‎GALIANI, F. ‎
‎Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds. A Londres (Paris), 1770. - (Bound with:) (MORELLET, A.) Réfutation de l'ouvrage qui a pour titre 'Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds.'‎

‎A Londres, 1770. Two works in one volume. (4), 314, (1, errata) pp.; 8, 360 pp. 8vo. 19th-century half calf, marbled boards, spine with raised bands, red labels with gilt lettering, marbled edges. First work: Weulersse, i, p. xxvi; Kress 6730; Goldsmiths 10640; Einaudi 2334; Mattioli 1376; INED 1948; Higgs 4941; Leblanc, De Thomas More à Chaptal, 138; Conlon 70:926. First edition of this epochal work. 'At the age of twenty-two, Galiani published anonymously the first of his two major works on political economy. This was his treatise, Della Moneta (1751), one of the outstanding works of economic theory of the eighteenth century. In 1759 he was sent to Paris as Secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy, where he stayed for ten years. His friends included many of the leading figures of Parisian intellectual society, most importantly Diderot, Grimm, and Mme d'Epinay. He won great renown as a wit and satirist, at a period when Parisian brilliance was at its most scintillating. Moreover, it was in the 1760s, the decade of Galiani's stay in Paris, that political economy became the great fashionable interest of the day, thanks, mainly, to the challenging, dogmatic crusade of the physiocratic school, led by Quesnay. Policy towards the grain trade, long the most vital branch of domestic economic affairs, became more than ever the dominant issue, with the lifting of the ban on exports in 1764. The debate came to a head just before Galiani was brusquely summoned back to Naples (1769). With the aid of his friends, however, he managed to complete his second major work on political economy, his Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, a scathing attack on the physiocrats and their policies, and surely one of the most brilliant and profound policy tracts ever written ....... Ultimately, what was the most important in the Dialogues was their methodological significance, with regard to the complex relationships between economic theory and policy, and the importance of the historical-institutional dimension. Galiani provided the first profound criticism of deductive theorizing in economics from an historical standpoint' (T. Hutchinson, Before Adam Smith, pp. 255-256 and p. 269).Second work: Weulersse, i, p. xxviii; Kress S.4633; Goldsmiths 10642; Einaudi 4026; Mattioli 2483; INED 3314; Leblanc, De Thomas More à Chaptal, 120; Higgs 4942; Conlon 70:1235.First edition.The very rare refutation of Galiani's work. 'd'Après Weulersse Morellet, pour combattre Galiani, invoquait beaucoup les principes de l'école (physiocratique); mais dans la question des manufactures d'exportation, et sur le point essentiel de la productivité de l'industrie, il n'hésistait pas à soutenir des thèses contraires à celles de ces nouveaux amis. Morellet reprochait aux disciples de Quesnay l'abus de l'esprit de système' (INED). - With ex-libris of Theodore Lissgignol on front paste-down. ‎

Reference : 18567

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