Facts, Theories, and Policies in the History of Economics. An Introductory Note

Facts, theories, and policies can be considered as the vertices of a triangle. While many contributions explore along the edges of such triangle, between couples of poles, we claim that the history of economics thought is fundamentally interested in looking within the whole area of the triangle. The relationship among theories, public choices, and events is complex, often twodirectional, with some unforeseeable short circuits. In order to tackle such complexity, it is necessary to use an interpretative model that assumes a high degree of interdependence between such variables and focuses on the evolution of their mutual interactions over time. The paper aims to show that this is the approach that the works presented in this issue of the journal try to address and illustrates some of their key features, in particular country-specificity and ideological bias.