The social encyclical Rerum Novarum closely links the question of poverty with that of property, and invokes Thomas Aquinas. But on closer examination, the reasoning developed in favour of property departs from the scholastic thinker, since it maintains more affinities with the liberal tradition...

This paper proposes a new reading of the sources to release a new dating for entering Lemercier de la Rivière in intellectual circles of Quesnay and Mirabeau. In doing so, this Physiocrat generally accepted by commentators as a secondary author of the school led by Quesnay, appears as one of...

Bodin’s monetary writings are mainly centred on the relationship between currencies and sovereignty. He aims at designing a monetary system that would be forgery, debasement and degradation proof. Having explained his conception of money and false money, we expose the way Bodin seeks to...

Rousseau shares with neo-classical theory a characterization of the economic agent, as a producer, based on the figure of Robinson. But whereas neo-classical economy expresses, through Robinson, the rational behavior of any economic agent, Rousseau considers on the contrary that the individual...

This article shows the influence of Turgot over Gustave de Molinari's studies in efficient allocation of productive means in a decentralized markets economy. From Turgot's works on spatial organization of markets's grain as an answer to the spatial information problem, Molinari makes deeper the...

The received idea is that he could not miss the science of modernity. But if we investigate what can be considered as the economic thought of Rousseau, we must be distinguish two different lines of thought: one which has to do with the division of labour (to be mostly found in Emile and the...

According to Rousseau, work teaches us wisdom about time and a sense of selfness and reality which protect everybody from imagination, passions and society harms. "The worker does not dream" will say S.Weil. What notion ofwork is here implied? Nothing which could be later found in classical...

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...

Montesquieu relates poverty not to a lack of patrimony but to the impossibility of working. He thus fully contributes to the modern, economic secular vision of poverty: poverty is not a matter of charity but of organizing labour. Montesquieu shares the liberal, optimistic creed that the...

Rousseau offers a reformulation of the concept of economy that can clear the contemporary debate devoted to the relations between ethic and economy. His philosophy allows to define economy according to ethic categories: ethic values and economic values enter in an exchange system; economy aims...