Before there were equations, there were questions.
Before supply met demand, life met limits.
And before the discipline of economics emerged, human beings were already thinking, worrying, praying, and writing about wealth, poverty, fairness, and need.
We call it prehistory — not to diminish it, but to mark its difference.
To acknowledge that something crucial came before economics had its name, before it claimed its place among the sciences.
And in that before, something important still lingers — a wisdom not yet refined into models, but not yet lost in abstraction.
In The Wealth of Ideas, Alessandro Roncaglia begins the journey into the history of economic thought by stepping into its shadows — into this prehistory.
It is not empty.
It is not primitive.
It is a vital archive of moral imagination, where philosophy, theology, and lived experience were the first architects of what we now call “economic thinking.”
The World Before “The Economy”
To call it prehistory is to admit: this was not yet economics. Not as we define it now — not a structured science of incentives and equilibria, not a field mapped by models and data. There were no economic departments, no journals, no professional theorists.
But there were realities.
Scarcity, labor, exchange, property, debt — these were not inventions of economics. They were conditions of life. And from Mesopotamian temples to Roman forums, from early Hebrew law to Confucian philosophy, humans tried to make sense of them.
They did not ask, “What is the marginal rate of substitution?”
They asked, “What is a fair price?”
“Is it just to charge interest?”
“What duties do the rich have to the poor?”
“How should a ruler provide for his people?”
These are not outdated concerns. They are simply framed in a language that feels different — slower, moral, thick with context. This is not prehistory in the sense of silence. It is prehistory in the sense of formlessness. The questions are there. The answers are searching.
From Ethics to Economics
The thinkers of this prehistory did not separate the economic from the ethical. They could not.
Aristotle distinguished between oikonomia — the art of household management — and chrematistics — the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. Only one was virtuous. The other corrupted the soul.
The early Christian and Islamic scholars debated the morality of trade, the sin of usury, the idea of charity. Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle and Augustine, tried to locate the “just price” — a balance not of markets, but of conscience and necessity.
In China, Confucian and Legalist schools framed wealth in terms of social harmony and statecraft. In India, the Arthashastra detailed how rulers should govern production, taxation, and justice — not as a theory of markets, but as a guide to stewardship.
This was a time when economic behavior was not a puzzle to be optimized, but a practice to be judged. Right and wrong came before efficient and inefficient. The question was not “Does it work?” but “Is it right?”
Why This Is Not Yet Political Economy
What separates this era from political economy — the term that would emerge centuries later — is the lack of a systematic vision. There were insights, fragments, rich reflections. But no unified theory of the economy as a system with its own logic.
The prehistory is filled with brilliant observations, but not with coherent models. There was no sense yet of production and exchange as processes governed by consistent laws. No clear division between state and market, between moral norms and economic incentives. The terminology, the boundaries — all of it was still forming.
The economy had not yet emerged as an object of study. It was still a dimension of life, inseparable from everything else.
That is why we call it prehistory. Not because it was inferior — but because it was still becoming.
What We Lost, What We Left
In naming this period prehistory, we also name a rupture.
When economics began to professionalize in the 18th and 19th centuries, it carved out a space for itself by shedding its roots. It distanced itself from the philosophers and moralists. It sought objectivity, formality, precision. It claimed the mantle of science.
But in that shedding, something was lost.
The earlier thinkers understood that economic life was always entangled: with ethics, with power, with meaning. They saw that behind every price was a judgment. Behind every exchange, a relationship. Behind every system, a vision of the human.
Roncaglia does not call us back to prehistory out of nostalgia. He calls us to remember that economic thought did not begin in models. It began in life — and in the moral perplexities that life entails.
A Silence That Speaks
To call it prehistory is also to confess how modern economics has silenced what came before.
Rarely are students taught about Aquinas when learning about prices.
Rarely are they asked to consider Aristotle’s worries about wealth, or Confucius’s ethics of duty, or the Talmud’s concerns with justice.
Rarely are they taught that the earliest economists were also theologians, judges, poets, kings.
And yet, if we want economics to matter — not just to describe, but to guide — we may need to hear these voices again.
Before We Begin Again
Before we can understand Adam Smith, we must understand Aristotle.
Before Ricardo, the Scholastics.
Before Keynes, the prophets.
Before the models, the metaphors.
The prehistory of political economy is not merely a starting point. It is a reservoir — of questions, warnings, and insights — that can still speak to a world caught between wealth and want.
We call it prehistory because we must begin somewhere.
But in truth, it is always still with us.
Every time we ask not just what works, but what’s right,
Not just how much, but for whom,
Not just can we afford it, but can we live with it —
We step back into that older world.
And perhaps, we carry a little of it forward.