In his 1947 essay, Tjalling Koopmans criticized the development of an empirical science that had no theoretical basis, what he referred to as measurement without theory. The controversy over the status of relations based on mere statistical inference has not ceased since then. Instead of looking for the contemporary consequences, however, I will inquire into its early beginnings. As early as the 1900s, Walras, Pareto and Juglar exchanged views on the status of theory and its relation to economic data. These private exchanges acquired the status of scientific controversy in the aftermath of the First World War, with the dissemination of Pareto's work. It is precisely this moment that I will try to grasp, when engineers began to read and write pure economic treatises, questioning the relation between theory and empirical problems, the nature of their project and the expectations that the subsequent development of economics has tried to fulfill.

Cournot Centre session devoted to the transformations that took place in mathematical economics during the interwar period.[-]

In order to explore the advances made on the economic issue of business cycles, I will present the work of the American economist Henry Ludwell Moore, who published four works on the question between the years 1911 and 1923. Within this framework, I will introduce several issues, such as the duality of empirical and theoretical approaches, the causal and semiological interpretations of the correlation, the notion of the ceteris paribus law in economics, the notion of non-probabilistic statistical mathematics, the development of the notion of the dynamic model at the end of the 1920s, the diverse analysis techniques of chronological series and their artefacts. I will also make reference to the contributions of other actors in this field.

Cournot Centre session devoted to the transformations that took place in mathematical economics during the interwar period.[-]