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