François Simiand

François Simiand (1873 to 1935) was a French sociologist and economist, best known as a participant in the Année Sociologique and a member of the French historical school of economics. A graduate in philosophy of the École Normale Supérieure in 1896, he turned to law and economics and submitted a thesis on the wages of coal miners in France (1904) to the faculty of law, which closed off a prominent university appointment. He was librarian to the French Ministries of Commerce and Labor from 1901, taught economic history at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1910, and joined the editorial board of the Année Sociologique, where he edited the economic sociology section and served as its expert on statistics. A student of Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim, he advanced a view of economics as a social science grounded in observable phenomena rather than convenient assumptions, set out in La Méthode positive en science économique (1911) and applied in his studies of real wages, money and long economic cycles. He was elected to the Collège de France in 1931 to the chair in labor history.