From one century to the next: minimum wages, economics, and public debate in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom (1890-2015).

Summary The renewed topicality of the controversies surrounding the minimum wage invites us to place them in a long history that begins at the end of the 19th century. This history is approached here by articulating three levels of analysis. The first two deal respectively with the study of the empirical and theoretical contents of economic controversies, and with the study of their methodological and even, beyond that, epistemological issues. A third level of analysis, according to a historical sociology of science approach, aims at recontextualizing economic debates by taking into account the modes of articulation of the academic sphere with three other spheres: the political sphere, the administrative sphere, and the sphere of civil society and the economic and social world. Based on the experience of the United States, France and the United Kingdom (and its Commonwealth), three major periods are distinguished - around the First World War, from the 1940s to the 1980s, and finally, from the mid-1990s to the present. Beyond the question of the minimum wage, the history of these debates sheds light on the evolution of labor economics during this period, and to some extent, on the evolution of economics as a whole.