Volonté individuelle et ordre social L’Éducation sentimentale, un roman sans modèle

The economic models of the Walrasian type and realist novels represent society as a stable mechanical organisation, as well as the way in which individual desires are confronted there. With L’Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert writes a novel in which individual desire is lacking and where the social narrative is deprived of causality. He thus distances himself from a certain type of realist narrative, implicitly revealing the finalism that the latter has in common with economic models.