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From Oikonomia to Political Economy
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How did Western economic learning come to claim status as a separate discipline? When – and how – did it begin to define and organize its own field of specialization, vocabulary, areas of interest and methods of study? What kind of methodological problems were raised by the attempt to make economic knowledge a real science? What ties were there between the study of production, exchange and consumption of goods and services and other forms of knowledge in a cultural context as hostile to specialization as the centuries from the waning of the Middle Ages to the mid-1700s?
These are some of the questions that led me to write this book. We can define the ‘economic knowledge’ I have in mind as the body of attempts – at various levels of the social hierarchy and in widely different intellectual and professional contexts – to furnish a fairly general view of the functioning of economic life in society. Joseph A. Schumpeter defined ‘history of economic analysis’ as ‘the history of the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomena or which comes to the same thing, the history of the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought’.2 This interpretative ambition also distinguishes economic knowledge from the mindsets brought into play by the separate groups – merchants, farmers, labourers and consumers – historically engaged in acts of production, exchange and consumption, for these figures did not intend to interpret economic life as a whole; they meant simply to act in ways which may be judged economically important according to specific theories or points of view.
Germano maifreda - Personal Name
1st Edtion
9781409471240
NONE
From Oikonomia to Political Economy
Economics
English
ashgate Publishing company
2012
USA
1-313
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