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De-growth theses point to a renewal of critical thinking able to link intellectual research projects and social movements. This paper provides an overview of some of the strands of arguments that are mobilised to criticise the 'growth obsession', and explains why issues raised by de-growth proponents are at odds with the regulationist research strategy. Both approaches are then critiqued for missing the connection between crisis tendencies and capitalist social property. However, the Gramscian-regulationist inheritance of paying accurate attention to institutional forms in shaping macroeconomic dynamics is still much needed in order to explore transition paths beyond growth.

To Friedrich Hayek, only after a lot of trial and error did liberalism appear as a real doctrine, spurred by eighteenth century Scottish philosophers Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. But in the nineteenth century, while the disciples of those thinkers, ''mostly economists in the tradition of Adam Smith,'' were gathering around the Edinburgh Review, 1 ''this development was paralleled'' by the Benthamite Radicals, ''which traced back more to the Continental than to the British tradition'' (1973, p. 125). Hayek therefore insisted on the difference between the ''continental'' liberal tradition and the ''British'' liberal tradition. He wished the word ''Enlightenment'' were not used to refer to ''the French philosophers from Voltaire to Condorcet on the one hand, and the Scottish and English thinkers from Mandeville through Hume and Adam Smith to Edmund Burke on the other'' (1963, p. 101). To him, this view of the eighteenth century as ''a homogeneous body of ideas'' had ''very grave'' and ''regrettable consequences'' (1963, p. 102). In Hayek's opinion, a specific ideological current was to blame for this confusion: ''It was in the end, the victory of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals over the Whigs in England that concealed the fundamental difference'' (1960, p. 55). Indeed, Hayek considered that the merging of these two traditions-that of the Philosophical Radicals and that stemming from the theses of Hume and Smith-had given birth in the 1830s to the party ''which from about 1842 came to be known as the Liberal Party'' (1973, p. 125).

Résumé Cet article vise à mettre en évidence et à tester la cohérence analytique de la représentation hayékienne du « vrai libéralisme ». Pour montrer que les libertés intellectuelles et économiques sont indissociables, Hayek s’appuie sur quelques idées du libéralisme « classique ». Mais il développe en outre une conception évolutionniste de la concurrence et du marché. Or ce discours évolutionniste est incohérent dans la mesure où il affirme à la fois que le maintien de l’ordre « spontané » du marché repose, et ne repose pas, sur des règles construites.

The current crisis takes place within a long downturn and new debates on the future of growth are emerging. This paper argues that some theoretical insights made by classical economists about the end of economic expansion are relevant for the discussion on the prospects for growth in rich countries. We focus on three key mechanisms related to contemporary radical economic analysis: over-accumulation, rising costs of accumulation, and the balance between productive and unproductive labor and consumption.