Cet article présente deux arguments qui remettent en question le bien-fondé de la distinction entre les approches transcendantale et comparative proposée par Sen dans son dernier ouvrage, L’Idée de Justice [2009]. Notre premier argument s’attache à discuter l’emploi que fait Sen du concept de spectateur impartial smithien, tandis que notre second argument porte sur le concept de capabilité et le débat ayant cours entre Sen et Nussbaum sur cette question. Nous montrons que des éléments relevant de l’approche transcendantale sont indispensables pour une bonne appréhension de ces deux concepts, ce qui fragilise la position de Sen selon laquelle ces derniers relèvent exclusivement de la tradition comparative et remet donc en cause la distinction elle-même.

Human capital theory has suffered much criticism. The filter theory of education (Arrow 1973), the theory of education as a “signal” (Spence 1973), and the theory of “screening” (Stiglitz 1975), for instance, have seriously challenged it from within mainstream economics, and heavy criticism has also come from other paradigms, with Franck Bailly (2016) recently documenting the critique from the radical school. Within this set of ideas that flourished in the post-WW II period and challenged human capital theory, John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the dynamics of the education process is often neglected. In his original institutionalist and firm-based approach to the evolution of education, Galbraith placed great emphasis on the issue of the requirements of the planning system when he tackled the issue of human capital investment. More surprisingly—since he is unanimously recognized as the “founding father” of the “human capital revolution”—Theodore Schultz himself developed a substantial critique of human capital theory that shares some ground with Galbraith’s. The aim of this contribution is to provide new insights into the history of post-WW II ideas in the field of economics of education by reviewing Schultz’s and Galbraith’s respective analyses of education and highlighting their proximities. Both authors raise doubts regarding the idea that the aggregation of individual choices must be regarded as the relevant generative mechanism of the dynamic of education and the basis of the allocation of education resources. Consequently, both question the equivocal concept of student sovereignty.

This paper investigates the development of intermediate human capital in nineteenth century France. We perform panel and cross-section regression analyses to compare the effect of technological change on basic vs. intermediate human capital accumulation. Our contribution reveals that a shift in the kind of skills required occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. We show that steam technology adoption was conducive to the accumulation of intermediate human capital in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In The Idea of Justice, Sen describes two competing approaches to theorizing about justice: "transcendental institutionalism," in which he includes Rawls, and "realization-focused comparison," in which he includes Condorcet and himself. This paper questions the robustness of his dichotomy through an examination of the works of Condorcet, Rawls, and Sen himself.We show that none belongs exclusively to either tradition. Further, we claim that an appeal to the concept of metaranking, developed by Sen in the 1970s, enables us to overcome the distinction between the transcendental and the comparative traditions and in the last instance to reconcile the two approaches.