The Works of Jules Dupuit François Vatin, Jean-Pascal Simonin, Luc Marco To cite this version: François Vatin, Jean-Pascal Simonin, Luc Marco. The Works of Jules Dupuit: Engineer and Economist of the French XIXth Century . Luc Marco. Edi-Gestion, 1 (1), 2016, Classical texts in Economics and Management, Luc Marco, 978-2-903628-08-6. hal-01335642 HAL Id: hal-01335642 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01335642 Submitted on 14 Jul 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The Works of Jules Dupuit 1 Collection “Classical texts in Economics and Management” 1. Jules DUPUIT. 2. Henri FAYOL (forthcoming in 2016). 3. Frederick Winslow TAYLOR (forthcoming in 2017). We would like to thank the members of the GEAPE (now the GRANEM) who contributed to this work with their assistance, comments or suggestions, namely Michèle Favreau, Philippe Le Gall and Daniel Martina, as well as Philippe Abecassis, whose computer skills were so indispensable. Thanks are also due to Syl- vain Bertoldi, curator of the Municipal Archives in Angers, for fa- cilitating our access to material on Dupuit and providing the illus- trations reproduced in this book. 2 François VATIN and Jean-Pascal SIMONIN (editors) With the collaboration of Chris HINTON (translator) THE WORKS OF JULES DUPUIT Engineer and Economist ofthe French XIXth Century With a grant from the CEPN’s University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité and a support of the GEAPE (University of Angers) ÉDI-GESTION Saint-Denis (France) 2016 3 ISBN : 978-2-903628-08-6 EAN : 9782903628086 © Luc Marco and Edi-Gestion, 2016. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword to this edition / by François Vatin and Jean-Pascal Simonin/ p. 7 1. Jules Dupuit : Overshadowed by his own reputation/ by François Vatin and Jean-Pascal Simonin / p. 15 2. Jules Dupuit, 1804-1866, Chief Engineer of Maine-et-Loire, 1844- 1850, by Georges Reverdy / p. 25 I. From engineering calculus to the theory of utility / p. 45 3. Machinery and taxation: Jules Dupuit, political economy and in- dustrial mechanics, by Bernard Grall and François Vatin / p. 47 4. From maintaining roads to measuring utility: Dupuit's substitu- tion calculus (1842-1844), by Bernard Grall / p. 81 5. Dupuit on domestic water supply and pricing, by Konstantinos Chatzis and Olivier Coutard / p. 95 6. The "monautopoly" controversy: Dupuit and the issue of intellec- tual property, by Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux / p. 123 7. Jules Dupuit and the subsistence problem, by Jean-Pascal Si- monin / p. 139 5 II. Dupuit’s economic analysis / p. 215 8. Dupuit’s theory of international specialization: formalization and critical evaluation, by Jean-Pascal Simonin / p. 217 9. Fertility and life expectancy: the analyses of Dupuit, Legoyt and Bertillon, by Philippe Compaire and Jean-Pascal Simonin / p. 249 Bibliographic references / p. 289 Illustrations / p. 321 * TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Letter of Jules Dupuit / p. 321 2. Bridge of Verdun (or Center Bridge): two views / p. 323 3. Drawings of Jules Dupuit / p. 324 4. Other drawings of Jules Dupuit / p. 325 5. Plan of a new road in Angers / p. 327 6. Drawing of Jules Dupuit on a water distribution project / p. 328 7. Collapse of a bridge in 1850 / p. 329 8. View of the Angers’ center / p. 330 9. Portrait of Jules Dupuit / p. 331 6 Foreword to this edition In Memory of Bernard Grall (1962-1997) who renewed the reading of engineers’ economic thought. N its French version, this book was published in 2002 by the Angers I University Press. Strange as it may seem, this is the first volume dedi- cated to Jules Dupuit in French literature. We find, in the catalog of the ―Bibliothèque Nationale de France‖, only two other references with ―Jules Dupuit‖ in the title: the re-edition of a set of Dupuit’s texts by Mario Bernardi in 1933 in Turin, Italy, and a twenty-nine paged booklet containing the speeches of René Roy, François Divisia and Daniel Bou- tet. These speeches were given during a memorial session at the ―École nationale des Ponts-et-chaussées‖ in January 1945 in honor of Jules Du- puit to celebrate the centenary of his famous 1844 ―Mémoire‖1. The Anglo-Saxon literature is not much richer, with two books: the collection of texts gathered by Mark Blaug in 1992 and devoted to three ―precur- sors‖ of ―neoclassical‖ economics: Heinrich von Thünen, Augustin Cournot and Jules Dupuit, and in 1999, the book of Robert Ekelund and Robert Hébert on Jules Dupuit and the engineers2. This literature is very small but, if we look at it more closely, we see that it is actually concerned with a single text: the 1844 ―Mémoire‖ on the utility of public works, considered since the late nineteenth cen- tury, as one of the founding documents of the ―neoclassical‖ tradition3, 1Jules Dupuit. De l'utilité et de sa mesure. Textes choisis et republiés par Mario de Bernar- di, Turin, La Riforma sociale et Paris, Marcel Giard, 1933. René Roy, Daniel Boutet, François Divisia, Jules Dupuit et son œuvre économique. [Séance commémorative en l'hon- neur de Jules Dupuit... à l'occasion du centenaire de son premier mémoire « De la Me- sure de l'utilité des travaux publics »], Paris, École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, 1945. 2Johann von Thünen, 1783-1850, Augustin Cournot, 1801-1877, Jules Dupuit, 1804-1866, selected texts edited by Mark Blaug, Aldershot (Great-Britain), E. Elgar, 1992. Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and Robert F. Hébert.Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. 3The edition of De Bernardi combines this memoir and a few other texts with the same central theme. 7 but also as the basis of pricing theories. A systematic analysis of all the articles on Dupuit throughout the twentieth century would lead to the same result. In contrast, this book is the first to have tried to capture this author in all dimensions of his work. It is the product of a meeting be- tween the two directors of the book, who have approached Dupuit each in an original way. Jean-Pascal Simonin discovered Dupuit’s texts, up until now, totally neglected, concerned with food shortages and about demography, making Dupuit a somewhat paradoxical precursor of the theory of demographic transition. François Vatin, associated with Ber- nard Grall, read his economic theory in the light of industrial mechanics tradition4, but also of the political economy of Jean-Baptiste Say and Pellegrino Rossi, these two crossed origins of inspiration. Taken out of the single question of the genesis of the ―neoclassic- al‖ theory of value-utility, the work of Jules Dupuit was becoming more profound. In order to take measure of this, it was necessary to place it in its time, instead of pulling it into the future and take it into consideration in its entirety, rather than to confine one’s self to one text and its annex- es. This is what we aim to do in this volume by asking a number of col- leagues who were not specialists of Dupuit, but specialists of the ques- tions dealt by Dupuit. We invited them to analyze Dupuit’s thoughts in their respective fields, in the light of texts contemporary of Dupuit’s works. Through this approach, we believe we have thus opened a num- ber of new perspectives for the interpretation of Dupuit’s thought, in- cluding understanding of the text, indeed fundamental, published in 1844. From the figure of Dupuit, it is also the entire history of the French economic thought of the nineteenth century, long neglected, which takes on a new dimension. We know that Joseph Schumpeter, in particular, considered with condescendence this French nineteenth cen- tury economic thought, while contrasting it with these who he consi- dered as three ―geniuses‖, Dupuit, Cournot and Walras, whom we should therefore totally isolate from their context5. However this is not 4This rereading of Dupuit’s work was inspired by previous work of François Vatin showing the economic foundation of industrial mechanics, Le travail, économie and physi- que (1780-1830), Paris, PUF, 1993. This book aims to show that the mechanical concept of ―labor‖ and that of ―yield‖, from what which it infers, are inherently economics. 5Joseph Schumpeter, Histoire de l’analyse économique (1954), French traduction, Paris, Gallimard, 1983, tome 3, p. 130. 8 historian approach, and, at the opposite we must to fully set down such writers, here Dupuit, in the thought of their time and their environment. Since this book came out, Yves Breton and Gérard Klotz pub- lished in two-volumes a critical edition of the Oeuvres économiques complètes of Jules Dupuit6. These two volumes provide considerable material to francophone readers, bringing together a large number of scattered publications and also unpublished texts. This is an extremely valuable work. The expression of complete economic works is neverthe- less problematic. It has been used to show that not all of the Dupuit’s texts were published in theses volumes, as everything that the publish- ers,considered fell within his engineering work was left out. In order to compensate for this, they asked Konstantinos Chatzis to write a long and valuable study on this topic7. The problem with this editorial decision is not so much the fact that Dupuit’s work was not published in its entire- ty, rather the way the conceptualization of what falls within the realms of economy thought was proposed.