Economists in Parliament in the Liberal Age

Since the pioneering works of Roger Church, Bob Coats, and William Barber ¹ on the sociology of the profession of economics, the problem of economists’ involvement in politics has attracted the attention of historians of economic thought. In a broader perspective, the evolution of this connection from the age of Antoine de Montchrestien’s Traicté de l’oeconomie politique (1615) ² to the era of professional economics seems crucially related to the changing nature of economic science, which has gradually been transformed from an ingredient of legislators’ and bureaucrats’ wisdom to a formalised science, with rigorously defined distinctions between pure and applied economics, or between science and art.