Everything about Ferdinando Galiani totally explained
Ferdinando Galiani (
December 2,
1728 -
October 30,
1787) was an
Italian economist.
He was born at
Chieti, and carefully educated by his uncle, Monsignor C. Galiani, at
Naples and
Rome with a view to entering the church. Galiani showed early promise as an economist, and even more as a
wit. By the age of twenty-two, after he took orders, he'd produced two works by which his name became widely known far beyond the bounds of his own
Naples. The one, his
Trattato della moneta, in which he shows himself a strong supporter of the mercantile school, deals with many aspects of the question of exchange, but always with a special reference to the state of confusion then presented by the whole monetary system of the Neapolitan government.
The other,
Raccolta in Morte del Boia, established his fame as a humorist, and was highly popular in Italian literary circles at the end of the
18th century. In this volume Galiani
parodied, in a series of discourses on the death of the public hangman, the styles of Neapolitan writers of the day. Galiani's political knowledge and social qualities brought him to the attention of King Charles, afterwards
Charles III of Spain, and his liberal minister Tanucci, and in 1759 he was appointed secretary to the Neapolitan embassy at Paris. This post he held for ten years, when he returned to Naples and was made a councillor of the tribunal of commerce, and in
1777 minister of the royal domains.
His economic reputation was made by a book written in the
French language and published 1769 in
Paris, namely, his
Dialogues sur le commerce des blés. This work, by its light and pleasing style, and its vivacious wit, delighted
Voltaire, who described it as a cross between
Plato and
Molière. The author, says
Pecchio, treated his arid subject as
Fontenelle did the vortices of
Descartes, or
Algarotti the
Newtonian system of the world.
The question at issue was that of the freedom of the corn trade, then much agitated, and, in particular, the policy of the royal edict of 1764, which permitted the exportation of grain so long as the price hadn't arrived at a certain height. The general principle he maintains is that the best system in regard to this trade is to have no system--countries differently circumstanced requiring, according to him, different modes of treatment. He fell, however, into some of the most serious errors of the mercantilists--holding, as indeed did also Voltaire and even
Verri, that one country can't gain without another losing, and in his earlier treatise going so far as to defend the action of governments in debasing the currency. Until his death at Naples, Galiani kept up a correspondence with his old Parisian friends; this was published in 1818.
See
Liibate Galiani, by
Alberto Marghieri (1878), and his correspondence with
Tanucci in
Viesseux's
L'Archivio storico (Florence, 1878).
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