ABSTRACT
Having attempted to provide an outline of the full breadth of the engineer’s social thought, it is important to remind the reader of the very limited and narrow impact of Isnard’s work. As was stated in the introduction it took nearly a century from the publication of Traité des richesses before any real significance was attributed to the principal mathematical passages in this work, while the bulk of his writings has been ignored completely until the present day. One may think that such a sweeping statement is bound not to stand up to very close scrutiny. Indeed, since Isnard was never completely forgotten, as is attested by entries in a number of nineteenthcentury biographical and economic dictionaries (see p. 424, n. 1), it seems reasonable to expect that a detailed search would turn up at least some traces of influence of his ideas. Therefore, in conclusion of the introductory part of this book, here follows a short account of a, probably incomplete, effort to trawl the economic literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for such traces.
