Riformismo settecentesco e Risorgimento: l'opera di Pietro Verri e il pensiero economico italiano della prima metà dell'Ottocento (Eighteent-Century reformism and the Risorgimento: Pietro Verri's work and the Italian economic thought in the first half of the Nineteenth-Century)

This article investigates the reception of Pietro Verri’s economic ideas in the first half of the nineteenth-century in Italy. In this period a revaluation of Pietro Verri’s economic thought went hand in hand with the development of the idea of an Italian historical and philosophical primacy over the other European schools of economic thought. Verri, from Pecchio to Salvagnoli, was first and foremost praised as ‘the economist of freedom’. Verri’s idea of public happiness (felicità pubblica) was employed by Italian economists to advocate for Italy an economic development without high social costs, and to advance the idea of economics as a discipline which had to reconcile moral concerns and profit. Giuseppe Pecchio was the most influential supporter of this interpretation, which was only challenged by Francesco Ferrara. Historians of Italian economic thought have often considered this attitude as evidence of the backwardness of the Italian school. However it is argued here that, in spite of their claim of the superiority of Verri’s approach, most Risorgimento economists neither rejected the analytical achievements of British and French economic thought, nor denied the benefits and advantages of mechanization and industrial development