Yves Guyot (1843-1928)


Yves Guyot (1843-1928)

Introduction

Yves Guyot (1843-1928) was one of the leading French laissez-faire economists at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century. He began his career as editor of several Republican newspapers and journals in the late 1860s and early 1870s when France was wracked by the turmoil of the Paris Commune and Franco-Prussian War. In the Third Republic he was elected to the Paris Municipal Council and in 1885 to the national Chamber of Deputies. In 1889 he was appointed Minister of Public Works. He was active in classical liberal economic circles as editor of the Journal des Économistes (in 1910 he took over when Molinari retired), president of the Paris Société des Économistes, a member of the British Cobden Club and the Royal Statistical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Among his many interests were taxation policy and opposition to socialism in all its forms.

Texts in the Collection

Yves Guyot, La Tyrannie Socialiste (Paris: Charles Delagrave, 1893). In HTML and facs. PDF

Trans.: Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism. Edited with an Introduction by J.H. Levy (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1894). In HTML and facs. PDF.

Yves Guyot, Les Principes de 89 et le Socialisme ((Paris: Charles Delagrave, 1894). In HTML and facs. PDF.

Yves Guyot, La Comédie socialiste (Paris, E. Fasquelle, 1897). In HTML and facs. PDF.

Yves Guyot, Les travaux publics (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1897). In HTML and facs. PDF.

Yves Guyot, Le collectivisme futur et le socialisme présent (Paris, F. Alcan 1906). In HTML and facs. PDF.

Yves Guyot, La démocratie individualiste (1907). In HTML and facs. PDF.

t	Yves Guyot, Sophismes socialistes et faits économiques (1908). In HTML and facs. PDF. ves Guyot, Socialistic Fallacies (London: Cope and Fenwick, 1910). In HTML and facs. PDF. [A better trans. of the title is "Socialist Sophisms and Economic Facts"]

Yves Guyot, La Gestion par l’État et les Municipalités (Felix Alcan, 1913). In HTML and facs. PDF.

Yves Guyot, Where and Why Public Ownership has failed. Translated from the French by H.F. Baker (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914). In HTML and facs. PDF. [A better trans. of the title is "State and Municipal Administration (of public works)"]

Yves Guyot, Les Causes et les conséquences de la Guerre. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1915). [PDF 23MB]

Yves Guyot, The Causes and Consequences of the War (New York: Brentano's 1916). [PDF 8 MB]

Comment: Guyot wrote a series of 9 aticles for the Journal des Économistes (of which he was the editor) as the war was unfolding between August 1914 and April 1915 [French version [PDF 16MB]. This was expanded and published as a book which was translated into English. It provides an interesting insight into the minds of the last remaining classical liberals in France before they were marginalised after the war.