Forging a “Positivist Consensus” in Interwar France: Quantitative Economics amid Convergence and Conflict

Abstract This article reexamines the transformation of quantitative economics in interwar France, challenging the prevailing dualistic view of the period as a choice between emerging compromise or renewed methodological warfare. We argue that the 1920s and 1930s were characterized by a “positivist consensus” based on a shared commitment to building a positive economic science and establishing statistics as the privileged form of mediated observation. However, we show that this consensus remained largely confined to the statistical domain, failing to resolve deeper methodological disagreements concerning the relationship between theory and data. By analyzing the rival visions of quantification within the Centre polytechnicien d’études économiques (X-Crise), we highlight the tension between Alfred Sauvy's conjuncturist approach, which was grounded in experimental, field-based diagnosis, and the econometricians’ formalist ambitions, embodied by François Divisia and Robert Gibrat. Our account reconciles existing historiographical contradictions by showing how this common positivist foundation gave rise to fundamental disputes over the epistemological boundaries of the nascent field of econometrics. Ultimately, these “small battles” were not just residual echoes of an old war, but formative struggles that shaped the development of economics as an inherently quantitative social science.