This year's lecture focused, as announced, on the general theme of " the state and the market ". This theme, which will remain the one for the next two years, takes us from the point of view of so-called positive economics - what is - to normative economics - what ought to be. Although the two terms refer to issues that are at the very least strongly intertwined, this distinction is traditional in economics. And in this sense, the Chair's lectures between 2000 and 2009 were in the realm of positive economics. Focusing on the organization, logic and modalities of public action this year shifted the emphasis to the normative.
In this 2009-2010 lecture, the theme was broken down into two parts. A theoretical phase focusing on the logic of public action in a complex society : the institutions that organize collective decision-making mechanisms must take into account the variety of citizens' interests ; they must also overcome the often concomitant difficulty of gathering relevant information. At one point, we applied the example of climate policy as a textbook case of public policy.
The logic of public action was hotly debated at the end of the eighteenth century, when the French Revolution overturned the previous order. Condorcet was one of the most visible protagonists of the intellectual debate at the time, with Bentham as a sometimes direct interlocutor on the other side of the Channel.
The lecture, and in particular its first part, echoed the arguments presented two centuries ago.