Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinarity field that has appeared in the beginnings of 2000's. This thesis proposes a theoretical history of neuroeconomics. The emergence of neuroeconomics is understood as being the continuation of an older experimental research program, that starts in 1961 with Richard Herrnstein's pioneering works. This quantitative psychology of motivation (called here "neo-behaviorism") focuses on the study of matching behaviors. The development of neo-behaviorism leads in the 1990's to a concept that has played a prominent role in neuroeconomics: the notion of reward learning. This historical analysis serves first theoretical purposes. The framework of reward learning allows to specify neuroeconomics from other approaches, in particular from the psychological works of Daniel Kahneman. One of the main result of the thesis concerns the distinction between the evolutionist and sequential perspective of neuroeconomics from the kahnemanian perspective in behavioral economics. At another level, the aim of thesis is to explain the emergence of the discipline in the 2000's. It is significant to notice that the experimental results obtained in the 1990's aroused economists' interest only in 2002-2003, precisely at the time when started a heated debate about libertarian paternalism and "behavioral" welfare policies. I argue that neuroeconomics allowed to solve normative problems that were raised by these discussions within behavioral economics. Neuroscience is indeed implicitly influenced by medical concerns; neuroscientific definition of irrationality is therefore justified at a normative level by clinical criteria used to diagnose pathologies. Neuroeconomics is hence understood as a an economic regulation of mental disease. This "economic psychiatry" is conceptualized in reference to what Georges Canguillhem calls an "scientific ideology".
