French Liberal School

The French Liberal School (also known as the Paris School or the French Classical School) was a tradition of economic thought that flourished in nineteenth-century France, associated with Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat, and Michel Chevalier. Unlike the British classical economists, who emphasized labor theories of value and long-run equilibrium, the French liberals emphasized exchange, entrepreneurship, and the institutional conditions that make markets possible. The tradition was empirical rather than axiomatic, institutional rather than abstract, and skeptical of mathematical formalism divorced from observation. This methodological stance reappeared in the twentieth century in the work of Maurice Allais, who inherited the school's insistence that economic theory must be tested against real market data rather than against logical consistency alone.\n\n