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The School of Reformers or Some Thoughts on Historic Opportunity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Alfred Sauvy
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In order to achieve celebrity and more or less to dominate one's time, not to mention those that follow, it has often been said that a necessary condition is to be born at the right moment, and also to die at the opportune time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 10 , Issue 39 , September 1962 , pp. 67 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © 1962 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Observations sur L'Esprit des lois, 1751.

2 L'Esprit des lois quintessencié, 1751.

3 Les Erreurs de Voltaire, 1770.

4 Les Conséquences économiques de M. Keynes, Gallimard, 1946.

* Donogoo is the title of a work by Jules Romains, in which some pioneers establish a town which they had been trying to find but never existed. - TR.

5 L'Economie libérale, p. 362.

6 Between the two wars, the American governments rigorously reclaimed the payment of inter-allied debts, applying the law and ignoring the mechanism of international transfers. The revaluation of the pound sterling in 1925 did not harm Baldwin more because it was "in line."

In 1936, Léon Blum, head of the Popular Front in France, reduced working hours at the very moment when Europe was arming more and more heavily, and when German industry had a work week of fifty hours. This measure, not studied from a technical point of view, weighed extremely heavily on the destiny of France; but public opinion did not criticize the responsible president because the measure was generous.

In 1946, the French Food Minister abolished bread rationing a few weeks before elections, contrary to the evidence of the facts. A few weeks later his successor had to reestablish rationing, with reduced allowances, because the bread had been used for feeding goats, sheep and pigs. Nonetheless, a few months later the first minister was named president of the financial commission, with no criticism of this distressing and ruinous but apparently generous measure.