Finance, violence et justice selon Blaise Pascal

This text aims at identifying and discussing the content and present meaning of Blaise Pascal's contribution to the understanding of justice in economic matters: which inequalities in terms of wealth, status and power are acceptable or not in a country or a community? Such a project faces a difficulty and a paradox. The difficulty is that economics as a separate discipline does not exist in Pascal's times; the paradox lies in the fact that while Pascal was politically conservative, his heirs in the XXth century converge in a strongly critical stance against capitalism and established order. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. In the first step, we briefly situate Pascal's approach in its historical context, by comparing it to the views of other authors of his time who are considered as forerunners of political economy. In this second, we discuss the content of the legacy as identified and used in the XXth century, by comparing Pascal's statements on justice to the conceptions of his heirs, in order to pinpoint convergences and divergences. The last step adopts an epistemologic and genealogic stance. We take into consideration the long-term changes in knowledge modalities leading to the "human sciences" and among them to "positive" and "normative" economics, in order to set and discuss the meaning of the references to Blaise Pascal in contemporary debates on economic and social justice.