Le double horizon d'attente de Charles Gide vis-à-vis de Marx : " Voilà ce que devient une doctrine scientifique, même de belle envergure, comme la doctrine marxiste, quand elle veut politiquailler "

In France, Charles Gide had been the first economist to analyse Marx's theses in depth. Translated into French by Joseph Roy, proofread by Marx and published in the form of fascicles by the publisher Maurice Lachâtre between 1872 and 1875. Book I of Capital met with a somewhat unexpected reception. An initial review of the German version, by the philosopher Eugène de Roberty, appeared in the columns of Emilie Littré and Grégroire Wyrouboff's journal La Philosophie Positive. Two economists close to the Guillaumin publishing house, Maurice Block and Emilie de laveleye, then commented it. But beyond these early exchanges, Marx's theories were ignored in French academic debates until Charles Gide's close analytical presentation of them more than two decades later. In accordance with the reading grid he claimed in his Histoire des doctrines économiques, Gide proposed a dual reading of Capital: one in terms of "theories" and one in terms of "doctrines". Janus bifrons: on the one hand, the academic texts, which reproduce the logical rigour of Book I of Capital; on the other, the texts of a citizen involved in the ooperative movement and solidarism, close to the pre-Marxist French socialists. As Jean Starobinski puts it, this dual perspective requires us to "shift the point of application of historical attention", and to analyse these two postures as embodying what the Konstanz School calls two "horizons of expectation" articulated here not diachronically, as in Hans-Robert Jauss, but synchronically