Research Team

What is at stake in this research project has been central to the work of the project’s Principal Investigator, Roberto Baranzini, whose principal expertise concerns the main protagonist of the project, Léon Walras. Baranzini is one of the most eminent specialists on Walras (Baranzini, 2016). His writings have shown the problematic nature of previous interpretations of the writings of Walras, based on Pure Economics only. In particular, he has demonstrated the need to consider Walras’s entire économie politique et sociale and adopt his epistemology as a hermeneutic guideline, indispensable even for correctly interpreting crucial aspects (market, tâtonnement, equilibrium, money) of the general equilibrium theory (Baranzini, 2005a, 2005b, 2006). By examining Walras’s texts in their historical context and adopting his epistemological outlook, Baranzini (together with Pierre Dockès) has revealed the divergence between Walras’s theory of general equilibrium and the latter’s subsequent analyses (Baranzini, 2001, 2005a, 2008a, 2011a, 2014). 

Baranzini is one of the few scholars who have highlighted the necessity of grasping the ontological specificities of Walras’s project, showing, in particular, that we should understand Walras’s ontology to grasp his differences with his successor in the Lausanne Chair, Pareto. In the same vein, Baranzini inaugurated, with Pascal Bridel, the de-homogenization of the Lausanne school – as Jaffé (1976) did with the three protagonists of the marginalist revolution – by studying the arrival of Pareto in Lausanne (Baranzini & Bridel, 1997) and the key concept of ‘marginal utility’ as a discriminant (Baranzini & Bridel, 2005). In addition to Walras’s (and Pareto’s) writings, Baranzini is highly acquainted with the three Walras Funds (Lausanne, Lyon, Montpellier) and the Pareto Fund, containing their unpublished writings and correspondence. He is currently working on the sources of Walrasian metaphysics (Baranzini & Bee, 2023) and epistemology, notably on the influence of the philosopher Etienne Vacherot.

Baranzini will contribute to Part 1 of the project. First, thanks to his prior knowledge of the Walrasian corpus, he will offer a systematic reconstruction of Walras’s overall socio-economic thought and its ontological and epistemological underpinnings. Second, he will unveil the crucial role and nature of normativity in Walras’s project. Finally, he will examine the similarities and differences between the normative function of general equilibrium analysis in Walras and neo-Walrasians.

Sina Badiei is the project’s Senior Researcher. Badiei is an expert on the role of ethical values and social norms in the history of economic thought. Badiei’s award-winning Ph.D. and book (2021) on the role of values and norms in the writings of Marx, Mises, Freidman and Popper have shown that by reducing scientific economics to positive economics, Marx, Mises, Freidman have expelled normative questions from scientific studies in economics. Badiei shows that this position exerts a deleterious influence on their economic theories and, more specifically, prevents them from offering rigorous arguments in favor of the normative positions they defend. In June 2024, Routledge will publish an updated English version of Badiei’s book. Badiei has also coedited two collective volumes, one in English, the other in French, on the relationship between normative and positive economics.

In a special issue of the Revue de Philosophie Économique, which he co-edited (2021), Badiei highlights the benefits of relying on insights from philosophy and history, especially those offered by historical epistemology and the integrated history and philosophy of science, to study economics. In a series of recent papers, Badiei continues his examination of the link between economics and normative questions by investigating the contributions of JN Keynes and Karl Popper (2023) and social economics (Rue Descartes, forthcoming) to the study of values and norms in economics. In a recent book chapter (2023), Badiei underlines the necessity of incorporating normative appraisals of needs and preferences into economics by critically examining Marx’s and Mises’s theories of needs.

Badiei’s first contribution to the project will be on the ontological and epistemological foundations of Pareto’s economic thought. He will use this to offer an impartial evaluation of Pareto’s rejection of Walras’s approach to normative considerations in economics. He will then investigate the ontological and epistemological foundations of Paretian welfare economics and the attempts by social choice theorists and the philosophers of economics to overcome the most significant shortcomings of Paretian welfare economics by rectifying or rejecting its problematic assumptions, such as those concerning interpersonal comparisons or substantial evaluation of values and norms. Finally, working on theoretical and philosophical studies of social choice theory, Badiei will identify approaches and insights in normative economics, social ontology, and the epistemology of economics that have considerable similarities with the theoretical, ontological, and epistemological assumptions of Walras. 

The Ph.D. student working on Part 1 will focus on the peculiar nature and place of normative considerations in Walras’s project and the latter’s ontological, epistemological, and theoretical specificities, notably in relation to the other protagonists of the marginalist revolution. They can also (or alternatively) study the similarities and differences between the role of general equilibrium analysis and its normative function in Walras and the writings of neo-Walrasians, especially Arrow and Debreu. Given the significant influence of the Bourbaki group on Debreu’s understanding of the link between social phenomena, economics, and mathematics, the Ph.D. student could also help the project by offering a comparative analysis between the philosophy of science of Walras and that of the Bourbaki group, especially regarding the ontological status of mathematics.

The Ph.D. student working on Part 2 will focus on the link between Pareto’s economics and his writings on sociology and psychology, unveiling the implicit or explicit presence of normative considerations in his contributions to these different disciplines. The goal is to understand whether Pareto’s sociological writings allow us to reinterpret his ordinalist approach, his idea that psychology should be the foundation of economics (Pareto, 2014, p. 20), and his positions regarding the role of norms and values in social science. They can also (or alternatively) examine the relationship between Pareto’s socio-economic thought and the writings of the founders of welfare economics. While this question has been studied in several papers and books, we still do not have a rigorous and systematic appraisal of the similarities and differences between Pareto and the writings of Bergson, Hicks, Hotelling, Kaldor, and Samuelson. 

The Ph.D. student working on Part 3 will study the complex relationship between welfare economics, social choice theory and the writings of Amartya Sen. This relationship is paradoxical since social choice theory can be considered a refinement or rejection of welfare economics. The Ph.D. student will offer a systematic appraisal of the historical context of the emergence and evolution of social choice theory, and the reaction of the leading scholars of welfare economics, such as Samuelson, to social choice theory, by examining not just their published papers on the topic but also their correspondence, e.g., the correspondence between Arrow and Samuelson. The goal is to offer a rigorous historical account of different manners in which social choice theory has influenced welfare economics and to show whether the position defended by Sen and Mongin (social choice theory and the capability approach exposing the limits of welfare economics and moving beyond it) is genuinely representative of the relationship between these theoretical frameworks.