Economics as History of Economics: The Italian Case in Retrospect

The history of economics or history of economic thought (HET) is not an unambiguous term; what it denotes is something not unequivocally understood regardless of context. What it means today in the United States to identify someone as a historian of economic thought or to say that an article should be classified as B (according to the JEL descriptors) is not necessarily what it meant some years ago in Italy and other European countries.

In this essay we look at the peculiar Italian way of doing HET, which germinated in the late 1960s, blossomed in the mid-1970s, and withered away in the early 1980s, involving people who considered themselves and were generally perceived as economists rather than historians of economic thought.

Our purpose is to make a case for the historical nature of practices and motivations in doing HET, which impinges on the much broader question of appraisal, namely, what is good or bad HET?

The question of what defines a legitimate contribution to the history of economics subdiscipline was raised by Roy Weintraub in his editorial piece for the HES list (Weintraub 1996). Legitimate membership in the community of historians of economic thought, he argued, requires a style of scholarship (use of primary sources, circumstantial evidence, background knowledge, and so forth) that is standard among historians, but not among economists. His conclusion was that a “good” economist is not necessarily a “good” historian of economic thought, and vice versa.

This line of argument has become increasingly popular since the 1990s,¹ being applied to criticize both mainstream and nonmainstream economists as prone to write mainly “internalist” or even “Whig” histories. It is precisely the opposite of what was held in Italy twenty-five or so years ago, namely that only economists trained in the “right” economic theory could have a full understanding of the issues involved in past theories and therefore produce “good” history of thought. In the first section we give three examples of this approach; in the second we conjecture on its origin; finally, in the last section, we air some thoughts on how the present situation may blight future prospects.

The peculiarity of the Italian case originating in the 1970s was a way of doing history of economics as if doing economics. The profusion of articles and books devoted to matters of interpretation (mainly of David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes) marking that period² —not only in Italy, of course, but, we believe, there more than elsewhere—were meant or considered to be not exercises in doctrinal history but, rather, contributions to the production of new economic ideas.

This approach was characterized by two essential features: (1) the primary role assigned to textual exegesis; and (2) the almost exclusive attention given to the “great economists” (who did not, however, reach ten in number).

The textual exegesis approach may explain why the professional, personal, and intellectual context hardly came into the picture, while the “great economists” approach—perhaps in part because critical editions of the works and correspondence of the most famous authors were being made available³ —may explain why the need or passion for archival work did not actually arise.

In the following pages we give three examples that we see as representative of this approach, and that also proved influential outside Italy. They can be characterized by the quest for ideas to use—and, indeed, for ideas to reject—as building blocks for an alternative economic theory once their original and “true” meaning had been restored.

The aim of Marco Lippi's (1979) book on Marx was to reconstruct the multifaceted role played by the theory of labor-value and thus distinguish which of its functions could be performed by other analytical tools (above all by Piero Sraffa's theory of prices) and which ought to be...