Research

The philosophy of public debt, and the history of political economy

My work brings the tools of philosophy to bear on economic life, and in particular on public debt — an object that is at once financial, legal, moral, and political.

Rather than treating sovereign debt as a purely technical matter, I ask how it becomes an institution: how a state's borrowing is justified, how creditors and sovereigns are bound to one another, and how the language of economics itself carries values while claiming only to describe facts.

Research interests

• The philosophy and ethics of public debt
• Public debt as an institution and “total social fact”
• The mutual shaping of representative government and the financial order — how public credit and political representation constitute one another
• The history and epistemology of political economy (18th–19th centuries)
• Normativity in economic discourse — positive, normative, and “norming” practices
• Sovereignty, social order, and public finance

The book

Normes et valeurs de la dette (1787–1791) (Classiques Garnier, 2022), drawn from my doctoral thesis (Lausanne / Paris-I, defended 2021, Faculty Prize), examines how public debt became an object of intense debate in France during the crisis of 1787–1791. It reads sovereign debt as a social and normative institution — bound to necessity, sovereignty, and the moral order — and analyses the competing ways in which economic discourse was used to describe and to prescribe, with the political economy of James Steuart as a central thread.

Current project

A forthcoming chapter (2026), “Première assurance-vie française et crédit public” (ed. R. Dartevelle), extends this work to the entanglement of early life insurance and public credit.

See the full list of publications