ABSTRACT
The emergence of economists in a strictly professional sense in Portugal is a twentieth century phenomenon, directly related to the actions and efforts of a handful of men who, during the late 1940s, accomplished the transformation of the Institute Superior de Ciências Económicas e Financeiras (Institute of Economics and Finance; hereafter: ISCEF) into a fully fledged modern school of economics. Therefore, the whole nineteenth century stands for little else than the unchallenged predominance of laymen with some more or less trivial notions of political economy, together with a few exceptional individuals with a more serious interest in the theoretical elaboration of economic discourse.
