Ferdinando Galiani

The first, Della Moneta, a disquisition on coinage in which he shows himself a strong supporter of mercantilism, deals with many aspects of the question of exchange, but always with a special reference to the state of confusion then presented by the monetary system of the Neapolitan government.

[5] 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.

He left a large number of letters which are not only of biographical interest but are also important for the light they cast on the social, economic, and political characteristics of eighteenth-century Europe.

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 had not reached a certain level.

Similarly to Voltaire and even Pietro Verri, he held that one country cannot gain without another losing, and in his earlier treatise defended the action of governments in debasing the currency.

He used the term "providence" to reconcile the historical dynamic of commercial progress with a set of fixed moral rules that lay at the core of successful human interaction.

Galiani presented any moralistic dismissals of natural price formation and self-interested profit-seeking as reproaches to the way God intended human societies to function.

Providential mechanisms were also involved in the history of money, the rise and fall of states in both antiquity and modernity and regulated the development of cultural characteristics of the dominant societies in the course of time.

In this respect, the physiocratic enlightened despot consistently and independently ruling economic matters according to natural laws was not enough to maintain social order.

Galiani not only had theoretical brilliance with his idea of "natural" laws in economics, but also was a practical man, skeptical about the reach of abstract theory, particularly when action was necessary and urgent.

Galiani disagreed with the physiocratic argument which said that in order to provide a sufficient supply of grain, it suffices to establish a completely free trade.

In 1768, as France collapsed in a near-famine, the physiocrats still called for "non-action", muttering on their ordre naturel and the glorious wisdom of Quesnay, which galvanized of making their own remarkable contributions in opposition.