General and Periodic Crises of Overproduction

Professor D'Maris Coffman holds a Chair in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at UCL's Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment where she is also Vice Dean Innovation & Enterprise.

Jean Lescure's General and Periodic Crises of Overproduction is a pioneering study of the causes and consequences of industrial crises in capitalist economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was updated periodically through five editions and now appears in English for the first time.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Jean Lescure on the Role of Solidarité in Industrial Economies and Among the Social Sciences; Early Biography; The First World War and the Globalization of Crises; Lescure and Aftalion on Interdependencies in the Economy and the Possibility of General Overproduction Crises; Methodological Pluralism and Interdependencies in the Social Sciences; Historical Narrative and Statistical Evidence in Lescure's 'Complex Historical Method'; Lescure's Liberalism and the Role of Government in the Recovery of the 1930s; Lescure's Complex Historical Method and the Use and Misuse of Statistics; Are Crises Inevitable and Forecastable?; Translator's Note; General and Periodic Crises of Overproduction; Volume I: The Phenomenon; Chapter 1: The Phenomenon; Section 1: A Historical Study of Economic Crises; Section 2: Theoretical Outline of the Alternating Periods of Growth and Depression; Section 3: The Role of Various Industries in the Alternating Periods Growth and Depression; Volume II: Causes and Remedies; Chapter 2: The Causes of General Overproduction Crises; Section 1: Theories Explaining Crises as Monetary Phenomena; Section 2: Theories Explaining Crises Through the Phenomena of Production, Consumption and Distribution; Chapter 3: Remedies for Crises; Section 1: Is the Crisis an Evil?; Section 2: Remedies; Section 3: Crises and the Working Class; Conclusion; Annexes; Appendix One: Bibliography of the Works Cited by Jean Lescure; Appendix Two: Bibliography of the Works of Jean Lescure; Index