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Economy was consequently his permanent subject of reflexion , in particular during the period of the german occupation, at the moment when Mines Administration which he directed in Nantes was somewhat idled . These reflexions were facilitated to him by his scientific formation which one knows it is an excellent school of rigorous reasoning and impartiality in the discernment. | ||||
| In thirty months of relentless work, from January 1941 to July 1943, he gets through a considerable work. He writes a volume of 1000 pages : "A la Recherche d'une discipline Economique - L'Economie pure" [ In Search of an Economic Discipline - The pure Economy ] that he succeeds in publishing in typed form, which represented in 1943 one actual feat whereas paper had fixed quotas and was practically unobtainable. It is this work which was worth the Nobel. | |||||
| What is much surprising is the fact that he was at the time only one autodidact in this discipline ! It is only during this time that he is concerned with finding and studying the works written by the great economists of this time like Leon Walras, Vulfredo Pareto and Irving Fisher. | |||||
| About this time of elaboration of coherent doctrines, Maurice Allais says us in his work "Autoportraits" (1989): | |||||
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My dominant concern was that of the synthesis. To fit together in the same construction the analysis of the real phenomena and that of the monetary phenomena, to associate analysis of the conditions of effectiveness and that of the distribution of the incomes, to connect narrowly theoretical analysis and applied economy , to attach the economy to other social sciences, psychology, sociology and the history, such were constantly my aims. | ||||
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It is this concern of a synthetic design of all the economic and social phenomena which constitutes the basis of all my work, and the close link between my work of theoretical economy and those of applied economy . It is it which explains the deep unity subjacent with all my works. | ||||
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In their development, the step of my thought never was to start from the theory to lead to facts but, quite to the contrary, to try to release from the facts the explanatory screen without which they appear incomprehensible and escape any efficient action . | ||||
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My work has met the need that I felt to understand concrete reality, and to give satisfactory answers to the questions which suggested to me the darknesses , the contradictions and the gaps of the existing literature. My work has thus represented for me a long effort, often painful, to release me from the beaten ways and from the dominant ideas of the time. | ||||
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At the beginning of my career, my desire to understand was justified by the major desire to act, by the concern for influencing the opinion and politics ; however, gradually, with the course of years, this motivation passed completely in the second plan, very far behind the desire of understanding. " | ||||
| These few sentences explain all the character and all the work of Maurice Allais. | |||||
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