Learning and Forgetting Marx’s Lesson: François Perroux’s Readings of Karl Marx

This chapter aims to address the question of the evolution of economists’s reception of Marxism in France, and thus to complete the more general history of the development of Marxism among French academics. To do so, we follow the relationship to Marx’s work of the economist François Perroux, a priori typical of the reversal reception of Marxist ideas in the 1950s, moving from open hostility to enthusiasm. Indeed, an incisive critic of Marx’s writings before the war, then head of the scientific institution of the Vichy regime, Perroux became in the postwar period a leading figure in the diffusion of Marx’s ideas in France. He founded the ISMEA (Institute of Mathematical and Applied Economic Sciences) which published the journalÉtudes de marxologie, and eventually penned the preface to Marx’s economic works in 1963 for the Pléiade. By following this sinuous path, we show that the way Perroux related to Marx’s work helps us shed light on the various shifts in Perroux’s relationship to the science and politics of his time.