Gide, Charles

Gide, Charles (shärl zhēd), 1847–1932, French economist. A professor at the universities of Bordeaux, Montpellier, and Paris, Gide was an expert on international monetary problems. He also played an important part in the cooperative movement, and his Consumers' Co-operative Societies (1904; tr. from 3d French ed. 1921) is a classic in the field. His other works include Principles of Political Economy (1883; tr. from 23d ed. 1924) and, with Charles Rist, History of Economic Doctrines (1909; tr. from 2d ed. 1915).

Bibliography

See K. Walter, ed., Co-operation and Charles Gide (1933).

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Gide, Charles 

Born June 29, 1847, in Uzèc, France; died Mar. 13, 1932, in Paris. French economist, historian of political economy, and theoretician of the French cooperative movement.

Gide graduated from the law department of the University of Paris in 1874. He was a professor of political economy at the university from 1898 to 1920. In 1886 he joined the Society for the National Economy, created by E. de Boyve in Nimes, which subsequently became the base of the Nimes school of cooperative thought. He sided with the subjective school of bourgeois political economy. Gide propagated petit bourgeois “cooperative socialism,” mistakenly thinking that capitalist production could be reformed by the widespread development of consumers’ cooperatives. The Utopian, reactionary nature of this teaching was exposed by V. I. Lenin.

WORKS

Histoire des doctrines économiques, 7th ed., vols. 1-2. Paris, 1947. (Jointly with C. Rist).
In Russian translation:
Obshchestva potrebitelei, 2nd ed., parts 1–2. Moscow, 1917.
O kooperatsii. Moscow, 1917.
Istoriia ekonomicheskikh uchenii, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1918.

REFERENCE

Lenin, V. I. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 9, p. 341; vol. 19, pp. 345–54; vol. 45, pp. 369–77.