberalism. Eucken makes the disappearance of economic power within the economic process the key to solving the social question. Röpke insists more readily on the spiritual and moral dimension of the phenomenon of massification, a focal point of what he calls the social crisis of our time.

Abstract | The characteristic features of the civilization crisis described by Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966) could be understood as an attack against collectivism and planning. Massification in all spheres of society reaches an apex in the economic field, mainly through big business' concentration and the enslavement of workers. Nevertheless, Wilhelm Röpke dismisses both historical liberalism and socialist planning. This article shows that his refusal is grounded in a specific historical interpretation: that of a causal pathway from one (liberalism) to the other (planning), with respect to the intensification of the same harmful trends. Therefore, the social crisis of the twentieth century follows from the inner decline of liberalism. We can understand the contemporary period solely by the analysis of primary causes, which are rooted in the previous century. The study reconstructs this complex discourse by linking Röpke’s cultural, sociological and economical fields of inquiry.

Abstract | The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it is a reconstruction of Wilhelm Röpke's (1899-1966) declinist discourse, its articulation and its singularity. It is subsequently an explanation of the author's theoretical claims in the light of his historical analysis. Thus the article reveals the primarily moral concerns of Wilhelm Röpke and their implications for his economic and political liberalism. It then concludes that, if this moral background sheds light on a work which actually aims for an ambitious societal reform, it remains unable to rigorously associate a liberal interventionist logic with a social conservative content.