Charles Gide

Charles Gide was a French economist, teacher, and cooperative thinker who joined academic analysis to sustained social engagement. The Economic Schools and the Teaching of Political Economy in France appeared in the December 1890 issue of Political Science Quarterly, volume 5, number 4, spanning pages 603 to 635. The article examined competing approaches to economic instruction in France at a moment when Gide was helping establish the Revue d'économie politique and developing his own critique of dominant liberal doctrine. He taught political economy at Bordeaux, Montpellier, Paris, and later the Collège de France. Beyond the classroom, Gide became a leading theorist of the Nîmes cooperative school, arguing that voluntary consumer cooperation could combine economic efficiency, democratic practice, and solidarity. That institutional background gives the article particular weight: its account of economic schools came from a scholar actively shaping both teaching and reform. Gide's Principles of Political Economy and later writing on consumer cooperatives extended the same interest in how economic ideas enter public institutions.