Melchiorre Gioia e Achille Loria: un impianto istituzionalistico nel pensiero economico italiano tra Ottocento e Novecento (Gioia and Loria: an institutionalist approach in the Italian economic thought between nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

The paper aims to demonstrate that Melchiorre Gioia, an Italian economist of the early nineteenth century traditionally judged and eclectic author, can be considered an outstanding spokesman of that approach that in 1918 Walton H. Hamilton defined «institutional economics». The role played in the genesis of this approach by another Italian economist of the late nineteenth century, Achille Loria, is also examined. If in the history of economic thought institutionalism is generally remembered for its attack to marginalist economics, from an operational point of view its goal is an attempt to explain the nature of institutions and organisations, their origin and evolution, the ways in which they interact with the economic agency of individuals and groups. The paper intends to show that institutionalism is primarily a ‘style’ rather than a current of thought located in a specific national and chronological context. According to this logic, before Veblen, Commons and others in America developed their theories, in Italy an ‘institutionalist style’ was employed in economic writing since at least one century.