Contenu du sommaire : Editer des économistes

Like any other scientific editor, the economist who intends to spread the writings of his predecessors is faced with constant problems, beyond the question of who he will publish: what he should publish and how he should publish it. In the field of our discipline, the difficulties raised by these questions are not radically different from those which occur in other disciplines, including literature. Of course, in many respects dealing with these difficulties implies skills which are not usually the prerogative of the historian of economic thought. Nevertheless it also requires analytical abilities that the latter is in the habit of regarding as being his own. The fact remains that editing is a scholarly practice to which the historian of economic thought usually pays little attention. However, since the primary source materials that continue to be the foundation for research in our academic discipline are here at stake, its institutional recognition and spread depend on such a practice.

A text is the product of a society, a situation, of time. Whole passages of the work result from observations of ground, from polite conversations very important for the period. The translation which we published is based on the first edition of Della Moneta, libri cinque. We can say that the work of Galiani is a real textbook of practical economic policy for politicians – The absence of translation of Della Moneta weighed heavily in the absence of a real consideration of the theoretical contribution of F. Galiani. We can understand this absence by the importance of the problem of the value throughout the XIXth century. The objective was at first to take into account the biggest part of the real roots of the European history of the economic thought.

Starting from the historiographical contribution of Quesnay's works edition INED 2005, the article shows the historical and analytical issues that editing raises for the historian of economic thought. The authors argue that editing can be a major stage in the work of interpretation. The heuristic value of editorial work is illustrated by the nanlysis of a brief unpublished text of Quesnay. Contextualizing this piece allow us to re-examine Quesnay's theory of surplus and to call into question the usual interpretation of Quesnay's theory of net product.

This article deals with a French edition of Jeremy Bentham's Selected Economic Writings. It aims at explaining the editorial choices that will be made, and underlining the difficulties faced by such an edition. Two kinds of difficulties are stressed: on the one hand, the singularity of Bentham's conception of political economy implies questioning the status of this science in his utilitarianism (section I. Question of boundaries); on the other hand, I raise some more general methodological issues which confront each editor of texts from the past (Section II. Methodological Issues).

This contribution develops various arguments in favour of a critical edition of Sismondi's collected economic works. Beyond the difficulties of actually getting hold of out-of-print published works and the large number of unpublished manuscripts kept in various archives in Switzerland, Italy and France, such a venture should help working towards a rigorous reexamination of Sismondi's entire output as well as evaluating anew the part he played during the crucial transition between Smithian and Ricardian economics. This article reevaluates first Sismondi's contribution to the 1800-1820 macro-economic debate before discussing the Smithian methodology used by Sismondi to connect wealth with happiness. Eventually, this essay argues and defends a continuity argument on the links explicitly drawn by Sismondi in his entire work between economic theory and his political philosophy.

Jean-Baptiste Say belongs to the important names of the French Political Economy of the XIXth century. Because of its role in the process of institutionalization of political economy, his even more famous abroad. The knowledge of Say's works remained however partial until now, for lack of a publication of his printed work, variants of his books and manuscripts. This study aims at presenting the scope of a new edition, the deficiencies of previous editions and the program of publication of the Collected Works of Jean-Baptiste Say. This study gives also, as an example, the main characteristics of the variorum editions of the Traité d'économie politique and of the Cours complet d'économie politique pratique.

The team which has proposed three years ago a critical revival of Clément Juglar contribution and nowadays the edition of his texts, has been led rather quickly to admit that if there is no doubt that Juglar contributed to modern business cycles theory, his reputation clearly surpassed his effective scientific influence on this specific field. In general, the conception our contemporaries can have about Juglar's approach is misleading that they consider on the one side that his contribution is one of the major ones for modern business cycles theory, or on the other side, that they focus on the papers dealing with periodicity of crises and then ignoring the greatest part of his work and then having very limited knowledge and comprehension of the nature of his general approach. Understanding Juglar's approach implies to take into account his training as a physician, the context in which he initiated the use of statistics via his analysis of population growth, his interest for monetary theory, essential for the understanding as well as the identification of the cycles, and finally, the role of his religious faith in his view of the nature of the economic and social movement. Our worry to resituate the fundamental nature of Juglar's contribution did not prevent us to operate few choices. It is the determinants of those choices about the edition we are working on which are examined and justified in this article.

Are surveyed here the confronted problems and the choices accomplished by a team of economists of the University Lyon 2 to accomplish the edition of the complete economic writings of Auguste and Léon Walras. One remind here the theoretical and practical reasons of their decision, their confrontation with scarrered funds of archives, their editorial choices and of characteristics of the critical apparatus. Also are underlined various difficulties that they met with, particularly those linked in search of means over long period, but also possibilities opened for the interpretation of a great work. Finally, wins and disappointments of a heavy editorial enterprise.

The end of publication of Complete Works of Pareto (OC) is the occasion in order to reflect on the importance of the publishing project due to Giovanni Busino, the most important Pareto's scholar. OC, published from 1964 to 2005 in 32 volumes, put to disposition of Pareto's scholars and admirers all his scientific and journalistic writings and, moreover, 5.000 of his many and often very interesting letters. Busino has renounced to use OC for exposing his way of reading Pareto. So the numerous footnotes who accompany the books aim only to clear the context of Pareto's writings. This editing choice ought assure a long future of use to OC. Our text gives also suggestions about which Pareto's papers we can still search for.

This article compares the problems arising in the course of the editing of the Interwar Papers and Correspondence (1919-1939) of Roy Harrod and of the materials relating to the preparation (1934-1937) of Gottfried Haberler's inquiry on Prosperity and Depression led for the League of Nations. In particular, the different writings contexts are examined, as well as the state of the archival collections and some specific features, such as the existence of different versions of a text or letters in different languages. The solutions envisaged are illustrated. In the case of Harrod's papers, some editorial problems related to the necessity of being selective were solved by means of an online electronic edition accompanying the printed version. The features and merits of this electronic edition are discussed, and the results of the experience are assessed by means of an examination of visits frequency of the different pages of the web site.

The paper informs about the work on the edition of Piero Sraffa's Unpublished Papers and Correspondence which will be published by Cambridge University Press. The hugeness and great complexity of the material are stressed and a number of.icebergs. are identified that have to be circumnavigated. The main problem of the edition is identified as finding the sense Sraffa intended. It is pointed out against the background of observations made by Clive S. Lewis, Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bernheim which precautions ought to be taken in order not to misunderstand and misinterpret.