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This detailed volume explores the role and actions of economists in US, Japanese and various European parliaments in the critical period between 1848 and 1920. Featuring chapters written by an international array of contributors from both economics and history, the book provides fascinating insights into the parliamentary life in the period. It highlights the often pivotal role of economists within each administration; examines their influence on policy making, their relationships with other MPs, civil servants, external economic associations and looks at the influence of public opinion on economic policy. The book also discusses the nature of the economic discourse practised in the parliamentary arena, considering the complex relationships between science and practice, and between politics and political economy in light of the evolution of economics during this period. The book is the first of its kind to provide a comparative framework for analysis, and will appeal to economists and historians alike. Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi are Professors of History of Economic Thought at the University of Pisa, Italy. They are authors of several books and articles on the Italian economic thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially focusing on the institutionalization and professionalization of economics. Contents: Foreword; Economists in parliament in the Liberal Age: a comparative perspective, Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi; Political economy in Portuguese parliamentary debates (1820-1910), António Almodovar and José Luís Cardoso; Economists in the Belgian parliament (1831-1918), Guido Erreygers and Bert Mosselmans; Chair, tribune and seat: Spanish economists in parliament (1844-1923). an exploration, Salvador Almenar; Economists in parliament in Britain (1848-1914), Roger E. Backhouse; French economists in parliament from the Second Republic to the outbreak of the Great Crisis (1848-1929), Yves Breton; German economists in parliament (1848-1918), Harald Hagemann and Matthias Rösch; Economists and political economy in the Italian parliament from the unification to the rise of the Fascism (1861-1922), Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi; Economists in the Greek Parliament (1862-1910): the men and their views on fiscal and monetary policy, Michalis Psalidopoulos and Adamantios Syrmaloglou; Economists in the Japanese diet (1890-1930): the debate on adoption of the Gold Standard, Jiro Kumagai; The American anomaly: why were there no economists in the US Congress?, Bradley W. Bateman; Index of Names.

The book studies the origins and evolution of economic textbooks in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, up to the turning point represented by Paul Samuelson's Economics (1948), which became the template for all the textbooks of the postwar period. The case studies included in the book cover a large part of Europe, the British Commonwealth, the United States and Japan. Each chapter examines various types of textbooks, from those aimed at self-education to those addressed to university students, secondary school students, to the short manuals aimed at the popularisation of political economy among workers and the middle classes. An introductory chapter examines this phenomenon in a comparative and transnational perspective.

This detailed volume explores the role and actions of economists in US, Japanese and various European parliaments in the critical period between 1848 and 1920. Featuring chapters written by an international array of contributors from both economics and history, the book provides fascinating insights into the parliamentary life in the period. It highlights the often pivotal role of economists within each administration; examines their influence on policy making, their relationships with other MPs, civil servants, external economic associations and looks at the influence of public opinion on economic policy. The book also discusses the nature of the economic discourse practised in the parliamentary arena, considering the complex relationships between science and practice, and between politics and political economy in light of the evolution of economics during this period. The book is the first of its kind to provide a comparative framework for analysis, and will appeal to economists and historians alike.

Since its beginnings, the literature on economics has been divided into different genres. Traditionally the historiography of economics has mainly considered four of them: treatises, books on special (especially theoretical) topics, pamphlets (provided that they had a theoretical content) and journal articles. Other contributions by economists published in the form of newspaper columns, encyclopaedic entries, or book reviews have been neglected for a long time. Sometimes they have been considered as elements of the economists' biography, or as evidence of their ideological and intellectual commitments. Only intellectual approaches to the history of economics have rescued these contributions from oblivion, and by integrating them with those of a more analytical content they have offered a richer reconstruction of economic debates. There is however another genre that has very often been treated ambiguously: that of economic textbooks and manuals devoted to educational purposes or to the popularisation of economic ideas. Many historians have taken them into consideration only if they contained some significant theoretical statement. Otherwise they have been almost ignored, if not regarded with some embarrassment when they contained some spurious elements compared with the most theoretical contributions of a same economist. The research presented in this book focuses on this genre from the vantage point of the institutional approach to the history of economics that emerged more than 30 years ago, aiming to assess the role of textbooks in the historical evolution of economic thought, and their significance for an enlarged understanding of the intellectual and social functions of economic theory.

The aim of this chapter is to examine the various types of texts on political economy that were published in Italy in the period going from the Restoration to the rise of Fascism. The choice of political events as chronological limits is justified by the assumption that this production was embedded in a process of institutionalisation of political economy in universities, secondary schools and other social and administrative institutions, which was in turn strongly influenced by government and other political factors. Owing to this influence, two institutional changes generated significant increases in the production of textbooks and manuals: first, the liberal openings of the early 1840s - followed in some areas by repression after 1848 - which reduced the weight of censorship on a science that reactionary governments had always considered suspect; and second, the unification of Italy in 1861, which was followed by important reforms in the organisation of the state machine and in the domain of education. Our analysis stops at the moment in which the authoritarian hold of the Fascist party brought to an end the Italian 'liberal age'.