Introduction

« France is the nation that taught us to read, us and the whole of Europe [...], the nation whose spirit is the sun of all spirits, the sun, whose heat and light cause all ideas to ripen »
Jose Frederico Laranjo, 1878

1The author of this suggestive eulogy was one of the most important systematisers of the science of political economy in Portugal, towards the end of the nineteenth century. Regardless of the statement’s hyperbole and premeditated rhetorical effect, it provides a pertinent illustration of the importance of the French cultural influence in Portugal, which was certainly reinforced by the reading and active assimilation of French intellectual traditions in the field of political economy.

2This paper seeks to document the most significant moments to be noted in the French influence on the formation of economic discourse in Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century. After a brief reference to the pioneering role played by a number of « Frenchified » Portuguese authors in the first half of the nineteenth century (section 2), an analysis will be made of the main French influences on the textbooks that were produced for the technical and university teaching of political economy (section 3), followed by a presentation of the main trends in the critical assimilation of the French liberal « tradition » and its opponents (section 4). Finally, a brief examination will be made of the repercussions of the mathematical « tradition » in Portugal (section 5).

I. The precursory role played by some exiles

3The regular presence of Portuguese intellectuals in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century – largely for political reasons connected with the ups and downs of the liberal revolutions – was an important physical factor in this closer approximation to French economic culture. One of the most interesting figures in this history of French-Portuguese contacts and exchanges was Francisco Solano Constâncio (1777-1846), who first settled in Paris in 1809. His esteem for France was so great that he was to become the leading figure in a strange conspiracy to support the French occupation of Portugal between 1808 and 1810. But these obscure political fancies were overlooked by his biographers and admirers, whose attentions focused instead on the importance and merit of his activities as a publicist and popularizer of scientific ideas. As is known, he was responsible for the translation into French of the works of Ricardo, Malthus and Godwin, the merits of which were expressly recognised in the brief mention that he received in the Dictionnaire d’économie politique by Coquelin and Guillaumin (1852,1, p. 519). He paid close attention to the controversy raging around the acceptance of Say’s law of markets, and enabled the Portuguese readers of the reviews which he edited in Paris to keep in touch with the most important developments taking place in the various natural and social sciences. He laid particular stress on the new ideas occurring in the field of political economy and the guidelines being followed by the different European governments in terms of economic policy. His main source of inspiration and systematisation was Jean-Baptiste Say, whose friend he claimed to be.

4But his work also revealed the adoption of a critical stance in relation to the supposed universality of political economy and showed great concern about the consequences of industrial development, especially the growing inequality in access to property and the distribution of wealth. Such a situation led Constancio to show a particular fondness for the theories that Sismondi had put forward on this subject.

5Another feature of his writing was his militant defence of the need to adapt economic discourse to historical circumstances and concrete national problems, which led him to admire the work of Chaptal and share this author’s views about the protection of nascent industry and, generally speaking, about all forms of state intervention that would help to preserve the institutional framework within which private economic activity was beginning to develop. This interventionist tendency led Constâncio to admire the main thrust of the economic literature being written by the American protectionists and drew him closer to List’s theories on the national system of political economy1.

6Another Portuguese author who spent most of his active life in Paris was Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira (1769-1846). Although his intellectual career was largely marked by his writings on constitutional law and political philosophy, Ferreira also published his Précis d’un Cours d’économie politique (1840) in Paris, with the inclusion of an interesting bibliography selected by Hoffmans. His name also merited a brief entry in the already mentioned Dictionnaire d’economie politique (1853, II, p. 405). Like Constâncio, Pinheiro Ferreira served as a vehicle for the dissemination of the works of the English classical economists on the European continent, especially in France. In fact, his book shows him to have been heavily influenced by McCulloch, a summary of whose work had already been published in both English and Portuguese2.

7Finally, a third illustrious emigrant who made an important contribution to the consolidation and development of political economy in Portugal was José Ferreira Borges (1786-1838). He was to spend his years in exile in London, where he wrote his most important economic work entitled Instituições de Economia Política (Institutions of Political Economy). The title clearly reveals the author’s intention to produce a systematic compendium, and shows that his main aim was to place the scientific legacy of political economy within reach of a vast, non-specialist public (Borges, 1995 [1834], p. 142).

8Despite his profound knowledge of the work of the main English classical economists (especially Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and McCulloch), Ferreira Borges did, however, make use of the type of manuals proposed by French authors, to whom he expressly recognises his debt. His primary sources of inspiration were Destutt de Tracy, J.-B. Say, and the French edition, annotated by Say, of the work of Heinrich von Storch, Cours d’economie politique ou exposition des principes qui determinent la prosperite des nations3.

9Ferreira Borges’ book was published at a decisive moment for the institutionalisation of political economy in Portugal, through the creation of chairs in political economy at the Faculty of Law at Coimbra University and at the Lisbon and Oporto Trade Associations4. And this was immediately followed by an increase in the influences of French analytic, doctrinal and political traditions, as we shall see in the next section.

II. The French influence on textbooks and the vicissitudes of the liberal creed

10Although it satisfied teaching objectives and afforded the public greater access to the established knowledge of political economy, Ferreira Borges’ book was to have only a limited impact in Portuguese intellectual circles. Much of the reason for this was the persistence of Adrião Forjaz de Sampaio (1810-1874), the first professor to occupy the chair of political economy created at the Faculty of Law at Coimbra University in 1836.

11When giving him responsibility for the administration of the subject, the School Council also entrusted him with the selection of a textbook from amongst three possible choices: the already mentioned Instituições by Ferreira Borges, the Cours by H. Storch and the Catéchisme by J.-B. Say. Sampaio chose this last work, and so in 1839 published his first textbook entitled Elementos de Economia Politico (Elements of Political Economy), with its subtitle indicating that it was a « free translation of the Catéchisme d’Économie Politique by J.-B. Say ». The solution was not entirely to his liking, which is why he immediately began preparation of a new and more thorough textbook, which by 1874 (the year of his death) had had 7 different editions5.

12His dissatisfaction with the simplifying and excessively doctrinal nature of Say’s Cathéchisme led him to find successive solutions for his teaching aims in three essential sources of inspiration. Firstly, in the French translation of the treatise of the German author Karl Rau, which provided him with the necessary formal rigour for expounding the different subject-matters and a suitable institutional framework for explaining matters relating to public administration and the workings of the state at both the financial and fiscal level. Indeed, the somewhat cameralist bias of Rau’s textbook was to become a crucial element for the teaching of his students.

13Secondly, he also sought inspiration in the textbooks of a number of authors of the French liberal school to whom he gave greater credence; and this explains why we find him frequently quoting such authors as Jêrome-Adolphe Blanqui, Pelegrino Rossi, Joseph Garnier and Michel Chevalier and, in later editions, yet purer liberal authors such as F. Bastiat, Wolowski, Baudrillart and Courcelle-Seneuil. Of all these, Bastiat is the one to whom he devoted most of his attention, particularly because this author saw the principles of the freedom of human action and individual responsibility as the very cornerstones of the liberal edifice. Another important nucleus of influences was provided by the universe of authors who gravitated around the Journal des économistes – which Sampaio said was « indispensable for knowing about the progress of science in France, and in other foreign countries » (1995 [1874], II, p. 101) – and by the contributors to the Dictionnaire d’économie politique by Coquelin and Guillaumin, which he classified as « the most important economic publication of recent times » (ibid).

14Finally, an important source of inspiration for his work was to be provided by authors who had a critical view in relation to the cold, dismal, materialistic and also utilitarian character of political economy. Despite the fact that Forjaz de Sampaio remained faithful to the principles of economic freedom and free competition, despite his systematic denunciation of the errors resulting from the systems of protection, monopoly and privilege, he continued to show his concern about the negative social consequences of urban and industrial growth. It is not therefore surprising to find that the social and charitable concerns of the Christian political economy of Joseph Droz and Villeneuve-Bargemont were so widely accepted by him, bearing in mind the aims of regulating work conditions and improving the conditions of social welfare.

15Being well informed about the situation in France, Sampaio related the experiences of certain charitable institutions, being pleased to note their concern with alleviating the suffering of the impoverished strata of society and record the main books and manuals about charity that both depicted and sought to suggest solutions for the evils that existed6. For all of these reasons, he concluded that « France, marching at the head of civilisation, and at the same time priding itself on its honourable title of the first-born daughter of the Catholic Church, has perhaps been fulfilling its great mission even more gloriously of late, as if by way of compensation for the most dreadful ills that its Voltairian school unleashed upon the face of the earth in the last century » (ibid, p. 272).

16These same charitable and Christian concerns lay behind his incursions into the territory of association, co-operation and the reciprocity of interests between labour and capital, embodying a certain type of social economy under the direct inspiration of Frederic Le Play.

17In relation to the work of Forjaz de Sampaio, we can therefore conclude that he was seeking to transmit to his readers, and especially to his students in political economy at the Coimbra Faculty of Law, an image of this science which also included strange ethical concerns and estimable, philanthropic intentions. In this way, political economy would begin to shed its image as a mere science of wealth (chrematistics) and also be recognised as a moral science.

18Let us now look at what was happening meanwhile in other teaching environments.

19The person responsible for teaching the subject of political economy at the Lisbon Trade Association was António de Oliveira Marreca, who systematically organised his subject-matters in the book that he published in 1838 entitled Noções Elementares de Economia Política (Elementary Notions in Political Economy). The book followed the structure of J.-B. Say’s Cours very closely (cf. Almodovar, 1995, p. 276), although it was substantially abbreviated and Say’s considerations about the application of the principles of political economy to the different sectors of economic activity had been left out. In relation to these subjects, Marreca once again echoes that permanent feature of Portuguese economic thought which consists in subjecting the laws of political economy to a system of validation based on the need to strengthen a peripheral and dependent national economy. His relativism in relation to matters of a practical nature is also evident in a critical appreciation which he makes of a work by Michel Chevalier (Marreca, 1843) and which is also worthy of our brief attention.

20His appreciation consists of a series of 14 articles published in a Portuguese periodical, with a total of 50 pages. However, only the first four pages are truly devoted to the book by Chevalier. Marreca sings the customary praises and makes the usual recommendations about the work he is reviewing, reminding us of the importance of the knowledge provided by political economy, and stresses three of the main factors on which, for Chevalier, the growth of production and wealth depends: communication systems, credit institutions and professional education. Next, Marreca enters into a long discussion of the importance of these factors in the context of Portuguese economic development, completely forgetting about the text that he is supposedly analysing. He becomes aware of this in the last article in the series and gives a clear explanation for his deviation from the subject:

21« In the series of articles published so far, we have lost sight of Michel Chevalier and his work ever since the second one: we have used his name as a shield; his book as a pretext and stimulus; but it was to our mother country that we have turned our thoughts, which, although these may be weakened by our faculties, by the timidity of our spirit, by the narrowness of the area in which we have sown them, are strengthened by the vehemence of our will » (p. 281).

22In the confession that has just been transcribed, both the sense and the purpose of reading and assimilating foreign authoritative sources are quite evident. Names act as a protective shield, works are an instrument to be placed at the service of generous and wilful programmes of reform. This was the great desideratum of liberal political economy: to inspire and serve programmes of economic and social reform. But this same text by Marreca also clearly expresses the characteristic orientation of those who, professing to adhere to the liberal creed, seek to relativise its powers of transformation: « I condemn restrictions as a system, as a principle and as a general rule: the opposite principle, system and general rule – freedom – is the true and genuine one: the freedom to exercise any industry and to buy and sell either in the country or outside it. But for this freedom to be profitable, it must not stop at the absolute choice that is given with it to producers and consumers, to some to choose the industrial area to which they wish to dedicate themselves, to others to seek out their supplies in the market most convenient to them, which is always the cheapest » (p. 269).

23This testimony of Oliveira Marreca is identical to that made by other contemporary Portuguese authors and was to be repeated in a similar fashion by so many of the other authors writing about matters of political economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Adherence to economic liberalism was almost always tempered by criteria of national or collective interest that softened the staunchest convictions of the defenders of the primacy of self-interest and the social order arising therefrom.

24However, at a time when Portuguese economic policy was clearly guided by the notions of free-trade, we also frequently encounter authors who make very few concessions on matters of principle. One such author was Luís A. Rebelo da Silva, who was best known as an historian, but who also produced some interesting textbooks for the teaching of political economy in non-university technical courses. There would generally be few reasons to mention this author, given that his texts produce very little original thought. However, at the end of one of his compendia (Silva, 1868), there is a particularly revealing note about the crucial role played by French liberal literature in the formation of economic discourse in Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a gallery that is almost exclusively composed of French authors – and where the only English author quoted has been read in the French translation – the main sources of inspiration used by Rebelo da Silva and other Portuguese authors from this period are clear for all to see.

25But in this example of assimilations and cross fertilisations, the isolated case of the reading of an English author is doubly exceptional. The author in question is T. E. Banfield whom W. S. Jevons was later to consider « the writer who seems to me to have reached the deepest comprehension of the foundations of economics » (Jevons, 1871, 41). And so great was his admiration that he transcribed a 2-page long quotation in which the author of the Organisation of Labour, dated 1844, « points out that the scientific basis of economics is in a theory of consumption » (41). We shall shortly re-encounter Jevons, also as a receiver of the influences of the French « tradition ».

III. The liberal order: its foundation and crisis

26Clearly the most important amongst the French authors most frequently quoted and praised in Portugal is Michel Chevalier. There are several reasons for his success and popularity: the great richness of his ideological formation in the ranks of the followers of Saint-Simon, the moderateness and maturity of his liberal convictions, which were not incompatible with his defence of a selective intervention by the State in economic life, the prestige of his professorship in political economy at the Collège de France between 1841 and 1879 (despite a number of forced interruptions) and his role as privy counsellor to the Emperor Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, his direct responsibility in the organisation of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, in short, as Yves Breton has put it most succinctly, the simple circumstance of his having been « intimement implique dans la vie intellectuelle, politique et économique de la France pendant pres d’un demi-siecle » (Breton, 1991, p. 247).

27We mentioned earlier how important he was for Oliveira Marreca, who found in one of Chevalier’s books the best possible excuse for talking of the obstacles to economic development, in relation to the Portuguese case. Another author for whom Chevalier was a central reference was Francisco Luís Gomes (1829-1869), as we shall now see.

28One of the most interesting and, to some extent, the most enigmatic aspects of his short public career was that F. L. Gomes wrote almost all of the texts which he published in French, namely his Essai sur la nature de l’economie politique et de ses rapports avec la morale et le droit (Gomes 1867), with the powerful backing of the Librairie Guillaumin.

29F. L. Gomes dedicated this book to Michel Chevalier, expressing words of great admiration, which can only be interpreted as a sign of his gratitude to the professor from the Collège de France, to whom he owed his acceptance as a foreign member of the Societé d’economie politique de Paris7. His involvement in public life was a success and his personal strategy of internationalisation, whether or not premeditated, was beginning to bear considerable fruit when he died prematurely at the age of 40.

30The part of the book that F. L. Gomes devoted to the relationships between political economy, ethics and law, represents only 10 % of the whole volume and has the appearance of being unfinished. His avowed source of inspiration for his broaching of these subjects was the work of Baudrillart (Gomes 1867, xi). The bulkiest and most systematically organised part of the book is entitled « Essai sur la théorie de l’économie politique », and contains the customary sequence of chapters dedicated to: definitions, value, capital, money, credit and production. Some of these chapters, namely those dedicated to the study of money and credit, are merely collections of quotations, the authors of which are duly identified. Side by side with the obligatory references to certain French authors (Bastiat, Dunoyer, Garnier, Chevalier, etc.), there are also a large number of translations of quotations from English authors, such as McCulloch and Macleod.

31All this would seem to give the impression that this is a trivial work, identical to so many other general volumes published at that time. But this is not an appropriate judgement, as Gomes has an interesting surprise for us in the opening chapter, which he dedicates to the definitions of political economy.

32In his opinion, there were three distinct, but not contradictory, ways of defining the substance of political economy, depending on the particular emphasis given: 1) the production, distribution and consumption of wealth; 2) trade and the logic of the market; or 3) labour and human industry. His preference was for the latter definition, which he also considered to be the idea prevailing in the works of Coquelin, Garnier and Chevalier.

33His arguments are based on two fundamental ideas: firstly, it is impossible to know anything about the science whose aim is the study of the laws of human labour and then to be able to take this knowledge any further without paying close attention to the moral nature of man; secondly, it must always be borne in mind that the nature of the isolated man is expressed in his self-interest, or in other words, in the preponderance of pleasure over pain.

34Starting from this clearly Benthamite framework of reference, Gomes considers that « pour l’economiste, travailler c’est prendre une peine pour mettre au jour des choses capables d’apaiser une sensation désagréable ou de donner un plaisir » (1867, p. 5). Encouraged by his readings of Dunoyer, Bastiat and certainly also Courcelle-Seneuil, even though the latter is not expressly quoted, Gomes summarises the essence of his concept of economic life in the following excerpt:

35« Nous sommes heureux de conclure qu’il n’y a rien dans la societe qui ne soit dans l’homme, que l’homme est un abrégé de la societe; que l’economie politique est le couronnement de l’economie individuelle; [...] qu’il n’y a qu’une économie vraie, c’est l’économie de l’homme. Les faits que nous venons d’exposer et qui sont le fondement de l’économie se trouvent tous dans l’homme isole. L’homme isole aime les plaisirs et fuit les peines. Il travaille pour acheter les plaisirs avec ses peines: voila le premier achat dont l’echange est un perfectionnement. Il cherche a diminuer la peine du travail; il capitalise; il distingue les besoins d’après leur influence sur la puissance productrice. Il sait ce qui est l’ utile et ce qui est la valeur. En somme, il a une économie individuelle avant de connaître l’echange » (1867, p. 13).

36In other passages, he gives an even clearer notion of utility and its variation – « Les choses qui sont propres a satisfaire les besoins s’appellent utiles. L’utilite des choses varie selon l’intensite des besoins et selon la nature même des besoins » (1867, p. 12) – and he shows great wisdom in the way in which he discusses the problems of uncertainty in economic activity: « L’homme pense à son avenir. La prévision est une de ses plus belles qualites. Il craint et il espère toujours. Il n’y a pas un seul acte de sa vie qui ne soit empreint du sceau de l’avenir, et peut-etre de l’éternite. L’incertitude de sa vie est pour lui la plus douce illusion et la plus heureuse de ses ignorances. La croyance à la perpétuité est toute sa grandeur » (1867, pp. 9-10).

37For all of these reasons, it can be seen that F. L. Gomes was remarkably successful in assimilating the disperse elements of a concept of economics centred upon the notions of pleasure and pain, human wants, human efforts, and self-interest satisfaction, which were the legacy of the French liberal tradition and which would prove to be essential elements in the major change of direction that economic science was to consolidate with the so-called « marginalist revolution » at the beginning of the 1870s. It was this French legacy that W. S. Jevons expressly recorded and paid homage to in the chapter of his work dealing with the notion of the final degree of utility (1871, p. 40-41).

38In this Essai that we have been analysing, F. L. Gomes is more concerned with problems of a doctrinal and analytic nature and pays little attention to the problems of the orientation of economic policy. He explains such problems more clearly in other texts in which, when talking about the mercantilist policies of Marquês de Pombal (Gomes, 1869) or the structure of property rights in Portuguese India (Gomes, 1862), he demonstrates his unequivocal reluctance to accept State intervention in economic life and his clear preference for the creation of institutional and political conditions that would make it possible to fully exercise individual economic freedom.

39In discussing such subjects, Gomes joins the large and varied group of authors who took part in an intense public debate in the second half of the nineteenth century on matters of economic and financial interest. And they did this in different ways, whether through their civic participation in teaching and cultural institutions, or through journalism or publishing activities that made them more visible and guaranteed that the various interests involved would enjoy a greater impact.

40This atmosphere of debate and the confrontation of different positions, aiming at the legitimisation of choices for the solution of pressing problems or the clarification of development options, reveals one of the distinctive features of the economic literature produced in Portugal at different periods in its history. One notes a certain fondness for the pragmatic use of the different traditions and languages of political economy, adapting them in keeping with the nature of the problems under analysis. Political economy thus almost always takes on the appearance of a stylistic feature, a form of rhetoric, an authoritative argument, a literary embellishment, a persuasive appeal, which can be used to strengthen permanence or bring about a change in the social and economic system that is in force.

41The authors with the greatest liberal tendencies found a broad spectrum of different supports in the diversity of the more radical or more moderate « French traditions ». As for the protectionists, they almost always revealed an attitude of disdain towards the supposed erudition of their free-trade opponents. There were few French authors that the protectionists could call upon to support them8.

42The essential problem emerging in all these heated discussions between free-traders and protectionists is naturally that of the relationship between the individual and the State, between individual economic freedom and State intervention for the regulation of the economy. Amongst the excessively fundamentalist options, there was both an opportunity and a certain room for supporting moderate and intermediate concepts. Consequently, some dyed-in-the-wool free-traders continued to be receptive to the exercise of social functions by the State, turning it into a promoter of general social welfare9. In turn, some staunch protectionists were similarly not unaware of the virtues of competition and the importance of self-interest satisfaction.

43Amongst the authors who saw in the liberal model an inadequate solution for the process of economic development in a country that was both peripheral and dependent, there were some who aligned themselves with the supporters of a national political economy and the so-called Kathedersozialism, with a strong German bias, to which they added ingredients of their own from socialist and anarchist thought. In this way, in some Portuguese authors who were active in the last few decades of the nineteenth century – namely in the works of Oliveira Martins and J. Frederico Laranjo (... the author of the opening quotation for this paper) – one can notice an assimilation of the critical thinking of Proudhon and the reproduction of his ideas on mutualism and the spirit of association, as well as his most daring proposals regarding the gratuitousness of credit. And so we re-encounter another French tradition that was to have a significant impact on our country.

44We mentioned earlier that one of the most permanent features of Portuguese economic thought, and not only in the second half of the nineteenth century, consisted of its essentially pragmatic vocation, or in other words of its express wish to study and solve the great questions of everyday economic and financial life. Such a stance gave rise to a certain excessive use of political and normative language, in detriment to an analytical approach to the abstract essence of the phenomena observed. Theoretical reflection was almost always subordinated to this concern, as is clearly shown by the fact that contemporary developments in marginalist and neo-classical economics were only really noted and disseminated in Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite everything, it must be added that the decline in the liberal rhetoric and the gradual triumph of the new mathematical « tradition » in France also had an impact on Portugal. We shall briefly look at this aspect in the next section.

IV. The influence of the mathematical « tradition »

45In 1911, towards the end of the period covered by this paper, a book was published that clearly lay outside the above-mentioned pattern: its author was António Horta Osório (1882-1960), and his work deserves a mention because it aimed to establish the importance of the mathematical method in political economy, namely in the context of the development of the general equilibrium theory of Léon Walras and the Lausanne school. Two years later he had the honour of seeing his book translated and published in France, with an introduction by Vilfredo Pareto (1913).

46Although somewhat wary of the alleged comprehensive utility of mathematics in economic reasoning, Pareto maintains that the book by Osório is not only « bien ordonné, sachant allier la simplicité de la forme à la profondeur de la pensée », but also that « il pourra rendre de grands services aux personnes qui veulent étudier la science » (1913, p. 288). The same credit would later be given by Schumpeter, by including Osório in a small list of books designed to encourage and disclose the use of mathematics in economic matters, which were published throughout the 1910s (Schumpeter, 1954, p. 957).

47We are not dealing here with an original work. Osório follows very closely the works by Walras and Pareto, presenting and discussing them as a whole, but also giving particular emphasis to their conceptions of pure economics as a particular branch of political economy. Besides, some importance is given to historical and methodological problems, mainly in order to provide an impressive explanation of the importance and necessity of the use of mathematics in economic analysis. Walras and Pareto are also used as a starting point for the specific development of a general equilibrium model applied to the analysis of the market for final goods.

48From all the concepts and theories that are presented to the readers, we think that special emphasis should be given to the way in which the Paretian distinction between utility and ophelimity is discussed, for these concepts are used by Osório as the foundation to his view of economic science – as a disciplinary field restricted to the study of a small part of human behaviour, a kind of « rational mechanics of desire » (1911, p. 72), while psychology is portrayed as the global science pertaining to the study of human action. Consequently, economics would be no more than one of the branches of the general study of mankind. There is no doubt that the publication of this book in the Portugal of 1911 was a bold accomplishment. One may say about this book that it was quite out of place and time, defying conventional wisdom and mainstream reasoning.

49Yet, regardless of the peculiar characteristics of Portuguese mainstream economic thought when the book was published, it is important to notice that the topics of Osório’s analysis were somewhat troublesome even for the marginalist and neo-classical economists. It is quite different to accept the importance and usefulness of mathematical concepts as a means of systematising economic reasoning, and to claim, as Osório did, that the scientific character of pure economics in itself demanded the presence of mathematics not only as a language, but also as a logical device for the development of hypotheses, and as a procedure for expressing conclusions. For him, pure economics was an abstract and experimental science which had to evaluate its scientific character, like all the exact sciences, not through the practical utility of its conclusions but chiefly by establishing the exactness of its formal internal logic. Therefore, it took a lot of courage – at least as great as his devotion to pure science – to warn his readers that « in the present work we will not deal with any practical topic nor find a solution to any concrete problem. Here we will only deal with the abstract relationships among human desires, and between them and the obstacles to their satisfaction » (1911, p. 3).

50When Osório was writing, the perceptiveness of this methodological attitude was weak, even for those learned in economic matters. It should also be stressed that Osório lived in a country whose academic elite, albeit with a certain degree of economic education, was either maladjusted or openly hostile towards the analytical contents of his book.

51In an environment that was clearly hostile to pure theory, Osório was condemned to oblivion and his book was dismissed. This may explain his attempt to spread his ideas outside Portugal, by publishing a French translation of the book.

52At root, such a gesture represented a return to the mother language of the mathematical « tradition », from which his work was largely derived.

Epilogue

53The mathematical episode of which Osório was the sole protagonist in Portugal was in fact no more than just a passing interlude. Cold reflection on matters of a theoretical and analytical nature could not manage to overcome the heated discussions taking place about the economic and financial problems that the science of political economy should be helping to make clearer. Behind this lay the widespread belief that, for better or worse, any society had to get used to the idea that it could not dispense with the mission of the economists, or more precisely of the experts in political economy.

54At the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most famous Portuguese novelists of all time, Eça de Queiroz, wrote a work entitled A cidade e as serras (The city and the mountains), in which, with brilliant and perspicacious irony, he described the dilemmas faced by anyone having to choose between the delights of the simple country life and the excitement of a hectic urban civilisation. In Eça de Queiroz’ work, the city and civilisation are situated in Paris, at 202 Champs Élysées. When the character from the countryside visits his childhood friend, who lives at this mythical address in Portuguese literature, his breath is almost taken away as he enters the reading room of the library: « What a majestic collection of the products of reasoning and imagination! There lay before me more than thirty thousand volumes, and all of them certainly essential for human culture. Immediately on entering, I noted the name of Adam Smith, in gold letters on a green spine. I was, of course, in the realm of the economists. I stepped forward and was amazed to find myself walking past eight metres of political economy ».

55This testimony clearly reveals the central position that political economy occupied in the education of a cultured, civilised man. And its importance in terms of actual metres was definitely not to be scoffed at. Eça de Queiroz would not have been expected to notice other names on the spines of the books, except for the hugely important Adam Smith. But this enormous mental bookshelf would certainly contain a large percentage of French economists, given that, as we have tried to illustrate here, it is they who were the decisive influences on the formation of economic culture in Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century.