Economics Treatises and Textbooks in Italy. A comparative analysis of 18th- and 19th-century political economy

This paper draws from a larger research project on treatises and textbooks of political economy in 19th-century Italy to show how the teaching and dissemination of political economy was a key element in the social construction of a market-based political order, as it created a system of representations that was functional to this process. And the locus in which this system of representations operated was the public opinion. The originality of this paper vis-à-vis other contributions is that here we attempt a comparative analysis of the characteristics, context and functions of textbooks in the 19th and 18th centuries.