ABSTRACT
Economic history illustrates the changing visions and interpretations of the economic world, leading to the emergence of new, competing paradigms that foster controversy, the development of knowledge and a better understanding of the world. Like hiking trails, identifying this continuum of rewritings requires marking it out. These markers take the form of innovations or consolidations and syntheses of scientific advances made up to that point or compared with them, and are embodied in an author and a work, i.e. the “paradigmatic books” whose influence extends over several decades. In this book, we analyze three main “paradigmatic books” – three paradigms, and therefore three worldviews, that are still in operation: through the Wealth of Nations, the Smithian paradigm, founded on the infallibility of the “system of natural liberty,” and therefore conservative in its principles; through Capital, the Marxian paradigm, founded on the contingent and historically dated character of a “specifically capitalist mode of production,” and therefore revolutionary in its principles; through the General Theory, the Keynesian paradigm, founded on the perfectibility of “the economic society in which we live,” and therefore reformist in its principles.
