Postwar Third-Way Perspectives: François Perroux on National Income and Planning

The article focuses on François Perroux’s work at the second half of the 1940s, at the moment when he redefines his third-way ideas in terms of a liberal interventionist perspective. The point of departure is an interpretation of Perroux’s intellectual trajectory during the interwar period, as a way of understanding how his investigations in the field of national income and planning finally became an essential part of his third-way perspectives, previously formulated in corporatist terms but partially reshaped in the immediate postwar period. Particular attention is paid to the institutional work led by him on national accounts in the first years of the Institut de Science Économique Appliquée. Refusing to analyze Perroux’s contribution in terms of eclecticism, the article attempts to critically illuminate complementarities and continuities in the author’s analytical framework between the interwar and postwar periods.