Économie politique et économie naturelle chez Antoine-Augustin Cournot by François VatinReview by: Bruce LarsonIsis, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), p. 184Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/237396 .

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184 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 92: 1 (2001)

of the binomial theorem shows that Bolzano was still striving to improve his proof in the weeks before "Der binomische Lehrsatz" appeared. The note from 3 February 1816, in which he cor- rected an assertion from the preface of this paper, is also included in the volume.

Other topics treated in the notes published here are the concept of series, a catechism on imaginary numbers, and the representation of trigonometrical functions in series or products. Bolzano criticized the use of the unproven re- verse of a theorem.

KARL-HEINZ SCHLOTE

Fransois Vatin. Economie politique et e'con- omie naturelle chez Antoine-Augustin Cournot. (Pratiques Theoriques.) x + 470 pp., illus., in- dexes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Fr 188.

Antoine-Augustin Coumot (1801-1877) is best known for his Recherches sur les principes mathe'matiques de la the'orie des richesses (Hachette, 1838), which most readers know through Nathaniel Bacon's translation, Re- searches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth (Macmillan, 1927). By virtue of this work (in both its French and English ver- sions), and a large and growing economics lit- erature, Cournot has come to be known as the father of mathematical economics, a title he richly deserves, even though, as Reghinos Theo- charis has shown (Early Developments in Math- ematical Economics, 2nd ed. [Porcupine Press, 1983]), Coumot had many predecessors.

In Economie politique et e'conomie naturelle chez Antoine-Augustin Cournot Francois Vatin broadly explores the development of the ideas of a man whose knowledge he compares to that of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. But al- though Cournot's knowledge was broad (as is evident from Thierry Martin's Bibliographie Cournotienne [Annales Litteraires de l'Universite de Franche-Comte, 1998], a com- plete bibliography of Coumot's work and the relevant secondary literature), Coumot was not one to be easily moved by the intellectual cur- rents of the day. Vatin notes, for example, that the revolutionary ideas of Rudolf Clausius, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx had little influ- ence on his thought. Cournot, therefore, was not at the center of the intellectual movements of the nineteenth century.

Vatin distinguishes three periods in Coumot's intellectual output. The first (1826-1838) was a period of scientific creation during which Cour-

not was strongly influenced by mechanics, work- ing in the orbit of Simeon-Denis Poisson; this period Vatin describes as a movement from the economy of the machine to the economic mech- anism. Thus the work that economists see as Cournot's crowning achievement was also the end of his scientific output.

In the second period (1838-1851) Cournot's energies were largely devoted to mathematical pedagogy, his life having taken a new turn as a result of his marriage and his appointment as In- specteur Gen6ral des Etudes. Among the works he produced during these years were texts on calculus, probability, algebra, and geometry.

The works dating from the final period (185 1- 1877) are characterized by their philosophical cast, specifically a concern with epistemology. The Essai sur les fondements de nos connaiss- ances et sur les caracteres de la critique philo- sophique (Hachette) appeared in 1851; the Revue sommaire des doctrines e'conomiques (Hach- ette), a condensed version of his Principes de la the'orie des richesses (Hachette, 1863) came out in 1877. In this period Coumot explored the idea of the workshop of nature and human civilization and composed his most mature and personal works: Traite de l'enchatnement des idees fon- damentales dans les sciences et dans 1'histoire (Hachette, 1861) and Considerations sur la marche des idees et des e've'nements dans les temps modernes (Hachette, 1872).

Today Cournot is best known for his contri- butions to economics and, to a lesser extent, for his philosophical works, two subjects that Vatin examines carefully. Economists who read this book should arrive at a reassessment of the re- lationship between Cournot' s two principal eco- nomic works, the Recherches of 1838 and the Principes of 1863. General readers will benefit in another way, for Vatin provides a previously unobtainable view of how, under the influence of nineteenth-century intellectual currents, Cour- not became respectively a mathematician, a stu- dent of mechanics, a statistician, an economist, and a historian and philosopher of science. As these observations indicate, there is much that a variety of readers can learn from Vatin's excel- lent book.

BRUCE LARSON

Alain Desrosieres. The Politics of Large Num- bers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Trans- lated by Camille Naish. xii + 368 pp., bibl., indexes. 1993. Cambridge, Mass./London: Har- vard University Press, 1998. $45.

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