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avoir exposé position sur conduite guerre d'indépendance, l'article se divise en trois parties. Dans la première, nous rendons compte de la position de Smith à propos des relations commerciales existant entre la Grande-Bretagne et ses colonies américaines. On montre que, selon Smith, ces relations ont été mutuellement profitables, tant du point de vue économique que du point de vue militaire, parce qu'elles ont mis en place un système de marchés complémentaires.
Cependant la seconde partie montre que Smith insiste sur le fait que cette politique commerciale est fondamentale viciée, dans la mesure où le rapide taux de croissance en Amérique risque d'être freiné par les contraintes qui lui sont imposées. Selon Smith, cette stratégie commerciale est également viciée dans la mesure où le taux de croissance de la Grande-Bretagne est aussi affecté par les relations avec l'Amérique. La dernière section de l'argumentaire étudie la solution qui avait la préférence de Smith : une union organique, qui aurait éventuellement été accompagnée par un transfert du pouvoir économique et politique à Philadelphie.

This article is not the work of an expert on the period in question (see Robinson, 1971; Rheinwald, 1977); rather it is a commentary on a book whose half‐century has just passed almost unnoticed. In a sense the argument involves a further visit to what J.A. Schumpeter once described as the "lumber room" of historical knowledge, although this particular visit is prompted neither by nostalgia nor piety, but rather by the conviction that Chamberlin still has much to teach those interested in the theory of the firm and in the wider area of industrial economics. The article is also prompted by the conviction that the conventional textbook accounts of Chamberlin's work have introduced misleading simplifications in pursuing the qualities of coherence and precision in the presentation of ideas.

This article does not constitute a commentary on George Shackle either as an economist or as an historian. Rather it sets out to explain the reference to Smith which was introduced to the foreword of the 1983 edition of The Years of High Theory, and further to elaborate some striking similarities between two philosophers whose writings on the origin of theory are separated by more than 200 years.

Der Beitrag prüft die Beziehungen, die zwischen den einzelnen Bereichen des unvollendeten Smithschen Systems bestehen, das Ethik, Rechtslehre und Volkswirtschaft umfaßte. Dabei folgen die Ausführungen dem Zusammenhang der beiden Hauptwerke, "Theory of Moral Sentiments" und "Wealth of Nations", und den Vorlesungen, mit denen Smith seine Studenten in sein Denken einführte. Es wird gezeigt, daß das ethische Argument verdeutlicht, wie allgemeine Maßstäbe des Verhaltens, einschließlich solcher des Rechts, entstehen. Andererseits zeigt die Erörterung der Rechtslehre, wie Regierungsgewalt entsteht und sich im Laufe der Zeit entwickelt, und trägt gleichzeitig zur Erhellung des Inhalts von Verhaltensmaßstäben bei, die sich in verschiedenen Gesellschaften zur gleichen Zeit und in der gleichen Gesellschaft zu verschiedenen Zeiten manifestieren. Sichtbar wird auch, daß die Erörterung der Ökonomie auf psychologischen Argumenten beruht. (GF2)

The Preliminary Argument The fifteen years following the end of the Great War saw considerable activity amongst economists concerned with competitive structures and the "firm". As has been argued elsewhere much of this work may be interpreted as an attack on Marshall's treatment of the subject with a view to replacing it by a more "rigorous" and formal analysis. E. H. Chamberlin to a very large extent stands apart from these developments, as he makes plain in the "Origin and Early Development of Monopolistic Competition Theory" (1961). Serious work on his thesis apparently began in 1924, was largely completed in 1926 and the study filed in the following year. This means that Chamberlin's "discovery" of the curves of marginal cost and marginal revenue was made quite independently of his English and German colleagues. Further, as Chamberlin himself made clear, the thesis had no link either with Sraffa or the Symposium of 1931: "Nor did the Book itself attack Marshall…on any of the issues there involved" (ibid., p. 532). Indeed, he always insisted that his work was an attack "not on Marshall, but on the theory of perfect competition" (ibid., p. 540). He might have added that Monopolistic Competition is essentially Marshallian both in its style of reasoning and in the pre‐occupation with realism; a pre‐occupation which led Chamberlin to play down the operational significance of the marginal curves while recognising their importance in a technical sense (1957, pp. 274–76).