James C.W. Ahiakpor wrote:  
  
> In an effort to rescue some useful meaning from Keynes's famous quip "In   
> the long run we are all dead," Nicholas J. Theocarakis first posts a text   
> in French which I would not trouble myself to try and read or understand.   
> It's been a rather long time since I took lessons in reading French.  (Why   
> wouldn't he translate the text, anyhow?)  
  
  
With the utmost deference to Ahiakpor, whose other communications I often   
enjoy, I should like to suggest that a reading knowledge of French is   
necessary for useful scholarship in the history of economic thought. The   
great majority of important texts in the history of our discipline between   
c. 1620 - c. 1800 were written in French. This is because France in the 17th   
and 18th CC was like Britain in the 19th C, and the USA in the 20th C: the   
richest and most powerful nation in the world, attracting scientists,   
artists, scholars etc from many other countries, and at the centre of   
philosophical and scientific culture. In the 18th C everyone had to know   
French just as today everybody has to know English. (As late as the 1820s   
J.B. Say corresponded with his English fellow-economists in French.)  
  
Theocarakis, I assume, paid us the courtesy of  treating us like serious   
students of HET, and did not wish to insult us by translating a very   
straightforward passage from a well-known source.  
  
  
Anthony Waterman