Galiani, Ferdinando

Galiani, Ferdinando (fārdēnän`dō gälyä`nē), 1728–87, Italian economist, educated for the church. As a very young man he wrote Della moneta [on money] (1750), which attacked the mercantilist theory that money has no intrinsic value. Sent (1759) to Paris as secretary of the Neapolitan embassy, he wrote his Dialogues sur le commerce des blés (1770). Galiani contributed greatly to the modern theory of value and to the relativistic, historical approach to economics. He opposed the physiocrat view that land is the source of all wealth. A noted wit, he was an intimate of the circle of Holbach and Mme d'Épinay.

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Galiani, Ferdinando 

Born Dec. 2, 1728, in Chieti. died Sept. 30, 1787, in Naples. Italian bourgeois economist and philosopher, statesman, and abbot. One of the forerunners of the Austrian school.

Galiani asserted that the value of a commodity is determined by its utility. However, his concept of value is contradictory: he tried to deduce the source of a commodity’s value from its utility and from the expenditure of labor that went into its production. Galiani considered questions of monetary theory and international trade. He criticized the physiocratic theory and the policy of free trade.

WORKS

Trattato della moneta. Naples, 1750.
In Russian translation:
Besedy o torgovle zernom. Kiev, 1891.

REFERENCES

Marx, K. Kapital, vol. 1. In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 23, pp. 84, 99, 100, 110, 164, 169, 325, 658.
Marghieri, A. L’Abate Galiani. … Naples, 1878.

V. S. AFANAS’EV