Debates about whether to maintain or abolish slavery revolved around two key values: the morality of enslaving other human beings and the economic benefits and costs of slavery as compared to free labor. Various and conflicting arguments were presented by abolitionists, colonists, and administrators in slave-holding societies, all of whom used calculations about the relative cost and productivity of slavery to defend their own point of view in an impassioned debate. In Calculation and Morality, Caroline Oudin-Bastide and Philippe Steiner consider how economic calculations, estimations, and arguments informed the long debate over French slavery between 1771 and 1848. They show how calculation was introduced into moral debate and became a critical social object in regard both to its consistency and its manifest effects. To do so they trace a process in which phenomena were classified into groups, becoming a category, and then how metrics and calculations were used to analyze the possible effects of emancipating slaves in French colonies. Abolitionists sought to demonstrate that it was in the interest of slaveowners and/or the entire nation to employ free labour in the colonies, and to show the irrationality of the colonial and metropolitan defenders of servitude; their aim was to enlighten various parties as to their real interest, and how that real interest coincided with justice. In turn, colonists accused those opposed to slavery of being blinded by their own philanthropic principles and insisted on the rationality of the slave system as the only means of meeting the interests of everyone, including slaves, at least in the short and medium term. Oudin-Bastide and Steiner closely examine the positions and reasoning of such influential French thinkers as Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet, Simonde de Sismondi, Jean Baptiste Say, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In doing so they shed light on the interaction of moral precepts and econonomic calculations in a trenchant study in the history of ideas.

This book brings together leading scholars of the history of economic thought to demonstrate the vitality and richness of a discipline that welcomes both practitioners of intellectual, contextual history, as well as specialists in the historical explanation of the analytical and theoretical dimension of economic science. They shed new light on a variety of themes and problems and move the frontier of knowledge in the areas covered. Economic Analyses in Historical Perspective is presented in three parts. The first deals with French traditions in economics, a field that Gilbert Faccarello has tilled for many years and to which he has made numerous contributions. The second turns to the dissemination and diffusion of economic ideas and theories across national borders, and thus to the European and even global level. Finally, the third part deals with analytical developments in some selected fields of economics: public economics, monetary policy, trade theory and spatial economics. This volume is of great importance to those who study history of economic thought, political economy and monetary economics. The chapters' centre around the work of Gilbert Faccarello, making this book a fitting tribute to his academic career on the history of economic theory and ideas.

emile Durkheim's work has traditionally been viewed as a part of sociology removed from economics. Rectifying this perception, "Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology" is the first book to provide an in-depth look at the contributions made to economic sociology by Durkheim and his followers. Philippe Steiner demonstrates the relevance of economic factors to sociology and shows how the Durkheimians inform today's economic systems.

Steiner argues that there are two stages in Durkheim's approach to the economy--a sociological critique of political economy and a sociology of economic knowledge. In his early works, Durkheim critiques economists and their categories, and tries to analyze the division of labor from a social rather than economic perspective. From the mid-1890s onward, Durkheim's preoccupations shifted to questions of religion and the sociology of knowledge. Durkheim's disciples, such as Maurice Halbwachs and Francois Simiand, synthesized and elaborated on Durkheim's first-stage arguments, while his ideas on religion and the economy were taken up by Marcel Mauss. Steiner indicates that the ways in which the Durkheimians rooted the sociology of economic knowledge in the educational system allows for an invaluable perspective on the role of economics in modern society, similar to the perspective offered by Max Weber's work.

Recognizing the power of the Durkheimian approach, "Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology" assesses the effect of this important thinker and his successors on one of the most active fields in contemporary sociology."