Background
Ferdinando Galiani was born on the 2nd of December, 1728 in Chieti, Italy.
Ferdinando Galiani was born on the 2nd of December, 1728 in Chieti, Italy.
Ferdinando Galiani was carefully educated by his uncle, Monsignor Celestino Galiani, at Naples and Rome with a view to entering the church.
Ferdinando served in Paris as secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador from 1759 to 1769. Thereafter, he performed government service in Naples, where he helped to formulate and administer economic policy.
Galiani wrote in both French and Italian, and his letters are valuable for their depiction of economic, social, and political life in 18th-century Europe. His correspondents included Denis Diderot, Voltaire, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. He also carried on a spirited intellectual debate with Abbé André Morellet, the spokesman of the Physiocrats.
Galiani published two treatises, Della moneta in 1750 (On Money) and Dialogues sur le commerce des blés in 1770 (Dialogues on the Grain Trade), both of which display clarity of methodological presentation, despite his basic eclecticism. In the first work, he evolved a theory of value based on utility and scarcity; this depth of thinking on economic value would not be seen again until discussions of marginal utility developed in the 1870s. Galiani’s second treatise stressed the necessity for the regulation of commerce, an argument that opposed the physiocrats, who advocated complete freedom.