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French Economic Growth: A Radical Revision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Rondo Cameron  and
Charles E. Freedeman
Rondo Cameron
Affiliation:
Emory University
Charles E. Freedeman
Affiliation:
State University of New York in Binghamton
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Extract

History is full of reactions and revolutions from which even the scholarly world is not immune. The revision in French economic history during the last two decades affords an example of one of the most complete turnabouts in recent scholarship. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of scholars, mainly American, believed that the problem to be explained was French economic retardation in the nineteenth century. Much was written about the unenterprising character of French entrepreneurs, anticapitalist social attitudes, the persistence of the family firm and the small farm, and other sociocultural characteristics that were deemed inimical to economic growth. The Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard (1948-1958) provided inspiration for analysing French entrepreneurial failure in terms of Parsonian sociology, and the classic retardationist view of French industrial development remains enshrined in David S. Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), originally written during the 1950s for the Cambridge Economic History of Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Winter 1983 , pp. 3 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1983 

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