Ferdinando Galiani

Who was Ferdinando Galiani?

Ferdinando Galiani was an Italian economist, a leading Italian figure of the Enlightenment. Friedrich Nietzsche referred to him as "a most fastidious and refined intelligence" as well as "..the most profound, sharp-sighted and perhaps also the foulest man of his century."

Born at Chieti, he was carefully educated by his uncle, Monsignor Celestino Galiani, at Naples and Rome with a view to entering the church. Galiani showed early promise as an economist, and even more as a wit. By the age of twenty-two, after he took orders, he had produced two works by which his name became widely known far beyond the bounds of his own Naples. The one, his Trattato della moneta, a disquisition on coinage in which he shows himself a strong supporter of mercantilism, deals with many aspects of the question of exchange, but always with a special reference to the state of confusion then presented by the whole monetary system of the Neapolitan government.

The other, Raccolta in Morte del Boia, established his fame as a humorist, and was highly popular in Italian literary circles at the end of the 18th century. In this volume Galiani parodied, in a series of discourses on the death of the public hangman, the styles of Neapolitan writers of the day. Galiani's political knowledge and social qualities brought him to the attention of King Charles of Naples and Sicily and his liberal minister Bernardo Tanucci, and in 1759 Galiani was appointed secretary to the Neapolitan embassy at Paris. This post he held for ten years, when he returned to Naples and was made a councillor of the tribunal of commerce, and in 1777 administrator of the royal domains.