John Rawls est souvent perçu comme un partisan de politiques redistributives visant à apaiser les conséquences d'une économie capitaliste qu'il ne remettrait pas en cause. Cet article montre qu'il s'agit là d'un préjugé et donne un aperçu de la transformation du paysage des entreprises qu'impliquerait une société juste aux yeux de Rawls. Nous commentons les régimes économiques qu'il esquisse dans son œuvre et rappelons que le libéralisme égalitaire a en vérité des implications profondes et souvent insoupçonnées en ce qui concerne la propriété et la gestion des entreprises. Pour Rawls, la démocratie de propriétaires implique que les citoyens possèdent tout au long de leur vie des parts sociales dans les entreprises tandis que le socialisme libéral suppose la nationalisation des moyens de production et la socialisation de leur gestion.

Les industries de staples ont dominé le secteur forestier québécois avec l'appui de l’État qui a concédé à de grandes entreprises exportant une matière ligneuse peu transformée l'exploitation quasi-exclusive des forêts publiques. Une nouvelle loi en 2013 modifie le régime forestier et suggère une transition du secteur vers une économie post-staples. Or, en examinant le rôle de l’État de la période menant à la loi et de celle suivant sa mise en place, une lecture plus nuancée du nouveau régime émerge. En s'appuyant sur deux typologies d’État, ricardien et schumpétérien, cet article dépeint une trajectoire non-linéaire du secteur forestier québécois.

This article posits that institutionalized mythologies can create comparative production advantages. Myths shape collective identity, mobilize actors, and fundamentally reshape production dynamics. Myths are institutionalized in market rules, regulations and structures, leading to the reification of the myth. The myth functions as if it is true, not because it is true, but because it shapes the rules of production. Yet without the initial myth, specific production incentives—and even their institutional comparative advantages—would not exist. My theory integrates approaches from modernist historians (“imagined communities”) and economic sociologists (“imagined futures”) to explain how myths (“imagined histories”) shape contemporary market outcomes, using the example of the French wine market. This argument contributes to the historical institutionalist approach, which focuses on the historical power dynamics between competing groups and the present-day social and market consequence of their institutionalized solutions.

In the second millennium cal BC, a new metal conquered Europe: the alloy of copper and tin that improved the quality of tools and weapons. This development, we argue, initiated a framework for a new political economy. We explore how a political economy approach may help understand the European Bronze Age by focussing on regional comparative advantages in long-distance trade and resulting bottlenecks in commodity flows. Links existed in commodity chains, where obligated labour and ownership of resources helped mobilize surpluses, thus creating potential for social segments to control the production and flows of critical goods. The political economy of Bronze Age Europe would thus represent a transformation in how would-be leaders mobilized resources to support their political ends. The long-distance trade in metals and other commodities created a shift from local group ownership towards increasingly individual strategies to obtain wealth from macro-regional trade. We construct our argument to make sense of available data, but recognize that our model's primary purpose is to structure future research to test the model.

This article considers aspects of the use of class in sociology and anthropology since the period around 1970, when Neo-Marxism became important in the social sciences, and is concerned primarily with Marxist and Weberian uses of the concept. It considers changes in the use of class in terms of two dimensions. One is the degree to which class is placed in a more macroscopic or more microscopic frame. The other is the degree to which class is defined in more objectivist terms or relies more on the way that the people being studied use the term. It is argued that since around 1970 writing on class has tended to become more microscopic and subjectivist. This tendency is related to changes within the two disciplines and within society more generally. The article closes with a consideration of some of the costs of this changing scholarly orientation to class.

Much work in present-day political economy still adheres to an economistic understanding of how markets operate - evident above all in the tendency to concentrate on the disciplinary and constraining effects of globalization. Using American power in financial affairs as an example, this essay proposes a shift of focus towards the constitution of actor capacities, which will permit more accurate conceptualizations of highly leveraged forms of agency. To this end, it turns to the philosophical foundations of the American pragmatist tradition, exploring the way in which it can inform a deeper understanding of the enabling qualities of institutions, the processes through which actor capacities emerge and the operation of power.

Le contrat de régulation optimale d'un monopole avec deux paramètres d'information privée et d'antisélection (productivité et niveau d'émissions polluantes) est caractérisé. Dans ce contexte de screening bidimension-nel, un aspect d'économie politique est introduit en considérant l'objectif du régulateur comme le résultat d'un processus électoral majoritaire. En fonction du régime politique, deux types de contrats apparaissent : l'un est séparateur, l'autre mélangeant. Leur occurrence dépend de la confrontation des incitations sociales et privées qui résultent de l'arbitrage effectuépar le régulateur entre l'extraction de la rente informationnelle et le gain d'efficacité allocative.