ABSTRACT
Since its beginnings, the literature on economics has been divided into different genres. Traditionally the historiography of economics has mainly considered four of them: treatises, books on special (especially theoretical) topics, pamphlets (provided that they had a theoretical content) and journal articles. Other contributions by economists published in the form of newspaper columns, encyclopaedic entries, or book reviews have been neglected for a long time. Sometimes they have been considered as elements of the economists’ biography, or as evidence of their ideological and intellectual commitments. Only intellectual approaches to the history of economics have rescued these contributions from oblivion, and by integrating them with those of a more analytical content they have offered a richer reconstruction of economic debates. There is however another genre that has very often been treated ambiguously: that of economic textbooks and manuals devoted to educational purposes or to the popularisation of economic ideas. Many historians have taken them into consideration only if they contained some significant theoretical statement. Otherwise they have been almost ignored, if not regarded with some embarrassment when they contained some spurious elements compared with the most theoretical contributions of a same economist. The research presented in this book focuses on this genre from the vantage point of the institutional approach to the history of economics that emerged more than 30 years ago, aiming to assess the role of textbooks in the historical evolution of economic thought, and their significance for an enlarged understanding of the intellectual and social functions of economic theory.
