Économie de la transmission : Péguy après Walras

The death of Charles Péguy during the First World War put an end to his work as well as to the enterprise of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. This space for intellectual freedom was not the fruit of a sacrifice by some spirit alien to economic questions but rather the result of a management that was deeply attentive to economic reality ? an attention that Péguy manifested from his very first article, when the young graduate of the Ecole Normale opened a dialogue with one of the recognized initiators of mathematical economics, Léon Walras. The letters that flowed between these two thinkers show the interest that each had in the ideas of the other, as well as the distance that separated them. While Péguy was not himself opposed to the application of mathematics in economics, he criticized the way in which it affected Walras?s theory by blocking consideration of the heterogeneity of economic phenomena. For Péguy, this meant not being able to consider from the outset that every economic actor inevitably is subject to or transmits social pressures. This consideration of the transmission economy would in turn make it possible to evaluate an organization not so much based on its legal form as on its capacity to absorb such pressures. From this point of view, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine no longer appears as an editorial enterprise plagued by its precarious financial situation, which consumed the life of its founder. Rather, it illustrates what Péguy never ceased to convey to his readers: an effort to offer an alternative to the typical capitalist corporation as well as to any form of statism. An alternative he could have continued to work on practically and theoretically if he had returned from the battlefield.