François Perroux - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

François Perroux (December 19th 1903, Saint-Romain-in-Gall - June 2nd 1987) was a economist French. He was appointed Professor with the Collège de France, after having taught with the Université of Lyon and the Université of Paris.

Course and combat

The Institute of Mathematical and Economic Sciences Applied (ISMEA), that François Perroux created in 1944 - under the name of Institut of Economic scene Applied (ISEA) -, has a long story. The rich person hours of its beginnings would be enough to justify that this and workspace perdure exchange in this new century. However, the heritage of François Perroux is threatened, at the moment when in the world the requirement of a “ dialog reappears everywhere on essence”, for “ an economy of all the man and all the men ”. In this context, the ISMEA wanted (and still wants) to contribute actively to the debates which causes the evolution of the real and theoretical economy contemporary.

" To change the textbooks or to change reality " François Perroux said to express his dissatisfaction vis-a-vis the ideas and with the commonly allowed economic doctrines at his time. Today its call to a “critical of the economic reason and statistical reason ” is again pressing. On both sides, here and there, the request for “an other” speech goes up on the economy and revives the need for a knowledge of intention scientific on real dynamics of our companies. It is necessary to think the Economy of the 21e century.

To invent new companies raises, for François Perroux, neither of the Utopia nor of the myth. Today, again, the fights and the car-resistance of most underprivileged express the need for a new going beyond of the ukases of the commercial order; a bearing going beyond recognition of the finality objectifies economy: a plenary participation of all in the life, in all its social dimensions.

Thus, the Perroux method within the framework of an economy d'" scientific intention " , wanted to be capable of an offer of proposals, left with the arbitration of the political apparatuses. Proposals that, according to him, the political economy is able to implement, subject to being based on the whole of its dimensions (1§), and, subject to being diverted axiomatic economy, or " ideological saving in intention " (2§).

Bases of a political economy

In a first approach, the concrete economy seems a muddle of facts, decisions, rough statistical data, forecasts; left chaos where the elements vary continuously without apparent bonds between them. However, economic reality is not chaotic in oneself… moreover, its internal coherence is not perceived immediately.

The political economy must aim to make understandable reality. This objective, it must seek to reach it by taking account of the historical thickness, which characterizes the facts of company, in all their dimensions: policy, social, institutional, etc It must, consequently, privilege a principle globalisant and interdisciplinary and contribute to offer a grid of analysis for capitalism and one beyond capitalism.

To make reality understandable

The goal of the political discipline economy initially consists in making economic reality understandable, seizing the evolution of reality and, in the second time, envisaging and acting on this reality. The economic capacity, this “recalcitrant outlaw”, is an ingredient inéliminable of the economic activity and, consequently, the policy, heard like the art and the practice of the government of the human society, constitutes a component of the political economy.

To make economic reality understandable, the political economy must resort to abstractions, concepts, links of deductive reasoning which binds the concepts between them, even to models which must be a simplified representation of reality that it aims at explaining.

To build these abstractions, the economist poses simplifying assumptions. He is not free choice of these assumptions. He chooses those which are likely to provide abstractions which can give an account of reality. To comply with this rule of reasoning, the economist must constantly be attentive with the validity, often limited in the time, of the simplifying assumptions over which the abstractions rest. Empirical moment, that of the checking of the theses by the facts, fact integral part of the political economy.

A discipline equipped with historicity

To give an account of reality, the political economy must have a historical vision of the socio-economic phenomena, that thousand wire attach to the last one: economic history, social history, institutional history… the comprehension of the present requires that of the past.

If we admit that capitalism constitutes an economic system, the economic theory which wants to make it understandable must be based on a system of concepts. It can give an account of the variety of the forms of capitalism only by working out new abstract categories in filiation of the core of the fundamental concepts. Because, the simplifying assumptions, theoretical sequences, that the economic thinking vehicle are, them also, equipped with historicity.

The economic agents, always unequal between them, not having immutable and intangible attributes, are historically located. The workers of today, at least in the industrialized countries, do not have, like those of the 19th century, only their chains to be lost. They garnered assets; in a more general way the man, “built social”, has his culture, his tradition, its lived, whose homo oeconomicus could not reflect the thickness. The objective conditions, in which it is brought to pose its choices, do not proceed in isolation. They fit in a legal framework and institutional given. They are exerted by incorporating technological advance and the social one impregnates all the pores of the economic activity.

A principle globalisant and interdisciplinary

If socio-economic reality is one, the discipline " economy politique" must fall under a whole of disciplines which study the company. It cannot be separate other disciplines of the social sciences. In the absence of what, it désincarne. Moreover, to stress the interdisciplinary relations, on osmosis between the political economy and the other disciplines of the social sciences does not start autonomy nor the legitimacy of the political economy. That enriches it. Detached from this requirement, the axiomatic economy very quickly lost its relevance.

For him, the country owes atteidre the growth by the means of its economic activity which must be optimal. The growth, it defines it as an increase for one or more long periods (Cycle Kondratieff) of an indicator of dimension, the total product Net calculated in real terms. It appeared according to him only after the first industrial revolution in England and it also involves, except exeptions, the development which it also defines: it is the whole of the transformations of the structures economic, social, institutional and demographic which accompanies the growth, makes it durable and in general, improves the living conditions of the population. (it is evaluated effectively thanks to the IDH put into force in 1990 with the UNDP: Program of the United Nations for the Development).

the Scientism of the axiomatic economy

Vis-a-vis the ambition founder of the political economy, the orthodoxe economic thinking is worried only coherence interns its doxa. It chooses to deny the history, including the history of the facts and the economic thinking. It is presented in the form of an ideology for “miserly capitalism”, like a justification of an unslung capitalism.

A pure “science”

The economic thinking which proclaims " unique" , wants to be pure. She claims to deduce the macroeconomic theory from the microeconomic analysis, built itself starting from a control rational, debatable, of the individual. She voluntarily cuts other disciplines of the social sciences. She does not recognize the scientificity of the step of the historian, the sociologist, the political economist, the anthropologist, etc Consequently, she does not take into account the contributions of the other disciplines of the social sciences. But, with the wrong way, the economic theory “orthodoxe” refutes specificities of the various disciplines of the social sciences. Being pressed on its microphone-foundations and a mathematisation functioning like self-justification, it is involved, with its debatable utilitarian tools, in the fields of the political economist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the historian, the lawyer. It establishes its hegemonic vocation with regard to the other social sciences.

However, the extent of the contradictions accumulated in the real economy (bursting of the wage report/ratio, domination of the financial sphere, absolute désarticulations of economic fabrics in the South, reduction of the elimination of illiteracy and reduction in the IDH in more than 20 countries, etc), and the brittleness of the ideologies conveyed by the orthodoxe economy (regulating aptitude of a confabulated market), prohibit to him to more dissimulate the reality of the practices (requirement of growth of the rate of profit by the financial sphere, precarisation of wage-earning, retreat of the official forms of solidarity, hoarding of the money by alone preoccupations with an accumulation, etc) which make capitalism unslung a dangerous fitting, contestable in its social approach; thus unable to produce direction and coherence for the populations of this planet, whose size does not cease growing. For these reasons, holding them of the axiomatic economy must organize the domination of it.

To establish its “scientific” domination, the axiomatic economy paradoxically ceased being a place of scientific confrontations between “visions” of the system. It, on the contrary, became a pure ideological company, with the direction where it reproduces a dogma within self-checking and noncritical authorities, while being based on States in the process of dismemberment, whose political apparatuses use this speech to call upon their impotence.

In other words, the orthodoxe economy is summarized with an axiomatic economy, with the virtues scientific or applied completely debatable; pushing back at the borders of the discipline the political economy, which, by the glance which it carries on the facts, not subsumables with databases, remains too openly in the register of a Social science and Company.

A “plugging science”

Empêtrée in its precepts, the axiomatic economy refuses to see the state of the world. But, it also prevents us from seizing all the dilapidations of them. However, if the forces of the market develop without obstacles, if resistances do not develop sufficiently, the form capitalism unslung risk to become the dominant form of capitalism on the world plan: in North, the South, the East.

In the industrialized countries of North, capitalism has been dominating for one historical long period. Whereas, mainly since the second world war, the less unfavourable power struggle with the " cut not" the erection of a solid official base allowed; authorizing the rise and the satisfaction of a certain number of collective needs. This movement progressist ran up, with the economic ideologies of the “thatcherism” and the “reaganism”, with measurements and practices which dismantle, since then, the state enterprises and which start the social conquests.

In the South, in the worldwide which had chosen a way third-mondiste of development, unslung capitalism is engulfed with step of giant. After the decolonization, the majority of the countries of the South had made give the State to safeguard a certain autonomy compared to the domination exerted by the large actors of the worldwide market; that to give access of the populations most stripped the vital goods, But, since the years 1970, with the profit of the large international companies and the local bourgeoisies and under the cane of the IMF, a wave of privatizations détricote, there still, the official sector, finding its legitimation in the proposals of the axiomatic economy. Liberalization and deregulation summarize the privileged axes of the economic policies. The international movements of capital and the purses of the transferable securities open out; while the dependence with respect to the worldwide market, of the overseas investments and the international finance, coupled to a dramatic debt becomes more and more extensive in the concrete life of the people. With the intern, the inequalities between areas and an increasingly iniquitous distribution of the national revenue increase poverty in absolute terms.

In the East, finally, capitalism is charged in an immense formerly padlocked geographical area: the Central and Eastern Europe of which Soviet ex-Union, China, Vietnam. With the low word, 1.700 million men and women are absorbed by the maelstrom of a chaotic transition towards an improbable market economy, marked by the explosion of the inequalities.

In the East, in the South, in North, débridement of miserly capitalism " proclaims; that there is no alternative" and that the universalization of the most unslung form capitalism is impossible to circumvent. This thought, known as single, and the social practices that it generates, have run up, for a few years with criticisms, resistances, increasingly vigorous disputes. There is thus no fatalism and the requirement of an alternative is there!

The ISMEA, a heritage impossible to circumvent of François Perroux

Instability, uncertainty, sufferings, misery generate a faintness general in the culture, to paraphrase Freud, and call, for the world, a better founded diagnosis, to paraphrase Keynes; however, as we already mentioned, each one can see reappearing everywhere in the world the requirement of a “ dialog on essence”, for “ an economy of all the man and all the men ”. The heritage of François Perroux and the ISMEA constitute an inheritance to be developed, with the service of the recasting of a “hard core” of the political economy, can be presented in the form of a place of debates and reflection constitutive of a global project and coherent. Indeed:

1-L' ISMEA is “work tools”, like had been to it the ISEA. It is this associative structure which “produced” a reflection, a conceptualization and modelings useful for the comprehension of the economy of the 20th century, from the theoretical and practical point of view: work of National accounting (INSEE), studies on the demographic trends in Europe (EU), contracts on inflation (Direction of the Forecast) and on the international debt (CNRS), searchs for industrial futurology;

2- The ISMEA has a vast network of international relations. The radiation of the thought of François Perroux, or, among others, of Henri Bartoli, Gerard de Bernis, Marie Lavigne, Jean Marczewski, Maximilien Rubel, of Jean Weiller, and the leading activity, like the research led to the ISMEA, in particular, on the development nourished exchanges and co-operations teaching research with the professional circle academic and in a very great number of countries;

3- Two reviews result from the first publications of the ISEA: Economy Applied (quarterly) and Economies and Sociétés (monthly). Both are diffused in France and abroad and are indexed in most known of the Anglo-Saxon bibliographical indices. Owner of these titles, the ISMEA directs the leading structures from there and ensures of it manufacture and the diffusion via the Presses of the ISMEA. The ISMEA was sixty years old in 2004; François Perroux would have been 100 years old in 2003; 2007 will have been the 20th birthday of its disappearance. However, it should be considered that its work, continued and amplified by the teams around Gerard de Bernis, is still largely likely of " to contaminate (to repugnant) the imagination of the economic world " , to take again the expression of the Center for a political analysis of economy, of New York, which introduces François Perroux in these terms: “ François Perroux belongs to this small strange French core who, in spite of the Anglo-Saxon domination in the field of the economy, continuous to contaminate the imagination of the economic world thanks to its innovative ideas ”. The ISMEA is presented, thus, quite naturally, following François Perroux, like the place of a debate on the forms of the alternative by challenging the evolution " naturelle" capitalism in this beginning of XXIe century.

Publications

Perroux, François (1926). the problem of the profit . Grenoble, University Presses of Grenoble, 406.
Perroux, François (1928). " Dictatorship of the proletariat at the marxistes." working right XXIV (3): 115-36.
Perroux, François (1935). Of the myths hitlériens in German Europe. Lyon, Bosc Brothers, Mr. & L. Riou, 156.
Perroux, François (1938). " Limits and going beyond of the concept of classe." Spirit VI (68): 161-80.
Perroux, François (1943). the value. Paris, In a hurry Academics of France, 403.
Perroux, François (1946). Liberalism and freedom. Economic mixtures dedicated to Mr. Professor Rene Gonnard. Paris, General Bookstore of Right and Jurisprudence: 299-316.
Perroux, François (1947). " America and responsibilities for an economy internationally dominante." Economy applied XL (2): 335-50.
Perroux, Francois, Pierre Uri, et al. . (1947). national revenue: Its calculation and its significance. Paris, University Presses of France, 310.
Perroux, François (1949). " The effect of domination and the relations économiques." Economy applied XL (2): 271-90.
Perroux, François (1950). " The pool of coal and steel and the Schuman plan - Illusions and réalités." Economy applied XL (2): 351
Perroux, François (1951). capitalism . Paris, University Presses of France, 136.
Perroux, François (1952). " Anglo-Iranian Company and effects of domination." Economy applied (1): 151-68.
Perroux, François (1954). Europe without shores. Grenoble, University Presses of Grenoble, 859.
Perroux, François (1957). " Profit and progress économiques." Re-examined Popular Action (112): 1049-63.
Perroux, François (1958). peaceful coexistence . Paris, university Presses of France, 209.
Perroux, François (1960). Economy and company: constraint, exchange, gift. Paris, university Presses of France, 186.
Perroux, François (1961). economy of the XXe century. Grenoble, University Presses of Grenoble, 814.
Perroux, François (1963). Dialectical and socialization. Works. K. Marx. Paris, Gallimard. I: 2000.
Perroux, François (1963). " Economy of the United States: a “leadership” difficile." Third world IV (370): 539-57.
Perroux, François (1963-75). To be able and generalized economy. Grenoble, University Presses of Grenoble, 605.
Perroux, François (1965). quantitative techniques of planning. Paris, University Presses of France, 309.
Perroux, François (1965). " The economic thinking of Joseph Schumpeter. The dynamic ones of the capitalisme" , Geneva, Droz Bookstore.
Perroux, François (1966). " Economic integration. Who integrates? For the benefit of which takes place integration? " Economy applied XIX (3-4): 389-414.
Perroux, François (1968). " The integration and the failure of the traditional theory of the extérieurs." exchanges; Economy applied XXI (2): 379-96.
Perroux, Francois, ED. (1969). Research and economic activity. Collection U. Paris, Armand Colin.
Perroux, François (1969). bread and word. Paris, Editions of the Stag, 334.
Perroux, François (1969). François Perroux questions Herbert Marcuse… who answers. Paris, Sapwood, 211.
Perroux, François (1970). Alienation and industrial society. Paris, Gallimard, 185.
Perroux, François (1970). " Implicitly normative conceptualizations and limits of modeling in économie." Economies and Sociétés Mr. (26): 2255-307.
Perroux, François (1971). " The balance of von Neumann, first test of évaluation." Economies and Sociétés V (10): 1687-702.
Perroux, François (1971). " Structuralism, economic models, structures économiques." Economy applied XXIV (3): 329-51.
Perroux, François (1972). Mass and class. Paris, Casterman, 146.
Perroux, François (1973). To be able and economy. Paris, Dunod, 139.
Perroux, François (1974). " Europe end of siècle." Economy applied XL (2): 369-84.
Perroux, François (1975). " Policy of the development and gaps of calculation économique." Worlds under development (10): 191-202.
Perroux, Francois, ED. (1975). Critical of the economic reason. Paris, Center of international studies for the development.
Perroux, François (1976). " Critical of the economic reason and the reason statistique." Economy applied XL (2): 303-23.
Perroux, François (1979). transnational corporations and the new economic order of the world. Lyon, Institute of Social sciences Applied, 112.
Perroux, François (1979). Of frugality: Tévoédjré meets Rousseau. To choose: 35.
Perroux, François (1980). " Peregrinations of an economist and choice of sound itinéraire." Economy applied XL (2): 197-212.
Perroux, François (1980). " The University: an institution in the société." Networks (37-38): 19-34.
Perroux, François (1980). What an economist? Files of Isméa. Paris: 12.
Perroux, François (1981). For a philosophy of the new development. Paris, Sapwood: Presses of UNESCO, 279.
Perroux, François (1982). Dialog of the monopolies and the nations: " équilibre" or dynamics of the active units. Grenoble, university Presses of Grenoble, 473.
Perroux, François (1986). Unemployment: complexity of the analysis and profile of the strategies. Association of the Friends of François Perroux. Lyon, AAFP.
Perroux, François (1993). " François Perroux, works complètes" , 6 volumes, Grenobles, Press Academics of Grenoble.

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