1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The scandal, for a scientific mind, is moral philosophy: dozens of competing systems, nearly identical practical conclusions, demonstrations built on undefined terms. Rueff's remedy, in this 1922 essay prefaced by Clément Colson, is to deny any real division among the sciences. Geometry, mechanics, physics, morality, and political economy share one structure — empirical laws drawn from experience, then "causes" constructed through axioms and definitions so that deduction can recover those laws; building a science is thus a création des causes. Moral doctrines become géométries morales, and utilitarianism, interventionism, and Marxian socialism appear as non-Euclidean systems, logically coherent yet untrue to present social conditions. Drawing on Walras but recasting need and utility as created causes rather than psychological measurements, Rueff sketches a statistical mathematical economics: no more a political economy of the individual than a thermodynamics of the molecule.
Dire qu'une théorie morale est vraie, c'est une affirmation qui n'a aucun sens.
English translation: “To say that a moral theory is true is an assertion that has no meaning whatever.”
Just as a chemical equilibrium shifts to absorb an external shock, an exchange rate moves to keep a nation's balance of accounts in balance—the analogy to Le Châtelier, Van't Hoff, and Lenz from which Rueff builds a theory of currencies as natural phenomena rather than political accidents. Working from wholesale price indices, he defines the 'disparity' between a currency's purchasing power at home and abroad, then demonstrates, mathematically and against 1912–1922 data for France, Britain, and the United States, that disparity moves to equilibrate the balance of accounts. He reads Britain's postwar unemployment as the cost of negative sterling disparity and dismisses the reparations quarrel: to compel Germany to pay while barring her exports is simply contradictory.
La vie économique, dans son ensemble, et pour un groupe important d'individus, paraît bien ainsi régie par la loi la plus générale de la nature.
English translation: “Economic life as a whole, and for an important group of individuals, thus appears indeed to be governed by the most general law of nature.”
Addressed directly to the champions of economic dirigisme, this open letter concedes their ends—higher living standards, human dignity, protection of wage-earners—and attacks only their means. Rueff's wager is that a price held away from its market-clearing level must produce either disorder or coercion: queues, shortages, black markets, rationing, and finally an economic police. Free prices, he counters, are the condition of a society of free persons, and price control is not egalitarian but malthusian, since it organizes scarcity instead of redistributing wealth. The volume pairs the Épître with Le Dilemme français, which frames postwar France's choice starkly: a plan enforced with the coercion of Vichy or Hitler's Germany, or liberated prices disciplined by a balanced budget and honest social intervention.
Dès qu'un produit est taxé, les acheteurs font queue à la porte des boutiques où on le vend.
English translation: “As soon as a product is subject to a price ceiling, buyers queue at the doors of the shops that sell it.”
A demonic invention that preserves appearances while destroying realities—so Rueff, reaching for Goethe's Faust, casts inflation, the hidden and unjust tax that rewards debtors and quick-adjusting incomes while ruining savers and fixed claims. Ranging from Poincaré's stabilization to West Germany's 1948 monetary reform, the lectures indict the gold-exchange standard born at Genoa in 1922, which let reserve-currency countries run perpetual deficits and, by duplicating credit, organized the boom that broke in 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Against national accounting and the modern faith in 'conscious organization,' Rueff defends the gold standard as an enlightened monarch that disciplines through incentives rather than commands, insisting that sound money is the precondition of European unity and of liberty itself.
L'Europe se fera par la monnaie, ou ne se fera pas.
English translation: “Europe will be made through money, or it will not be made at all.”
A property right, for Rueff, is a 'container of value' distinct from the thing it holds: its volume equals the value of its contents, and it may be filled true or left false. From this reinterpretation of Article 544 of the Civil Code he builds an entire economics of true and false rights—price controls, deficit finance, and the discounting of unbacked claims all manufacture rights that cannot be exercised, and such false rights are the real engine of inflation and disorder. Conceived as a monetary dynamics extending his 1927 Théorie des phénomènes monétaires into the problem of governing societies, the work defends legal-economic institutions as the 'technique of freedom,' warning that once the State injects false rights the road runs toward rationing, command, and the loss of human dignity.
Le droit, c'est la coque qui enveloppe le fruit.
English translation: “Law is the shell that envelops the fruit.”
Three days after de Gaulle's February 1965 press conference demanded that international payments rest once more on gold, Fred Hirsch put the objections to Jacques Rueff, and this Princeton interview records the exchange. Rueff denies being the General's scriptwriter but presses his long-standing argument that the gold-exchange standard is structurally absurd: dollars paid to creditor central banks flow straight back to New York, so the United States never feels its deficit and no corrective discipline bites. He defends a one-time rise in the gold price—modeled on Roosevelt's 1934 revaluation—not as an end but as the means to liquidate accumulated dollar balances without deflation, while Hirsch challenges him on arbitrariness, gold supply, international credit institutions, the CRU proposal, and British policy.
And the main consequence is that there is no reason whatever for the deficit to disappear, because it does not appear.
Persistent payments deficits do not prove that trade has failed; they prove, Rueff contends, that the monetary mechanism which should correct them has been switched off. Marshalling the French indemnity payments of 1871, German reparations, and the postwar dollar shortage, he argues that trade balances adjust through relative prices and cash-balance movements to offset every other international payment—reviving his 1929 duel with Keynes over transfer capacity and the alleged 'natural level of exports.' The American deficit endures, on his account, only because the gold-exchange standard returns dollars to New York, so the debtor never feels the loss. Equilibrium is too improbable by chance for its long survival to be accidental; the remedy is restored convertibility and a corrected discount rate, not administrative restraint on foreign spending.
Le principal caractère d'une balance des paiements équilibrée, c'est son extrême improbabilité.
English translation: “The principal characteristic of a balanced balance of payments is its extreme improbability.”