Antonio De Viti de Marco è un grande economista italiano, fondatore della teoria pura della finanza pubblica e ispiratore della public choice. Con Maffeo Pantaleoni, Vilfredo Pareto, Enrico Barone e Ugo Mazzola è protagonista di una delle epoche d’oro del pensiero economico italiano, in cui la teoria marginalista viene affinata e applicata a nuovi ambiti. Deputato radicale di orientamento liberaldemocratico, è leader del movimento antiprotezionista; imprenditore vinicolo meridionale, lotta per l’attuazione di riforme che consentano al Mezzogiorno agricolo di svilupparsi in un regime di libertà commerciale.

Documentario su Antonio de Viti de Marco (1858-1943), grande economista italiano, deputato combattivo liberale, radicale, democratico e antiprotezionista, nato a Lecce in una grande famiglia cosmopolita della metà dell'Ottocento e vissuto nel Salento producendo vini con metodi d'avanguardia. Il documentario ricostruisce per la prima volta la sua straordinaria figura dall'infanzia fino al rifiuto del giuramento di fedeltà al fascismo. Nei luoghi autentici della sua vita Emilia Chirilli, ultima testimone diretta dopo la scomparsa di tutti i suoi discendenti, e dieci esperti italiani e stranieri, tra cui il premio Nobel per l'economia James Buchanan, ricostruiscono la sua vita e il suo pensiero raccontando aspetti inediti della sua attività e della sua influenza.

The name of Emil Sax is frequently to be found in the history of Italian economic thought in the age of marginalism. This paper reconstructs three episodes to describe the relationship between Emil Sax and Italy. The first concerns the introduction of marginal analysis into some specific issues of public finance, seeing the works of Maffeo Pantaleoni (1883) and Sax (1887) as of primary significance. The second is about the reception accorded to Sax's thought in Italy: his 1887 work was immediately examined, discussed and assimilated, especially by Giuseppe Ricca-Salerno (1887), and by Augusto Graziani (1887). The third relates to the development of a pure theory of public finance, and concerns the works of Sax (1887) and Antonio De Viti de Marco (1888).

Enrico Barone’s famous article on economic planning, “Il Ministro della Produzione nello Stato Collettivista” (“The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State”), which showed the theoretical possibility of an economically efficient collectivist planned economy, was published in Giornale degli Economisti in 1908. Barone’s article has been widely cited, particularly in the comparative economic systems literature, but it has not been very widely read or analyzed in recent years, and there is not much literature that places Barone’s “Ministry” model in the context of his other works or in its historical, social, or ideological context. The aims of this paper are: a) to analyze and clarify Barone’s model in depth; b) to place it in the context of Barone’s other writings and the literature on the subject; and c) to examine the apparent contradiction between Barone’s hostility to socialism and his attempt to formulate the pure theory of the collectivist economy.

This article belongs to the area of university policy, viewed as an important example of the relationship between culture and power. As a case study, it utilizes the competitive exams for university chairs which took place in Italy for economic disciplines between 1900 and 1942. Interpreting the rules, the criteria and the outcomes of faculty recruitment, the article reconstructs an overall picture of the actors, themes and orientations, as well as the channels used to spread ideas. In this way, it clarifies important aspects of the influence exercised by the political sector over economic culture prior to and during fascism, in particular, in the formation of a consensus for government intervention in the Italian economy.

The Italian economist Enrico Barone (1859-1924) is best known for his contributions to marginal productivity theory and the socialist planning debate. This paper analyzes Barone’s contributions to the theory of perfect competition which are largely ignored in the secondary literature. It includes his methodology; the definition, conditions and outcomes of perfect competition; the institutional context of perfect competition; and the adjustment process. It also includes some of Barone’s graphs that illustrate the working of perfect competition. The paper demonstrates that Barone deserves a place in the history of the theory of perfect competition.

It is well known that one of the features of public choice, political realism, is embedded in a time-honored Italian tradition going back to Machiavelli and perpetuated by G. Mosca and V. Pareto in their political and sociological writings. The scientific spirit, which in their era led to the foundation of various social disciplines, fostered the applica-tion of economic analysis to the political sphere. In that context, Antonio de Viti de Marco (1858–1943) formulated an economic model of the state, consisting of two types of con-stitutional extremes: the absolute state and the democratic state. We ask herein how that model may be reconciled to G. Mosca and Pareto’s theory of the ruling class, with which De Viti de Marco agreed. Finally, we analyze his political writings in order to reconstruct his interpretation of collusion, rent seeking and “clientelism”, i.e., the redistribution of extracted rent, which takes place in the form of discretionary allocations of public jobs, public contracts and other corporative favors. Collusion is the use of democratic institu-tions by the ruling classes in order to gain monopoly power. While collusion is the basis of rent creation, rent extraction is not the final goal of politicians; rather, it is a means of strengthening electoral support.

We revisit the Cournot–Bertrand debate in the light of Cournot, Edgeworth and Launhardt, tracing back to Launhardt the origin of price competition in duopoly models with constant returns to scale. Then, we discuss the formalisation of consumer utility function for differentiated products, first appearing in Launhardt and then in Bowley. This allows us to point out that assuming that firms know the demand function(s) is equivalent to assuming that they know the structure of consumer preferences. Therefore, we argue that there is no role for the auctioneer, either in Cournot or in Walras.