General and Periodic Crises of Overproduction

This first authoritative English scholarly edition of Jean Lescure’s seminal work on business cycles is essential reading for all who study economics and and markets. Lescure showed that to understand market success and periodic failure, economists had to take a historical view, using high quality, long-term statistics— Jacob Soll, University Professor and Professor of Philosophy, History, and Accounting, University of Southern California “Lescure’s book is a powerful historical reminder that ‘the study of the general movement of business cannot dispense with the study of the main branches of production.’ Aggregate dynamics cannot be detached from the transformation of internal structures. This entails that the theory and the policy of economic fluctuations need a multisectoral viewpoint. The co-editors have done an admirable job and have provided an outstanding introductory essay.” — Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy This book is a classic in the empirics and theory of industrial fluctuations and an English translation has been long overdue. Its emphasis on overheating as the primary signal and cause of an approaching crisis is combined with a detailed reconstruction of the role of different industries in economic fluctuations. Lescure’s core and most valuable lesson is that the analysis of industrial crises must combine the sectoral and the macro levels of investigation, and that multi- layered interdependence provides the key for the differential diffusion of crises across industrial sectors and economic systems— Roberto Scazzieri, National Lincei Academy and University of Bologna Gonville and Caius College and Clare Hall, Cambridge. ‘Jean Lescure’s Des Crises is a lively and original blend of historical narrative, statistical evidence and contextually grounded theoretical construction that revolves around interde-pendencies between sectors and countries. The work is wonderfully contextualized and translated in this first English edition, which will be of great interest to students of economic crises.’ — Ivano Cardinale, Reader in Economics, Goldsmiths, University of London ‘Lescure’s book belongs to the early nineteenth-century literature on economic fluctuations, but is of striking actuality for its discussion of market and sectoral interdependencies within and between nations; generalized crises; and contagion in a globalized world. The editors and the translator deserve the gratitude of economists, historians and historians of economic thought for this edition of a classic treatise that may have suffered from a language barrier thus far.’ — Lilia Costabile, University of Naples Federico II and Clare Hall, Cambridge