ABSTRACT
In this last chapter, a clearer understanding will be provided of what remains one of the most remarkable and enduring characteristics of Portuguese economic thought: its reluctance to accept the notion of theory for its own sake and the way in which it distanced itself from a theoretical, abstract and scientific discourse, thereby inevitably reinforcing its ideological, doctrinal and political aspects, in other words, theory being conceived on account of its pragmatic gist. And this characteristic is even more notable in this particular case, because here we are talking about a period which, for many other countries in the Western world – and especially those under the influence of Anglo-Saxon thought – represented a decisive moment in their acceptance of the appropriateness and disciplinary superiority of economics as a social science. The development and consolidation of neo-classical reasoning, particularly with regard to the theories of money and interest and the marginal productivity theory, the challenge provided by the Keynesian revolution and the new macroeconomic language which was associated with it, and, finally, the process of academic standardisation brought about by the successive attempts to merge together and synthesise neo-classical and Keynesian economics, were all processes which had very few, or at least somewhat belated, repercussions on Portuguese economic thinking in the first half of the twentieth century.
