Articles
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The Conflicting Orientations of the Early American Republic
Is the economy a driving force behind democracy or its gravedigger? – Article 3 American independence and the adoption of the federal Constitution constitute two successive and distinct moments in the birth of the United States. From the resolutions of the First Continental Congress in 1774, through the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to the Constitution…
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The Deceptive Familiarity of Homer and Hesiod’s World
The ancient Greek world feels familiar: Homer’s epics, the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, or the emergence of democracy and philosophy occupy a prominent place in Western culture and the arts, as well as in accounts of Western history. Yet this familiarity is deceptive. Western thought has inherited important concepts and practices from Greece, but that…
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Modern Conceptions and Practices of Political Liberty and Equality
Is the economy a driving force behind democracy or its gravedigger? – Article 2 Political liberty and equality are the two cardinal principles of contemporary democracies. Their meaning may seem familiar, yet it is far from self-evident. Liberty may refer, among other things, to independence from domination, protection against arbitrary power, participation in collective government,…
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From Antiquity to the Dawn of Modern Revolutions: Did Commerce Foster Equality?
Is the economy a driving force behind democracy or its gravedigger? – Article 1 In Antiquity, the wealth of states rested first and foremost on agriculture.1 While commerce contributed to collective enrichment, it operated within social frameworks shaped by religion and politics. Military victories, for their part, provided booty, slaves and, in cases of conquest,…
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How Interests and Values Rose and Virtue Declined (16th–18th Centuries)
In The Passions and the Interests (1977), the historian Albert O. Hirschman shows how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the concept of interest established itself as the pivot of justificatory frameworks in political economy.1 His enquiry draws in particular on 17th-century moral philosophy, as well as on Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith. Building on those…
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How Technologies Are Eroding Creative Destruction
Contemporary technologies inspire radically divergent diagnoses. On one side, they are portrayed as the main engine of a new wave of growth and jobs, driven by automation, computing, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. On the other, they are taken to signal a darker rupture, in which work tends to recede—up to the point of…
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Humans and AI: Two Messy Paths to Knowing the World
Over the past two years, large language models (LLMs) have triggered a familiar split in reactions: enthusiasm, alarm, and a growing chorus of criticism. Among the sceptics, Yann LeCun occupies a particular place. As one of the architects of deep learning, he speaks not from the outside but from the very centre of the field,…
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Models in Economics and Sociology: A Conceptual Toolbox
Drawing on earlier work that has examined scientific models in a historical perspective,1 with particular attention to physics, this article turns to models in economics and sociology. In this perspective, the aim is less to offer an exhaustive typology of models than to sketch out a general interpretative framework – a conceptual toolbox – for…
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Utility, Work, Distribution: a New Grammar of the Social (19th Century)
At the Origins of the Valorisation of the Economy (15th–19th Centuries) – Article 5/5 During the eighteenth century, Great Britain conferred an unprecedented status on the economy. The development of credit and investment projects, the gradual emergence of a manufacturing industry and a consumer society, the expansion of an increasingly integrated domestic and colonial market—all…
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Interests as the driving forces of social recomposition in eighteenth-century Great Britain
At the Origins of the Valorisation of the Economy (15th–19th Centuries) – Article 4 In eighteenth-century Great Britain, the word “interest” condenses heterogeneous realities that we now distinguish in order to avoid confusion. First, there is financial interest, an instrumental category and the primary one etymologically, which designates the temporal cost of a debt. It…