Émile Louis Victor de Laveleye (1822–1892) was a Belgian political economist. Laveleye was born in Bruges and educated at the Collège Stanislas in Paris, even today one of the largest and most prestigious private Catholic schools in France. Laveleye studied at the Catholic University of Louvain and later at the University of Ghent, where he was influenced by the work of François Huet (1814–1869). Huet, a professor of philosophy at Ghent, is known for his attempt to reconcile Christianity with socialism in his Le Règne Social du Christianisme ([1853] 2010). Schooled in the language, literature, and history of France, Laveleye’s fascination with these subjects never wavered, but his principal writings were in the area of political economy.
It is perhaps unusual to include a nineteenth-century Belgian political economist in a twenty-first-century special issue of a journal devoted to the global cultural politics of luxury. However, rare among political economists, Laveleye...
