ABSTRACT
This chapter states that the sociological critique of the economy in France had strong similarities with the critique of political economy that was emerging with the Historical School in Germany and England, and with American institutionalism. It also focuses on the movement towards an economic sociology which, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, took on an international dimension with contributions from leading sociologists and economists and an attempt at institutionalisation around the Institut International de Sociologie and the Revue Internationale de Sociologie established by René Worms in 1893. The chapter starts from the critique of classical political economy deployed in the first half of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, following Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. It then gives an account of the way in which Frédéric Le Play’s empirical and conservative sociology rejected the industrial world, seen as a danger to the stability of society. The last part focuses on the critique of political economy developed by Gabriel Tarde and by Émile Durkheim, whose followers, especially François Simiand, continued the effort to develop an economic sociology under the name of “économie positive” (positive economy) in the 1920s and 1930s.
