The Neglect of the French Liberal School in Anglo-American Economics: A Critique of Received Explanations

F or roughly the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, the "liberal school" thoroughly dominated economic thinking and teaching in France. 1 Adherents of the school were also to be found in the United States and Italy, and liberal doctrines exercised a profound influence on prominent German and British economists. Although its numbers and authority began to dwindle after the 1870s, the school remained active and influential in France well into the 1920s. Even after World War II, there were a few noteworthy French economists who could be considered intellectual descendants of the liberal tradition. Despite its great longevity and wide-ranging influence, the scientific contributions of the liberal school and their impact on the development of Eu-ropean and U.S. economic thought—particularly on those economists who are today recognized as the forerunners, founders, and early exponents of marginalist economics—have been belittled or simply ignored by most twentieth century Anglo-American economists and historians of thought. A number of doctrinal scholars, including Joseph Schumpeter, have noted and attempted to explain the curious neglect of the school in the En-glish-language literature. In citing the school's "analytical sterility" or "indif-ference to pure theory" as a main cause of its neglect, however, their explanations have overlooked a salient fact: that many prominent contributors to economic analysis throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed strong appreciation of or weighty intellectual debts to the purely theoretical contributions of the liberal school. In this article, I present evidence demonstrating that economists as diverse in analytical approach and ideological preference as Eugen von Bohm-Spann found scientific merit in the works of various liberal economists. In addition, I suggest that the Turgot-Say subjective value tradition, as embodied and extended in the works of later French liberal economists, was the primary scientific inspiration for two important movements in the evolution of nineteenth century Anglo-American economics.