This year's lecture focused, like last year's, on the general theme of " the state and the market ". This theme took us from the point of view of so-called positive economics - what is - to normative economics - what ought to be. Although the two labels 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 field of positive economics. The 2009-2010 lecture focused on the organization, logic and modalities of public action. The 2010-2011 lecture focused on taxation and social insurance, the term "social insurance" being taken in a broad sense (even if, in fact, most of the lecture was devoted to fiscal issues - impôt - rather than para-fiscal social security issues). The issues addressed are at the heart of the economic policy debate, if not at the heart of the political debate altogether.
The theoretical perspective adopted in the lecture (as the title of the Chair invites us to do) is obviously essential. But it sheds more light on the upstream side of the public debate itself, both because it mobilizes a mainly qualitative argument and because it does not decide between the differences of opinion and interest that legitimately confront each other in democratic debate.