Introduction

Excerpt

This volume hosts the results of the encounter of several different academic disciplines at the 25th conference of the Italian Association for the History of Economic Thought (AISPE) held in Rome in December 2017. The conference explored the possibility and hermeneutical value of comparisons, across time and space, of economic facts and ideas. On this occasion the editors of this volume felt that the time had come for renewing the collaboration between economists and historians of antiquity, a collaboration that had rarefied, at least in Italian academic intercourse, since the 1990s. Many colleagues from different countries, universities and departments readily answered the call and participated in the conference. The ensuing discussions exposed the necessity to recreate a common language and a set of shared concepts that would render research results and methodological approaches understandable and fruitfully comparable. To this end, in the years following the conference, the work of participants followed two different paths. …