Introduction

In contrast to the reorientation of political economy implemented by Keynes with his General Theory less than seven years after the 1929 Wall Street crash, no substantial change in the mainstream approach to economics can be detected twelve years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The same Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model which had been unable to anticipate the crisis still rules research, teaching and economic policy, only marginally modified to take account of the most obvious flaws of the economic system. In this intellectual environment, going back to past authors may be of some help, not to fuel nostalgia for times gone by but to explore modern economic issues along new perspectives—in short to build theory and understand facts. This is the task of the history of economic thought, when it is not understood as a graveyard for respected albeit no longer read authors but as a living corpus of debates on the same old issues shrunk and distorted by the present mainstream.