This book throws light on Edith Penrose's contribution to the theory of the firm. In particular, it relies on the analysis of her 1955 article, published in the American Economic Review four years before her magnus opus The Theory of the Growth of the Firm and entitled: « Limits to the Growth and Size of Firms ».

Sobriety, promotion of organic farming, these bioeconomic principles proposed in the 1970s by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen led to the commonly-made association between his works and the De-growth Movement.

This book acknowledges that there can be no reflection on liberalism without the concept of freedom but that no concept of freedom can be included among the different forms of liberalism. The two words which constitute the subject of this investigation refer to empirical or conceptual realities and a priori different chronologies.

D. N. McCloskey states, among other things, that the study of economic texts stems primarily from literary criticism; that mathematical models, highly valued by economists, are essentially metaphorical and constitute a genuinely original poetic genre.