GILBERT JEAN FACCARELLO (Paris, 1950) is professor of economics at Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris, and a member of the Triangle research centre (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and CNRS). He is presently chair of the ESHET Council (European Society for the History of Economic Thought). He completed his doctoral research in economics at Université de Paris X Nanterre. He has previously taught at the Université de Paris-Dauphine, Université du Maine and École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud (now École Normale Supérieure de Lyon). (...) He is a co-founder of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, which he co-edited for 20 years with J. L. Cardoso, Heinz D. Kurz, and A. Murphy. With Alain Béraud, he edited the Nouvelle histoire de la pensée économique (La Découverte, 3 volumes, 1992-2000) and, together with Heinz D. Kurz, he is presently editing a Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis (3 volumes, forthcoming with Edward Elgar). -/- EJPE interviewed Gilbert Faccarello about his research career in the history of economic thought, where he has focused especially on old and new classical and Marxian political economy, and French political economy during the 18th and 19th centuries. G. Faccarello discusses his interest not only in the logical structure and context of the economic ideas of past thinkers but also the links between economic thought, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

In the second half of the 18th century, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy spread to the Dutch Republic, where it found a favourable reception. The most popular Scottish philosopher among Dutch intellectuals arguably was James Beattie of Aberdeen. Almost all of his prose works were translated into Dutch, and the Zeeland Society of Sciences elected him a foreign honorary member. It made Beattie remark that he was ‘greatly obliged to the Dutch’, and a Dutch learned journal that he had ‘in a sense (...) become a native’. This article discusses why precisely the Dutch got interested in Beattie and what made his common sense philosophy appealing to a Dutch audience. It argues that it was the moderate and non-speculative nature of Beattie's moral philosophy that fitted well with the eclecticism of the Dutch Enlightenment. (shrink)

The first decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of Calvinist economics in the Netherlands. This clearly normative approach to economics was inspired by Abraham Kuyper and was criticized by mainstream economists from the outset. It would eventually disappear under pressure of positive economics, but survived until at least the middle of the century. Calvinist economics itself was highly critical of classical economics and, unlike the neo-classical school, strove after an entire reformation of economic thought. Calvinists writers like T. (...) de Vries, P. A. Diepenhorst, J. A. Nederbragt and J. Ridder did not constitute a school of economic thought, but nevertheless shared some fundamental ideas such as the influence of world views on economics, the existence of divine ordinances for the economic domain, and the central place of man in God’s plan for the economy. In this article, I describe the rise, sources of inspiration, fundamentals, aim and methodology of Calvinist economics. Although the perspective of this article is historical, this episode from the history of economic thought may inform us about the relationship between Christianity and the science of economics as well as that between economics and the economic crisis. (shrink)

Handbooks of the history of economic thought typically assume a strict fault line between scholastic economics and mercantilism. Historically, the distinction between the two streams of thought was less evident—especially when it came to the style of argumentation, in which there is much continuity between the scholastic doctors and early mercantilists. However, although the latter did not employ the scholastic method, both traditions frequently called upon classical authorities to strengthen their arguments. What is striking is the high regard for Aristotle (...) among the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century English mercantilists. By way of illustration, this article reviews the surprising role of Aristotelian ideas, primarily from the Metaphysics and Physics, within the debate between Gerard Malynes and Edward Misselden on England’s economics crisis. (shrink)