Introduction 1

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents collection essays of international researchers in the history of economic thought and economic history in order to confront their different approaches to the study of economic facts and ideas, rethinking boundaries, methodology and the objects of their disciplines. It explains about the relation between history and economic theory, the boundaries defining the history of economic thought in single authors and schools of thought and the Italian tradition of thought. Starting in the 1980s some classical concepts of economic history writing have increasingly been put under stress by postmodernist criticisms. The history of economics has a clear sense and direction, even if postmodernism reshaped its Eurocentric denomination as industrialisation or modernisation; economic theory lives with a hypothesis of idealistic permanence.