Guest Lecture: Marco Vianna Franco

Energetics in Central European Economic Thought

Marco Vianna Franco is a historian and philosopher of ecological economics. He is currently Marie Skolodowska/EUTOPIA-SIF postdoctoral fellow at CY Cergy Paris University, hosted by the research centre AGORA.

Knowledge on how energy flows shape and condition social systems and, thus, bear implications to economic issues, dates back at least to the late nineteenth century. Within German-speaking scholarship, there is a long but largely forgotten intellectual tradition bridging the fields of thermodynamics and political economy in a quest to understand how biophysical laws and constraints are intertwined with modes of social organization and provisioning processes. In this guest lecture, I will outline how the rising field of energetics was then assimilated into strands of economic theory in Central Europe (1880s-1930s). Topics such as economic value, resource accounting, and social reform will be presented as key questions in the works of scholarly figures such as Eduard Sacher, Johann Žmavc, and Josef Popper-Lynkeus. Offering a thorough theoretical framework to reconcile the natural and social sciences, these lesser-known thinkers and their ideas merit renewed attention today, not least given their potential to inform contemporary debates in fields such as ecological economics.

Date: 30 January 2024 from 14:00 to 15:30

The hybrid guest lecture is organised in person at the H008 meeting room of MIR in Neuville-sur-Oise and remotely on Zoom.

To attend the remote guest lecture, please connect to Zoom: https://cyu-fr.zoom.us/j/91066250542
Meeting ID: 910 6625 0542

The video will be online on the CY AS YouTube channel