Jacques Lemaire (27 October 1909, Lille — 26 March 1991, Blois) was a French layman who spent decades developing a detailed proposal for restructuring the enterprise and the state. His work addresses the distribution of profits, the basis of taxation, and the governance of the firm — and arrives at answers that remain strikingly relevant.
The back cover of his later book describes him as a "passionate witness to the social movements that shook France in 1936." In that year, a wave of strikes swept the country, culminating in the Matignon Accords — paid holidays, the 40-hour work week, and collective bargaining rights. Lemaire was 26 years old, living in the industrial north. What he witnessed evidently set him on a path of inquiry: if the relationship between labour and capital was so broken that it required mass upheaval to extract basic concessions, perhaps the structure itself needed redesigning.
His first book, Nos personnes et nos biens: Esquisse d'un monde économique moderne, was published on 15 February 1946 by Robert Laffont. The date matters: barely nine months after the end of World War II in Europe, France faced the question of how to rebuild — and for a brief window, rebuilding along fundamentally different lines seemed possible. Lemaire seized that window, offering a comprehensive blueprint for a fairer economic order. His words were published at the right moment, but they went largely unread and entirely unapplied.
Three decades later, he published his mature work: Le cou du chien pelé ([1], La Pensée Universelle, 1976). The title — literally "The Mangy Dog's Neck" — comes from La Fontaine's fable of the wolf and the dog. The dog is well-fed but wears a collar; the wolf is hungry but free. Lemaire chose the fable as a metaphor for the modern worker: materially provided for, but stripped of true economic participation.
At the heart of Lemaire's proposal is a simple observation: three factors make an enterprise profitable. Management (which Lemaire called le Patron) conceives and directs the venture. Capital provides the necessary investment. Labour (le Travail) provides the workforce that produces value.
All three are necessary. None is sufficient alone. Therefore, Lemaire argued, the profits of the enterprise belong to all three — not in equal parts, but in proportion to each factor's measurable contribution to the enterprise's revenues.
This is not redistribution. It is fair distribution at the point of creation. The profits are divided before anyone takes a share home — not extracted by one party and clawed back later through taxes or transfers.
Lemaire's most powerful insight may be his simplest. As the back cover of Le cou du chien pelé states:
"A salary is not a settlement; it is merely an advance."
In conventional enterprises, the worker receives a wage and nothing more. But a wage is only a down payment on the worker's true share of the value they helped create. The remainder — the worker's proportional share of the profits — is owed but never paid. Every worker in every conventional company is, in effect, a creditor who never collects.
The polemicists, Lemaire observed, debated the existence of exploitation endlessly, but nobody bothered to calculate by how much the worker was being shortchanged. He brought the mathematics. His formula answers not just "is the worker exploited?" but "by how much?" — and it provides the mechanism to correct it.
Lemaire argued that taxes on labour are fundamentally misplaced. They penalise the act of working — the very activity that creates value. His alternative: shift the tax base away from labour and toward land and resource extraction.
This insight — that labour should not bear the tax burden, and that taxation should draw from land and resources rather than from productive work — is the seed from which the concept of organic taxes later grew. Lemaire did not use that term, but the foundational logic is his: stop taxing work.
Lemaire did not stop at profit sharing. He proposed that the same proportional model should extend to governance. In his vision, the enterprise holds a General Assembly — like any corporation — but voting rights are distributed across all three factors in proportion to their share of the enterprise's revenues.
Workers do not merely receive a share of profits. They receive a voice proportional to their contribution. The enterprise becomes a partnership of its three constitutive factors, each with both a financial stake and a governance role.
He also proposed a variable-capital enterprise structure: workers accumulate shares through undistributed profits, gradually becoming co-owners of the enterprise they build. This is not nationalisation. It is not collectivism. It is the natural consequence of recognising labour as a co-creator of value.
Lemaire held that natural resources are a gift to the collective — not the property of whoever happens to extract them first. The commons belong to everyone; the role of government is to be their keeper, ensuring that the wealth derived from shared resources serves the common good.
This principle — that natural resources are a commons held in trust — connects Lemaire's work to a much older tradition in political economy, and it provides the moral foundation for taxing land and resource extraction rather than human labour.
Jacques Lemaire's work went almost entirely unnoticed during his lifetime. He had no institutional backing, no academic platform, no political connections. His second book was self-published through La Pensée Universelle — a vanity press that guaranteed no distribution or marketing. The ideas he developed over decades reached virtually no one.
This silence is itself significant. Lemaire's story is a case study in what the Pildem framework calls the Knowledge-Application Gap: the distance between what is figured out and what is ever heard about. The gap is not only between what humanity knows and what it does. It is also between what some people figure out and what everyone else ever hears about. Serious ideas produced outside institutional channels can vanish without a trace — not because they are wrong, but because no one with influence ever encounters them.
Le cou du chien pelé was digitised and published online in 2012 at jacqueslemaire.fr, where the full text is freely available in French. It remains largely unread.
Lemaire's core proposals — the three-factor model, proportional profit sharing, the abolition of labour taxes, worker governance, natural resources as commons — form the intellectual foundation of the Fair Share framework. His ideas were not adopted wholesale; they were carried forward, adapted, stress-tested, and extended to meet the conditions of the 21st century. But the seed is his.
The complete text of Jacques Lemaire's 1976 book Le cou du chien pelé is freely available online at jacqueslemaire.fr. The book was digitised and published in 2012.
A Fair Share —
A Fair Share of the Profits
Capital — Challenging traditional views of capital
Exploitation of labour
Factors of Production —
Factors of Production and the Stewardship of the Commons — The role of the government and organic taxes.
Labor Taxes: A Heavy and Unjust Burden — Why keep taxes that exacerbates social inequality, widen wealth gap and destroy the environment?
Labour: The Human Contribution to Value Creation
Organic Taxes: A Path Towards a Balanced and Sustainable Future — What if taxes could be a force for good?
Redistribution of Wealth: A False Solution — Instead, implement a fair distribution at the initial creation of wealth.