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My question is addressed primarily but not exclusively to the French-speaking colleagues. 
 
In the French 19th-century economics literature, one often encounters the expression
"l'esprit d'association", "the spirit of association". Bastiat discusses the phenomenon in
Chapter XIV of his Economic Harmonies, and the expression makes the title of the book by
Alexandre de Laborde (D'esprit d'association, 1818). I would like to know if the
expression was coined by a particular author; also, did the French economists refer to
particular forms of economic organization or to economic cooperation in general; and
finally, why the "spirit", did they mean "something in the air"?
 
Adolphe Blanqui (History of Political Economy in Europe, 1837) identifies de Laborde as an
"economiste eclectique"; would anyone like to comment on the connection between "l'esprit
d'association" and eclecticism?
 
Yuri Tulupenko 
 
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