The Limits of Performativity by Franck Cochoy Martin Giraudeau Liz McFall

Author:Franck Cochoy, Martin Giraudeau, Liz McFall [Franck Cochoy, Martin Giraudeau, Liz McFall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Finance, Economics, Theory of Economics, Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Political, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology
ISBN: 9781317691082
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

Prologue

Biographical works on Du Pont have been plethoric, but most of them went in either one of two different directions that we intend to combine. Biographies of the ‘honest man’ (Aimé-Azam 1934), of the ‘soldier of liberty’ (Jolly 1956), have depicted Du Pont’s vivid personality, sometimes brilliantly, as well as his family and statesman’s lives, in a way he had inaugurated himself when writing the autobiography of his training years (Du Pont de Nemours 1906; see also Du Pont 1933 and Saricks 1965). They have also tended to make him the indirect founder (through his second son Irénée) of the gigantic Du Pont de Nemours & Company chemistry firm, which has been a longstanding symbol of most shifts in economic history over the past two centuries, as a managerially and technologically innovative firm (Chandler & Salsbury 1971; Lamoreaux & Sokoloff 2002; Yates 1989), but also as one relating closely with the federal state, or developing mass markets (Ndiaye 2007). Thorough studies of Du Pont’s economic writings were also conducted by historians of economic thought who were sometimes interested in the man’s relationships with other economic and political theorists (Weulersse 1910). But, strangely enough, even the ‘economic biography’ of Du Pont’s life as a businessman that is presented in the ultimate book on Du Pont’s economic theories hardly connects these two aspects of the character’s trajectory (McLain 1977). Writings and actions are seldom mixed, and this may explain some interpretation problems, with Du Pont’s various biographies contradicting one another on certain points.

But Du Pont, although he had multiple lives, remained all along a particularly coherent character. As an intellectual, he was so coherent that he was even criticized as a man of ‘system’ (Riskin 2003). He also made his acts as adequate as he could to his thoughts, be it as a civil servant or as an entrepreneur. ‘In short’, as Gustave Schelle puts it in the hagiographic tone shared by most biographers of the ‘great man’, ‘all the acts and all the writings of this thinker were inspired by a constant sentiment, that is nowhere expressed more sincerely: the love of humanity and justice’ (Schelle 1888, p. 3). If one must depart from the hagiography, it is nevertheless difficult not to agree with such an insistence on Du Pont’s integrity. The reading of his rich epistolary production reveals how much he made efforts to make his actions fit with his thoughts, and conversely, not only by following some vague ‘constant sentiment’, but also by using in practice the intellectual tools he had conceived as a published writer, or by transforming present events into opportunities for renewed reflection on his theories. Letters, as a communication genre, do favour this kind of fit between thought and action, but it needs to be stressed that Du Pont’s published writings themselves also interacted closely with his personal experiences. It was the case, obviously, of his Philosophie de l’univers, which was written as a reaction to the Terror and which prescribed rules for individual behaviour that Du Pont then tried to obey (Du Pont de Nemours 1795).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.