INTRODUCTION

摘要

This issue of the Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali brings together, in a suitably revised version, five contributions that were originally presented at the Study Day on Classical Political Economy and the Social Doctrine of the Church. The teaching of Maurice Potron sj (1872-1942) in the wake of the Rerum Novarum, held on May 4th, 2012 at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. The Study Day was promoted jointly by the University Centre for the Social Doctrine of the Church and the Institute of Economic Theory and Quantitative Methods of the Catholic University of Milan. Both the Centre and the Institute had in fact been urged to "connect" with Maurice Potron - and in particular with his work as a mathematical economist - by Enrico Bellino, Professor of Economics at the Universita Cattolica and author of one of the essays presented here. For at least a decade, he had been following closely the work of several Francophone scholars, especially Christian Bidard and Guido Erreygers, who were engaged in an attempt to rescue Potron from the low status reserved for him not only by his contemporaries but also from the economists and the historians of economic thought of the late twentieth century.