ABSTRACT
The canonical study of political economy in Italy currently emphasizes the importance of the Milanese school, particularly through the second half of the eighteenth century.1 On the other hand the first half of the nineteenth century in Italian political economy is commonly described as a barren age.2 In this chapter we shall focus attention on the Milanese school itself, in view of their prominence on the intellectual scenery of Italian language authors, and we shall proceed to show that there is both continuity and progression within that school throughout the century, 1750-1850, as far as the history of political economy is concerned. It is argued that the canonical judgement and bi-partition of that period in the Italian case mainly reflects the prevailing concentration of the attention of historians on selected analytic issues, ranging from the comparative productivity of sectors in the economy to the debates on value and price theory, on money and on international trade.3 No single one of such and similar matters, significant as they are, seems to lie at the core of the analytic interest of the main authors in Italy from the mid-eighteenth to midnineteenth century. It would, therefore, not be possible to seize the specific analytic contribution of those authors to the development of political economy by classifying their contents according to a thematic grid mainly built on some of the traditionally leading issues in the history of economic analysis. A correct specification of the historico-analytic contribution of a particular school is not independent of the discovery of some common basic purpose to the authors of the school itself, as a history of economic analysis is not independent of expectations and intentions on the part of its actors.
