Abstract
How did Western economic learning come to claim the status of a separate discipline? When – and how – did it begin to define and organize its own field of specialization, vocabulary, areas of interest, and methods of study? What kind of methodological problems were raised by the attempt to make economic knowledge a real science? In order to answer these questions, this chapter suggests that we need to resist the temptation to treat the Renaissance as a mere repository of “premises,” “forerunners,” and “anticipations” of the present discipline of economics. Instead, the discontinuity between Renaissance and modern economics, as well as the culturally fragmentary nature of the Renaissance “economic” knowledge, will be emphasized. Rejecting the conventional narrative that takes for granted a homogeneous and necessary development of modern “economic thought,” it is maintained that this notion is a cultural artefact constructed by choosing, among various past “economic” discourses, those on which our present reality casts a false glow of inevitability.
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Maifreda, G. (2021). Economics, Renaissance. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_669-1
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