Que représentait Robert Gibrat (1904-1980) au Congrès international de philosophie scientifique de 1935 ?

Abstract

Robert Gibrat graduated from the École Polytechnique in the Corps des Mines, and successively authored the first thesis on econometrics in France on the law of proportionate effect, directed the École des Mines of Saint-Étienne, served as director of Electricity at the Ministry of Industrial Production under Laval’s first Cabinet and sat as Secretary of State for Communications in his second cabinet during the collaborationist Vichy Regime; which led him to be sentenced to 10 years of national indignity in 1946. This did not prevent him from pursuing a second brilliant career as a consulting engineer and senior civil servant at the EDF utility, where he designed the Rance tidal power plant before joining institutions linked to the development of France’s and Europe’s atomic policies. So, one could wonder what he may stand for at a conference on scientific philosophy. Part of the answer lies in his paper “Economics. Methods and philosophy”, provided one reads between the lines, and in the light of what he had brought to this discipline, personally or through his commitments in specific groups like X-Crise, the econometric think tank, the Ordre Nouveau political movement, and in administrations and industrial employers’ organizations. In a very turbulent period, all these rather ephemeral institutions were well situated at the crossroads of science, society and politics. Gibrat not only embodied drastically changing economics as they were challenged by the Crisis, but also a new science unified both in its rationale and capacity to exercise technocratic expertise (the word comes from this period) and, in the 1930s, a capacity to somehow lead the way out of this crisis towards social renewal. The philosophers of science could not fail to take an interest in this programme, and Gibrat could not fail to listen as they spoke of the unity of science.