The various interpreting traditions agree to state that if there is a point on which Condillac and the Physiocrats disagree, it is indeed that of the value and the prices. However, by studying the controversy between Condillac and Le Trosne on these subjects, this article takes at first the...

The economic thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has often been reduced to some pieces on money, inequalities, luxury and autarky. Compared to contemporary writings of Quesnay, Smith or Hume, it has been considered for long as backward. Jean Mathiot has however shown that, far from being...

The Jean-Joseph Graslin?s Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l?impôt [1767] is at the same time one of the most brilliant critical analysis of physiocracy and the synthesis of a systematic thought which announces the sensualist political economy of the end of the Ancien Régime. The...

This paper aims at highlighting several origin mercantilist ideas in the works of Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1726). 

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...

In this paper we contemplate the debate, happened in Britain during the second decade of the eighteenth century, over the possibility of a general shortage of demand, in order to identify its common ground with the controversy that, a hundred years later, would give birth to the Law of Markets....

This paper examines the emergence of an economic discourse separated from ethics or political philosophy. It argues that the works of Locke are a decisive moment in this process, for disclosing the existence of a sphere of the economy distinct from the sphere of the politics. Furthermore, the...

Mit seinem Hauptwerk "Political Arithmetick" legte William Petty die Grundlage der modernen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsstatistik und der soziologischen Sozial-Berichterstattung. Sein Begriff der "politischen Arithmetik" konnte sich allerdings gegen den vom europäischen Kontinent stammenden Begriff...

This paper presents the origins of the Economics of innovation describing the economic thought of the economists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. In this period and in particular during the Industrial Revolution the economists argue the main effects of inventions and machines for...