In a famous 1967 article, Lynn White predicted the coming climate crisis and attributed responsibility for it to the medieval conception of man and nature. Indeed, the protection of natural resources was not a concern of medieval authors; yet Thomas Aquinas’s economic thought resonates with what we could today call an ecological approach to economic activity in at least two respects. On the one hand, such activity is characterised by sobriety, being directed towards the satisfaction of the need for necessary goods, the achievement of moderate gains and the enhancement of local supply. On the other hand, we note the unity of the process of satisfying needs, which begins with the reception of what the earth produces and the choice of the place of settlement according to the fertility of the land, and then develops into human economic activity oriented towards exchange. Justice in such exchange cannot be reduced to matters of justice in social relations, but concerns the conformity between the achievement of the satisfaction of needs and what is at its principle, namely the land provides.

This article focuses on the emergence of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in 1933 in the United States. We argue that behind the objective of saving agricultural markets from the Great Depression collapse, the Roosevelt Administration pursued broader aims. As Roosevelt feared that economic challenges would endanger American democracy, he saw agriculture as a key sector for economic and social recovery and hired institutional economists during his presidential campaign and afterwards to set up an agricultural plan. We show that these economists conceived this agricultural program, enacted as the AAA, under the influence of planning and pragmatism. We uphold that the emergence of the AAA represented a new way of making choices in a democracy, leaning on John Dewey’s conception of democracy. This article hence argues that the democratic concern within the AAA was two-fold, embodied by the objective itself, and by the method.

Despite growing literature on women in the history of economic thought and feminist economic methodology, little work has been done to outline a feminist approach to research in history of economic thought. Drawing from methods in feminist history and feminist economics, we describe two distinct approaches: (1) history of feminist economic thought, which examines the trajectory of economic thinking on patriarchy, intersectionality, and social provisioning, and (2) feminist history of economic thought. In this realm, we offer feminist perspectives on several approaches to research in the history of economic thought, including: (a) the Matilda effect; (b) corpus development; (c) archival studies; (d) the role of biography; and (e) oral history, linguistic, and network studies. Ultimately, this article sets forth a guide for feminist economists interested in pursuing research in the history of economic thought and challenges an “add gender and stir” approach to research in the field.

From the very first years of its creation in France, the public commissioning system known as the 1% artistic contribution (to the cost of construction) has been the subject of much criticism, fueling controversy surrounding contemporary art and the denunciation of avant-garde academicism. This article departs from this critical sociology of cultural policy, based on the hypothesis of a plurality of conventions for evaluating the quality of public commissions. By taking a historical perspective (1951-2022), the analysis of artistic quality conventions provides a privileged vantage point from which to observe changes in the aims of this regulatory mechanism and the criticisms to which it is subjected. The text begins by characterizing each of the three periods distinguished with reference to a dominant quality convention supported by a certain type of market intermediary. In the fourth part, it offers a summary, showing the specific nature of each of these conventions, according to different characteristics, as well as their interrelationship.

La réception de l’œuvre de John Dewey dans le champ de la recherche économique repose en partie sur l’interprétation séparatiste qui en a été faite. Selon cette interprétation, il convient d’établir une séparation entre, d’une part, la pensée économique du philosophe et ses prises de position publiques des années 1930 en matière d’économie et, d’autre part, les aspects épistémologiques et méthodologiques de sa philosophie. Cette interprétation constitue un obstacle à la pleine compréhension des apports de l’œuvre de Dewey à l’analyse des problèmes économiques et démocratiques contemporains et à leur résolution. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à lever cet obstacle en revenant sur quatre arguments avancés par Kenneth Arrow (1997), Richard Posner (2004) et D. Wade Hands (2004) contre la cohérence de la pensée économique de Dewey et sa défense d’un contrôle démocratique de l’économie. Nous concluons en formulant quelques hypothèses sur la manière dont notre lecture non séparatiste de Dewey offre un éclairage sur les positions que des économistes d’inspiration deweyenne pourraient adopter aujourd’hui, tant en ce qui concerne les mesures politiques à défendre qu’en ce qui concerne leur rôle plus général dans le débat public.