ABSTRACT
Smith's Wealth of Nations, Marx's Capital, and Keynes's General Theory are “paradigmatic books,” i.e. works that have systematized economic reasoning and analysis, making them independent of other scientific disciplines, and thus founding texts of schools of thought. But if these works are abundantly quoted, commented on, and interpreted, they are, at the same time, as the price of their success, less and less read directly and more and more through the intermediary of secondary literature. As a result, the works of their inspirers are generally simplified or, conversely, unnecessarily complexified, popularized, and dogmatized, taking the form of intellectual legacies that give rise to controversy between epigones and then within new generations of interpreters, so many variants of the original thought that distance us from it. Hence, the need to return to the source of the great texts, in statu nascendi, by re-appropriating their contents, emphasizing their little-known aspects, while keeping in mind the historical and ideological context of their conceptions—the subject of the present book—in order to loosen the constraints of the vulgate and the imperialism of “received ideas.”
