PREFACE TO THE SECOND ENGLISH EDITION
Our satisfaction in writing the second English edition of this book is easy to imagine: not only are we assured of the utility of our work, but also have the opportunity to enlarge and revise it.
We have attempted to do this in various ways. We have removed oversights and errors; we have made a few additions and expanded a little on all chapters; we have re-written and simplified various parts which students had found obscure or difficult to understand; lastly, we have updated the bibliography, with the aim of offering useful suggestions for further reading.More substantial integrations have been made to chapters 1,2,4, 9 and 11. In the first chapter we felt it necessary to recall the role played by humanism and the Renaissance in the birth of political economy and, in particular, the contribution they made to the formation of ‘civil humanism’, a philosophical approach that fell into disuse following the advent of utilitarianism, but now appears set for a second revival. In the chapter on Smith we have integrated our exposition of the interpretations of his thought by recalling the one that is today considered the most convincing, that of Smith as an institutionalist economist. The chapter on Marx has also been enlarged to recall his concept of man and his investigation into the social and institutional conditions of capitalist production, two of the most topical parts of his thinking. Lastly, in chapter 9, we have separated treatment of the post-Keynesian approach from the so-called ‘new Keynesian macroeconomics’, by further expanding on both and pointing out the important differences that distinguish the two schools. We have also added a summary paragraph with a simple diagram comparing the views of the various contemporary schools of macroeconomics. In chapter 11 we have added extensive paragraphs on evolutionary games and the theories of growth and complexity.
In addition, we have introduced a new chapter—the twelfth—which deals with the current situation of economic science. The state of crisis which has beset our discipline over the last thirty years appears even more evident today than when we wrote the first edition of this book. Now we believe it to be a healthy crisis and in chapter 12 we have endeavoured to explain why. A crisis can also be a revolution. We do not pretend to know what will happen in economic science over the next twenty years or so, but it seemed important to us to clarify the reason why, in our opinion, we are in the middle of a crisis of foundations that may make history begin again from Adam.
Finally, a formal change has been made which we hope will be useful for students. We have removed many references to relevant works from the main text and entered them in special bibliographic lists at the end of each chapter. Only those references to fundamental works, which no student can afford to overlook, have been left in the text.
Let us conclude by thanking friends and colleagues who have taken it upon themselves to read and comment on the integrations to this edition: Elettra Agliardi, Luigino Bruni, Luca Fiorito, Nicholas Theocarakis, Carlo Zappia, and Luca Zarri.
Our experience in the teaching of economics and its history has made one thing plain to us: that keeping the two subjects separate, if it was ever justified, is certainly not today. In the face of the crisis of the theoretical orthodoxies of the 1950s and 1960s, the flowering of innovations in recent years, and the numerous rediscoveries of traditional wisdoms, it is no longer an easy task to teach economic principles. We feel it necessary, therefore, to teach economic theory by paying careful attention to its history. We have tried to satisfy this need in our book, and this already says a great deal about the way it has been conceived. We have endeavoured to present traditional theories as living matter, as well as presenting modern theories as part of a historical process and not as established truths.
On the one hand, we have tried to resist the double temptation of rereading the past only in the light of the present and explaining the present only by the past, or, to be more precise, to avoid searching in the traditional theories for the seeds of the modern theories and explaining the latter as simple accumulations of knowledge. On the other hand, we have attempted to distance ourselves from the implicit banality of the great historiographical alternatives, such as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ history or ‘continuism’ and ‘catastrophism’. We have also tried to avoid the dichotomy which still exists today, and which seems to us to cause misleading simplifications, between the ‘pure’ historians of thought, who dedicate themselves exclusively to studying ‘facts’, and the ‘pure’ theorists, who are only interested in the evolution of the logical structure of theories. We believe that knowledge of the ‘environment’ in which a theory is formed is just as important as knowledge of its logical structure, and we do not accept the view that an analysis of the emergence of a theory must be considered as an alternative to the study of its internal structure. This historical outline is, therefore, neither a collection of discoveries nor a portrait gallery.
Our choice to give a fair amount of historical weight to modern developments has entailed the problem of where to end our narrative. This cannot but be a subjective decision. We have chosen the 1970s, but we have reserved the right to break this rule each time we felt it necessary—for example, in the case of research work and debates which produced important results in the 1980s but which began earlier. The only precaution we have taken in these cases has been to avoid citing names and titles, with a few exceptions, and limiting ourselves to outlining the essential elements of the most recent theoretical developments.
The reader accustomed to traditional history books may be surprised by the large amount of space we have reserved for the thought of the last fifty years—approximately half the extent of a book that still remains (all things
considered) fairly concise.
If there is an imbalance of this type, however, we believe it is that we have dedicated too little space to modern theories. Quantitative historiographical research has shown, whichever index is used, that scientific production has grown at an exponential rate in the last five centuries, with the remarkable consequence that certainly more than 70 per cent of the scientists who have ever lived are living today, and perhaps a great many more. The decision to devote less than 70 per cent of our book to modern theory was, in fact, prudent.Finally, we have no wish to avoid certain difficulties, or, rather, responsibilities, connected with our endeavour to treat the present as history. We are well aware of the danger of the attempt to be wise in the sense advocated by William James, who believed that the art lays in knowing what to leave out. We realize that this danger becomes greater the smaller the distance from the material dealt with and the larger the quantity of material about which decisions must be made; but we believe that these responsibilities must be faced. We do not know whether we have been wise in this sense, or to what degree, but we are convinced of one thing: even if we have omitted many things from this book, the resulting selection has been justified, in fact necessitated, by the importance of the material upon which we focus.
This book is not directed to a specialist public, nor solely to a student audience. We also hope to reach the educated person, or, rather, the person who wishes to educate herself or himself. Specialist training is not, therefore, necessary to understand this book; a basic knowledge of economics, however, especially the main themes of micro- and macroeconomics, would be of help. This is true for most of the book. There are, however, sections, especially those dealing with the modern theories, in which the analytical difficulties cannot be avoided without falling into the trap of oversimplification. In these cases, which we have tried to keep to a minimum, we have chosen to avoid banality and to ask the reader for a little more effort.
This knowledge of the audience to whom the book is directed may help in understanding several things about its structure; we have chosen, for example, to avoid weighing down the narrative with footnotes, a choice that has often restricted us, but which we hope will benefit the reader. On the other hand the bibliographies presented at the end of each chapter do not pretend to be complete; they contain, apart from details of works quoted from, only a short guide to further reading.
Finally, we should like to express our gratitude to the many colleagues and friends who have kindly and generously agreed to read and comment on the first drafts of our book, or on parts of it. In particular we would like to mention Duccio Cavalieri, Marco Dardi, Franco Donzelli, Riccardo Faucci, Giorgio Gattei, Augusto Graziani, Peter Groenewegen, Vinicio Guidi, Geoff Hodgson, Alan Kirman, Jan Kregel, Marcello Messori, Pierluigi Nuti, Fabio Petri, Pier Luigi Porta, Maurizio Pugno, Piero Tani, and Warren Young. Of course any inadequacies or mistakes in this book are our own sole responsibility. Our thanks also go to Andrew Schuller and Anna Zaranko of Oxford University Press for their perceptive editorial work and advice.
E. S. S. Z.