1 - FIRST LECTURE: The Demand for Historical Perspective

Summary

Introduction

The Italian economist and public figure in whose memory these lectures were founded, regarded the writings of the masters of the past as a source not only of enjoyment but also of inspiration and enlightenment. I am sure that all of us have derived consumption benefits from reading the classics of the past and have our own particular favourites. In the field of public finance and public choice alone, who would not admire the penetrating, terse analysis interlarded with good humour in David Hume's essays, the breadth of vision and style of Smith's analysis of the tasks of government, the way in which Wicksell builds his analysis out of a balanced critique of the work of his forebear and contemporaries, and the audacity of Einaudi's ideas – to mention only a few writers familiar to us all? I am sure also that most of us perceive that there are external economies of production to be derived from even casual reading of the works of our forebears, in the sense that we may believe that our own output of ideas and their application benefit from avoiding what Lionel Robbins in a familiar phrase called “provincialism in time”. We all enjoy, I suspect, garnishing our contributions to economic literature with a pithy quotation from “the classics”, though a veneer of scholarship must not have us subjected to the charge of misplaced reverence for the past.

I could rest my case for devoting these lectures to a study of the links between past and present writings on public finance and public choice on the inspirational content of the contribution of our forebears.