The Historical Writings of Luigi Einaudi

This article focuses on the contents of the second volume of Section II, entitled Historical Writings, of the National Edition of the Writings of Luigi Einaudi, which includes more than eighty texts written between 1902 and 1960, as well as the complete transcription of A Merchant Prince (1900) and a short appendix containing the correspondence between Einaudi and Marc Bloch from the years 1929-1937. Several scholars have highlighted the importance of three components of Einaudi’s thought, namely history, economics and civic consciousness. For reasons of space, this article concentrates only on the first, with the aim of underscoring the significance of historical studies in his analysis of economic phenomena.