From 1759 to 1762, François Quesnay regularly appealed to Charles Richard de Butré (1725–1805) when he had to make numerical estimates or perform non-elementary computations (Charles and Théré 2008). Although scarcely mentioned in the secondary literature, Butré was indeed an important collaborator of Quesnay’s. The present article gives a detailed account of Butré’s contribution to Physiocracy by concentrating on the period from 1766 to 1768, when Quesnay conceived and published his last versions of the Tableau économique. We show that Butré developed a sophisticated economic model. Although his model contains significant deviations from Quesnay’s, Butré’s intent was to complement rather than criticize it.

Although James Mill considered production and education to be two objectives of global welfare, he claimed that the former was not always consistent with the latter. On the one hand, production is necessary to provide humankind with the means of subsistence; on the other hand, if individuals allocate all their time to labor to the detriment of their own education, “neither intellect, virtue nor happiness can flourish upon the earth” (Mill [1819] 1825, p. 30). Mill argued that this problem might be solved by finding what he called “the precious middle point.” This point deserves special consideration: it acknowledges that there is a way in which education and production might be distributed in society in order to promote the greatest global welfare. The aim of this paper is to explain the relation between production and education through the working of the precious middle point.

Keynes abandoned the theoretical approach used in the Treatise on Money, the fundamental equations approach, very soon after publishing the Treatise. One reason why he may have done so is discussed in this paper. Twice in 1931 someone pointed out to Keynes a third fundamental equation, one for the price of investment goods, an equation Keynes had not developed in the Treatise. This third fundamental equation may have shown Keynes that his fundamental equation approach may not be promising or fruitful.

The emergence of railroads in France in the nineteenth century raised new debates on analytical issues. The issue lies in the fact that they are natural monopolies. In this paper, I focus on Jules Dupuit’s work on the operations of the railroads. Curiously, he seemed to have defended two contrasting positions: on the one hand, he claimed that unlimited competition is the most efficient way to operate in the railroads; on the other, he stated that State management was the best way to run them. I aim to restore the consistency of Dupuit’s positions. I show that, for him, unlimited competition is not possible in the railroads and that it is not necessarily good for the welfare of society. Therefore, the State should regulate this sector. Then, I specify the conditions under which Dupuit believed the State should manage the railroads instead of offering concessions to private companies.

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we show that some theoretical continuities exist between the approaches of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith to the division of labor and the contemporary analyses of technical change and economic dynamics, which consider innovation as a process of technological creation. We thus offer a further exploration of the origins of evolutionary ideas in the history of evolutionary economics. Second, despite the existence of these theoretical continuities, we highlight the differences between the Scottish Enlightenment authors and the modern evolutionary economists on the issue of temporality and the place of history in their reflections.