Finance, a New Old Science

Abstract

Corporate Finance is a fashionable field in schools of Economics throughout the World. Although the main epistemological break to identify its scientific character may be established in the decade of the 1950s, this paper demonstrates how much developed financial thought there was in Europe before the First World War. Thanks to considerable growth of international trade, corporations, and multinationals (i.e. rising globalization) during this phase of European civilization, Stock Exchanges flourished in all European countries. Philosophers, businessmen, professors, and lawyers disseminated their burgeoning erudition in financial knowledge, and several authors made large contributions in books devoted to legal features of human economic actions, and in textbooks devoted to political economy.