Order and freedom in the international political economy: The development of the political economic thought of Jacques Rueff, 1922--1972 (France)

This dissertation examines the development of the thought of the liberal French political economist Jacques Rueff (1896–1978), and argues that his thought represents a distinct perspective in twentieth century European political economy. Rueff was a prodigious philosopher of modern political economic life. Over the course of his intellectual career he produced several thousand pages of political economic theory. This is the first analysis of his thought as a whole.; Rueff was deeply involved in French policymaking during the interwar years as an haut fonctionnaire and again in the 1960s as an informal advisor to Charles de Gaulle. Rueff served in the 1950s as a judge on the European Court of Justice. He eventually made a name for himself in international policy circles, when, during the ongoing international debate over the reform of Bretton Woods in the 1960s, he pushed ardently for a return to the gold standard.; Although Rueff's philosophy is broad, his most characteristic political economic argument was that inflation, by disrupting the price mechanism, leads inexorably to tyranny. He claimed that the gold standard was the best means for protecting against inflation and thereby protecting democracy.; Rueff's thought is shaped by a combination of his twentieth century experiences and his belle époque intellectual formation. This dissertation examines the genesis of Rueff's views in the early 1920s, and then traces how Rueff's perspective evolved in face of the dramatic events of the next fifty years. For a figure often considered by his contemporaries to be a relic of the nineteenth century, Rueff's perspective, when conceived as a whole, is surprisingly original. His basic conceptions of progress, nature, science, the state, the economy, and society—both national and international—make his perspective distinct within the main currents of twentieth century political economic thought. The Conclusion to this dissertation shows how Rueff differs from the Keynesians and planners in his belief that the powers of man are small in the face of nature, and how he is also distinct from the Monetarists in his willingness to accept a large and active state.