An Activist Stance: The 1828 French Translation of Jeremy Bentham's Defence of Usury

Nathalie Sigot

History of Political Economy, 2016, vol. 48, issue 4, 705-731

Abstract: This article aims to understand the reasons why, in 1828, Jeremy Bentham's Defence of Usury was translated into French by Saint-Amand Bazard, one of the two leaders of the Saint-Simonians, even though it had already been translated twice, in 1790. Addressing this issue enables us, first, to question the role of translations in the diffusion of economic ideas and, second, to better understand the relationship between a key component of the Saint-Simonians' economic theory—their ideas about the banking system—and Bentham's criticism of the usury laws that prevailed at the time. We reject the possibility that Bazard translated Bentham's work because he thought the two earlier translations inadequate and instead argue that he used the translation as a method to diffuse Saint-Simonian theories on credit and banking.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-3687319 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:48:y:2016:i:4:p:705-731

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().