The History of Economic Thought in Spain and Portugal: A Brief Survey

In December 1999, the Iberian Association of the History of Economic Thought was created in Barcelona. The basic objective of its founding members (thirty Spanish and ten Portuguese) was to promote the organization of academic conferences every two years, so that, by means of this regularly held forum, greater visibility and projection might be afforded to the results of the research being undertaken in both countries.

The creation of this association was the culmination of a series of bilateral contacts that have intensified over the last ten years and that, in a certain way, also correspond to a particular process for the renewal of the scientific study of the history of economic thought being followed in both Spain and Portugal. The aim of this short text is therefore to provide an overview of this activity and summarize the current situation of the discipline in the two countries.¹ Although the central focus is inevitably directed toward more recent developments, it is worth remembering how it all began.

In Spain, the first histories of economic thought, or, to be more precise, the first reports and guides seeking to record the legacy of past economists, date from the end of the eighteenth century. In their writings, Gaspar M. de Jovellanos and, above all, Pedro de Campomanes (1775) have left us with valuable testimonies about the work of those authors who wrote about economic and financial matters throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both Juan Sempere y Guarinos (1801–21) and José Canga Arguelles ([1826] 1968) undertook a similar effort of providing a written record of past authors.

In Portugal, it was not until the end of the 1810s that the first systematic report appeared about the contents and significance of the economic doctrines and ideas of the past, seeking to integrate Portuguese authors into the context of the European production of economic literature (Lisboa [1819] 1994).

These pioneering historians of Iberian economic thought share at least one particularly interesting facet with their counterparts in other countries: namely, that they were simultaneously protagonists in and creators of their own object of study. In fact, all those who helped to keep alive the memory of their predecessors also later enjoyed unanimous recognition for the importance of their own works. In other words, acting as historians of economic thought represented for them both a starting point and a useful tool for making a general assessment of the significance of the discursive practices that they themselves continued by following either similar or distinct methodological, doctrinal, or theoretical paths.

In Spain, the compilation of such summaries continued into the second half of the nineteenth century, having reached a particularly important moment with the work of Manuel Colmeiro ([1861] 1978). Similar attempts at summarizing economic ideas were also made in Portugal during the same period, namely through the inclusion of brief histories of the discipline in university textbooks for the teaching of political economy, which were themselves given a certain systematization in the work of Moses B. Amzalak (1928).

In both countries, we are faced with a historiographic tradition that is important, above all, for its collection of biobibliographical information and the identification of sources to which a less specialized public would normally have difficulty gaining access. Or, in other words, it represents a type of approach that has eminently heuristic concerns and avoids any attempt to deliver a critical interpretation or detailed assessment of the significance of the works recorded and consulted. It would not be too outrageous to consider that such a historiographic tradition imposed its own authority and extended its influence over several decades, albeit with one or two honorable exceptions that were, nonetheless, not sufficient to break a hegemony that was maintained until the end of the 1970s. For the specific case of the history of Spanish economic thought, it is important...