ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The political economy of the abbé Galiani: between history and philosophy.
Author: Clément Alain, Soliani Riccardo
The great controversy on the free trade of grain and Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787): between history and philosophy. Alain Clément, Université de Tours (France); Riccardo Soliani, Università di Genova (Italia) The present paper aims at examining some aspects of Galiani’s approach to political economy, particularly with respect to his criticism to the free trade propounded by Physiocracy. In the first part, we describe the historical and cultural context where the Dialogues was born, and the structure of the argument. Scarcity of corn and consequent turmoils marks the history of Naples and France in the period of elaboration of Dialogues, at the end of the period that Galiani spent in Paris. Impossibility of directly applying the same theoretical principles to very different countries and necessity of considering which social groups are advantaged or disadvantaged by different rules appear as the basic issues of Galiani’s proposals, which influenced Diderot and other relevant people. In the second part, we try to clear the vision of history and nature of Galiani, which his argument is based upon. There references to Della Moneta concerning value, “alzamento” and interest are introduced, and some letters and less known papers on history and politics are considered and discussed. The comparison with some points of the third New Science of Vico allows us to draw conclusions about the philosophy of history of Galiani and its incompatibility with abstract economic theories.
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