At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in France and then in Europe, Jean-Baptiste Say progressively became a central figure in political economy. Situating himself in the tradition of Adam Smith, he came to oppose the Physiocratic school of political economy on essential points. For this reason he has his own place in the current of opponents of Physiocracy.

This opposition is, however, of a different nature from the one that had prevailed in the decades when Physiocracy was at the center of the debates. The fact that Say claimed an affiliation with Smith did not prevent him from sharing a conception of political economy similar to that of the Physiocrats: like them, he based this new science on a sensualist theory of knowledge, a utilitarian theory of action and a theory of government—which we have proposed to call economic philosophy. His opposition to the Physiocrats bears more on the content of certain elements of economic philosophy than on its existence and structure. The works that Say published and the courses he professed show that his intellectual strategy was not frontal criticism of Physiocracy, but rather an attempt to integrate what he found true in their writings in order to achieve a complete exposition of the science—this is moreover the strategy he follows with respect to Smith. If he shows himself to be critical of some of their theses (fiscal and value theory), he is nonetheless not hard on Physiocracy and makes little use of eighteenth-century Antiphysiocratic writings.

In the late 1820s, Say's intellectual strategy undergoes a change with the arrival of a new adversary, David Ricardo. While the French economist aims at a “historicization” (mise en histoire) of Physiocracy insofar as it is no longer a live intellectual force in industrial society, he finds himself obliged to return to Quesnay's methodological mistakes so as to combat those he sees coming to the fore in the writings of the British economist.

Two overlapping generations of economists

Born in 1767, Jean-Baptiste Say was still in his childhood when François Quesnay died in 1774 at the age of 80.

In Quesnay's writings there are many sentences in which government, administration, nation, State or kingdom are invoked to explain a particular point in his political economy. Quesnay's use of words pointing to the administration of economic affairs has to be examined in detail so that we might clarify the innovative nature of his vocabulary during the formative period of the ‘New Science’ of political economy. Such clarification will improve our understanding of the respective roles that this ‘New Science’ ascribed to government and administration at a time when there was increasing concern about administration. Finally, this issue is of interest because historians of economic ideas should pay attention to the connections between political economy, with its due emphasis on the theoretical dimension of the subject, and the way and means through which political economy did have, or may have had, an impact upon society. I will therefore examine here the status of administration in the writings of Quesnay and other Physiocrats, as has recently been done in the case of industrial administration, and also the with regard to commercial administration, examining the group formed around the work and administrative action of Vincent de Gournay.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine what Polanyi and the Durkheimians have in common when they study the economic point of view, what Polanyi labeled the “economistic fallacy” (Polanyi 1977) or the “obsolete market mentality” (Polanyi 1947). This may appear to be a paradox, since there is no trace of any direct influence that the French sociological school could have had on Karl Polanyi's thought. There exist a few cursory references to Émile Durkheim's works in some of his writings, but not a single one to François Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs, who were the leading Durkheimians in the field of economic sociology. More surprisingly, there is no reference to Marcel Mauss's path-breaking analysis of gift-giving processes among primitive societies, although Polanyi did read French. However, as we shall see, there is a point in considering Polanyi and the Durkheimians together since it enables us to advance our understanding of the functioning of the market system in a given setting.

I first consider how similar their comparative analyses of modern society are, with a particular emphasis on their move from history to anthropology. Then I focus on the role played by economic knowledge in the shaping of the contemporary economy, since both Polanyi and the Durkeimians' inquiries stressed the importance of this cognitive dimension of modern society, that is to say, the cognitive embeddedness thanks to which the market system works. Finally, I propose a comparative assessment of Polanyi and the French sociological tradition in terms of their sociology of economic knowledge, and suggest how the Durkheimian approach might enhance Polanyi's insights by providing a more accurate understanding of the role of economic knowledge in our societies.