The concept of public service as we understand it plays a minute role in the theory of the liberal economists of the early nineteenth century. Frequently this concept was rejected and criticized because it was associated with the image of the Old Regime, its privileges, its monopolies and its moral economy. But the economists ended up thinking that for practical reasons the market needed public services. These were accepted if they were decentralized, cheap, and managed by private interests in conformity with a platform imposed by government policy. Since the 1840s and the emergence of new difficulties in the market economy, the debate on public services has opposed the liberals who were convinced that public services must be privatized and the republicans and socialists who wanted them to use for the people and under the control of a democratic State.