The engineer as judge: engineering analysis and political economy in eighteenth century France (original) (raw)
Related papers
2001
The purpose of this article is to highlight the originality of X-Crise, an Ecole Polytechnique association formed in nineteen thirties' France. Firstly il analyses the factors leading the French engineers to look collectively, for the first time of their history, at the big politicoeconomic problems of their epoch. Two factors seem particularly relevant on this matter : their epistemology and value system on one hand, and their perception of the theoretical and political impotence at that time on the other hand.Secondly this paper presents the main original theoretical elements that arose from the group's deliberations. Among them, it exposes the Guillaume brothers' macroeconomic model [1932], one of the very first macroeconomic model produced in France, and Potron's first application to economics of Perron-Frobenius's theorem (Potron [1911] and [1935]).
2007
This paper approaches the development of the teaching of mathematics among engineers in Spain during the 19th century. If among military engineers mathematics are always well represented without discussion, among civil engineers problems of corporate influence appear after the creation of the Faculties of Science (1857). Cet article étudie les grandes lignes de développement de l'enseignement des mathématiques chez les ingénieurs à l'Espagne du XIXe siècle. Si dans le génie militaire la présence mathématique a été forte et sans discussion, chez les ingénieurs civils les problèmes d'influence corporatiste commencent dès la création des Facultés des Sciences (1857).
Marshal Vauban, John Law, and the Loss of the French Tradition of Political Arithmetic
Social Evolution & History, 2022
A 17th-century tradition of British political arithmetic merged the empiricism of Sir Francis Bacon with an early version of statistical science. William Petty, John Graunt, and Gregory King were leaders in this work. They used no higher mathematics but only what English-speaking people called shop arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They debated how far statistical data should inform the decisions of statesmen, and that debate prepared the British political elite for their acceptance of state financial reform under King William III. This essay now draws your attention to the parallel suppression of the same tradition of early statistical science in seventeenth-century France. Using shop arithmetic, Marshal Vauban proposed a reform of taxation, but King Louis XIV rejected the proposal. Not only that. The king dismissed Vauban from all his offices, and the king suppressed Vauban's book, The Royal Tenth, thus preventing any wide discussion of Vauban's suggestions. As a result, no one ever prepared the French public to understand simple statistical data or to accept financial reforms under the old regime. When John Law tried to implement other reforms during the regency which followed King Louis XIV's death, the reforms failed because of this absence of public understanding.
This book reproduces the lectures delivered during a course held at the National Distance University’s associated facility in Segovia and co-sponsored by the university and Fundación Juanelo Turriano. Renaissance engineers is the second volume of a collection launched in 2012 with Roman engineering as a platform for the publication of the lessons authored by reputed specialists on the occasion of these courses. The book analyses the decisive contribution made by Renais sance engineers to land use planning and modern knowledge. It reviews the oeuvre of renowned engineers associated with the Spanish monarchy during that pivotal period and describes how they acquired the high esteem in which they were held by the governing class: building fortifications, channelling rivers, inventing devices and machines, writing treatises and describing the cities and territories visited in their travels. [A course coordinated by Alicia Cámara Muñoz and Bernardo Revuelta Pol; Texts: Daniel Crespo Delgado, Fernando Cobos-Guerra, Juan Luis García Hourcade, Nicolás García Tapia, Pedro Cárdaba Olmos, José María Izaga Reiner, Jorge Miguel Soler Valencia, José Ignacio de la Torre Echávarri, Alicia Cámara Muñoz]
Teaching Engineers in the Seventeenth Century: The Aula de Fortificação in Lisbon (Portugal)
Engineering Studies, Journal of the International Network for Engeneering Studies (INES). , 2016
In the seventeenth century, technical developments in the military field (construction, fortification pyro-ballistics, strategy) and in scientific instruments increasingly made the mathematical disciplines an universal tool. The aim of this paper is to analize the work, in this context, of Luís Serrão Pimentel (1613-1679) Chief-cosmographer and Chief-engineer in Portugal and founder of Aula de Fortificação