ABSTRACT
Political economy was one of the major sciences of the European Enlightenment. The gradual consolidation experienced by this science during the eighteenth century was manifested in the spheres of ideas, reforms and institutions. This study focuses on this last sphere and on its main expressions in the Spanish Enlightenment. It offers a synthetic analysis of the Economic Societies of Friends of the Country; the dictionaries of commerce; the economic press; and the university chairs of Economics. The emergence of these new institutions was simply the crystallization of the new enlightened ideas of political economy; in short, a further consequence of the intense international process of the circulation and adaptation of these ideas to the different national contexts.
