Technological Change and Economic Dynamics from the Scottish Enlightenment to Contemporary Evolutionary Economics
Résumé
The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we show that some theoretical continuities exist between the approaches of Mandeville, Ferguson and Smith to the division of labor and the contemporary analyses of technical change and economic dynamics, which consider innovation as a process of technological creation. We thus offer a further exploration of the origins of evolutionary ideas in the history of evolutionary economics. Second, despite of the existence of these theoretical continuities, we highlight the differences between the Scottish Enlightenment authors and the modern evolutionary economists on the issue of temporality and the place of history in their reflections.