Studies in the History of Latin American Economic Thought (review)

Few intellectual histories of Latin America have found their way to press over the past decade or so, and Routledge has done a service by including in their "History of Economic Thought" series, Oreste Popescu's collection of essays, which first appeared in Spanish (Bogotá, 1986). As Popescu points out in his introduction, there has been scant recognition of Latin Americans' contributions to the development of economic thought. This book offers a partial corrective by exploring the economic ideas of nearly two dozen men from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century; only the last three brief chapters out of seventeen deal with figures of the twentieth century, and the vast majority are of colonial origin.

Oreste Popescu, Rumanian by birth, has spent much of his professional life in Latin America and has devoted much of that to the study of Latin American economic thought. This book is part of that effort, and it is the product of enormous erudition and scholarship. Its essays provide fascinating glimpses into a diverse set of ideas; I know of no other English-language source that offers such sustained and caring and careful attention to the topic. Arranged chronologically, the seventeen chapters include essays on scholastic economics, the quantity theory of money, early versions of development thought, as well as intellectual biographies of Juan de Matienzo, José Cardiel, Manuel Belgrano, Esteban Echeverría, and Raúl Prebisch, among others, with shorter discussions of the economic ideas present in the writings of such prominent figures as Christopher Columbus, Bartolome de las Casas, and Vasco de Quiroga.

Most of the subjects of Popescu's study are engaged not in the lifelong development of economic theory or policy, and few indeed might in any fashion be termed "economists" by profession. Rather, most are elite individuals who are drawn to observe and comment on the material aspects of New World society. One gets a vivid sense throughout the book of a set of colonial intellectuals powerfully drawn to the challenge of making sense of the colonial economy and of the social relationships which composed it.

Several themes run through many of Popescu's topics and individuals. The central tenets of liberalism--individual liberty, market forces, laissez faire, and private property--are recurring in the writings of many Latin Americans from surprisingly early in the colonial period. Never, however, do we see the expression of whole-cloth liberalism. Rather, authors might advocate limited free trade, or espouse individual liberty, or explain prices by relative scarcity, but each is tentative and nearly always balanced by an undercurrent of suspicion of liberty and markets, or an awareness that politics often shapes (or, more normatively, should shape) markets for political ends. While we are often surprised, for instance, by the market-based explanations for relative price differences in the markets of Potosí, Lima, and Spain, and by not infrequent homages to liberty, we are perhaps less surprised by a recurring concern for the problems of persistent social inequalities. In the sample of writers selected by Popescu, this theme becomes more insistent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and culminates in the writings of Esteben Echeverría of Argentina, contemporary with the early European socialists.

While this volume should provide an invaluable library reference to anyone interested in the intellectual context for economic thought in Latin America, it is a book most useful to those well-versed in economic thought and its history. Popescu examines the ways in which writers discussed directly or indirectly such concepts as bullionism, theories of value and of trade, purchasing power, the just price, the quantity theory of money, interventionism, a family wage, and the role of supply and demand. Each discussion provides fascinating insight into the degree to which learned Latin Americans of the colonial era observed the material world around them and sought to explain what they saw...