caption death_date death_place school_tradition influences color nationality field birth_date image article_title name
françois simiand at work 13 april 1935 saint-raphaël french historical school henri bergson , Émile durkheim goldenrod france social economics 18 april 1873 simiand françois.gif françois simiand
 françois simiand
françois simiand

françois joseph charles simiand -lrb- 18 april 1873 -- 13 april 1935 -rrb- was a french sociologist and economist best known as a participant in the année sociologique .
as a member of the french historical school of economics , simiand predicated a rigorous factual and statistical basis for theoretical models and policies .
his contribution to french social science was recognized in 1931 when , at the age of 58 , he was elected to the faculty of the collège de france and accepted the chair in labor history .
simiand 's career was unusual .
like many destined to become influential academics in france , he entered the École normale supérieure and graduated in philosophy at the top of his class in 1896 .
however , he quickly became interested in law and economics and submitted a thesis on the wages of coal miners in france -lrb- 1904 -rrb- to the faculty of law rather than becoming an academic .
as a result , he foreclosed forever the possibility of a prominent university appointment .
thus in 1901 he became the librarian for the french ministries of commerce and labor , a post he held until the outbreak of world war i. from 1910 on he also taught economic history at the École pratique des hautes etudes , an institution which did not require a doctorate from its lecturers .
toward the end of the nineteenth century simiand joined the editorial board of the `` année sociologique '' .
he became a central member of the group as editor of the economic sociology section and served as its expert on statistics .
at the same time , as someone removed from the politics of french academics , he was at an institutional remove from Émile durkheim 's ambitions for transforming the french university .
simiand moved further into the administrative apparatus of the french state during world war i when he left his position as a librarian for work in the ministry of armaments where he played a prominent role in making policy .
after the war , he served for a year as the director of labor for the province of alsace-lorraine .
in addition , he took up a more permanent position as a teacher at the conservatoire national des arts et métiers .
a student of henri bergson and Émile durkheim , simiand advanced a view of economics as a social science grounded in observable phenomena rather than convenient assumptions .
this would imply a large program of historical and statistical research .
joseph schumpeter , who denied the existence of a french or an italian historical school despite the historical current evident in their economics , acknowledged the significance of simiand 's contributions .
in schumpeter 's view , simiand should be considered a french institutionalist .
simiand 's views on scope and method , which appear in `` la méthode positive en science économique '' -lrb- 1911 -rrb- , were applied in his studies of real wages , money and long economic cycles .
they were applied in criticism of the work of contemporary economists , as well .
