La biblioteca Pantaleoni e le fonti dei «Principii di economia pura» (the private book collection of Maffeo Pantaleoni and the sources of Principii di economia pura)

According to Pantaleoni’s will, his private book collection should have been entrusted to the Municipality of Macerata. The present essay delineates the vicissitudes of this collection, describing how the testamentary dispositions were not executed, the several attempts made to bring the collection back to its natural seat and the impossibility to examine it because of the judicial dispute between Pantaleoni’s heirs and the Treasury Ministry to which the collection was temporarily entrusted in 1925. Only in January 2000, the collection was open to the public in the communal library of Macerata. Pantaleoni’s book collection, which consists of 7.603 volumes, had been examined up to that date only by Gangemi in 1939. The latter studied the notes written by Pantaleoni in some of his books, and pointed out the variations the economist wished to make to the second edition of Principii di economia pura (Principles of pure economics). Our essay moves from Gangemi’s analysis and enlarges the research about the notes to the volumes cited in the bibliography of Principii. It examines Pantaleoni’s approach to texts, his outlook on scientific research and the ways in which he transposed into his manual the notions he had apprehended. Starting from the bibliography of Principii, we have tried to verify whether the economist had all the volumes cited, how he had acquired them and the personal impressions he drew from them. Without going into the contents of Principles, our study centres on the development of Pantaleoni’s work, in order to highlight the special alchemy of a book that deeply affected Italian economic studies, even though it was written hastily and disregarding cleanness of text and accuracy of form.