In search of a self-regulating monetary order: An essay review of Jacques Rueff's The Social Order

Jacques Rueff (1896−1978) was among the most important French economists of the 20th century, combining academic writing with policymaking. He advised Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré on the monetary and fiscal reforms of 1926. The following year he published a noteworthy monetary theory text, Théorie des phénomènes monétaires: Statique [The Theory of Monetary Phenomena: Statics] (Rueff, 1927). In the 1930s he held important positions in the Ministry of Finance. In 1939 he became a deputy governor of the Bank of France but was dismissed from that post by the Vichy regime in 1941 for his Jewish ancestry. He wrote The Social Order between 1941 and 1944, published in French in 1945.

Rueff was a leading interwar advocate of restoring the classical gold standard, a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. In the 1950s he became a key economic policy adviser to French President Charles de Gaulle and a leading critic of the Bretton Woods system. The Monetary Sin of the West (Rueff, 1972), his best-known work in English, compiles his accurate analyses of the system’s internal contradictions (and his less accurate prediction that it a deflationary crisis would follow its demise).

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