About

My PhD thesis discusses the different ways in which consumption has been conceptualised before the ascendency of marginalism in the late 19th century. Indeed, before the marginalist revolution, the concept was often denied a paramount importance. It was not central to the definitions of political economy. Moreover, consumption was not considered to be generalisable into laws in the main treatises of the 19th century. Hence, my thesis analyses these earlier economic discourses, when consumption was not systematically conceptualised as an “economic activity”. It therefore questions the etymology of the concepts of productive and unproductive consumption as well as the evolution of their meaning. The objective is to unveil forgotten ideas about this activity and to suggest alternative understandings than the ones which surfaced with the marginalist revolution and, to a great extent, still prevail today.