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278 Germano Maifreda

The relations between economic knowledge and mathematics were
– as Tubaro has opportunely noted – characterized by a decided origi-
8
nality . Attempts to formalize economic argumentation were very pre-
cocious – Giovanni Ceva’s fundamental De re numeraria was printed
in Mantua in 1711 – and, indeed, appeared much earlier than in
France, where reference to exact science within economic studies was
often more a declaration of principle than a rigorous and methodologically
accurate procedure. Still in 1771, in his first writing on political
economy contained in letters written to Pietro Verri, an innovative
mathematician such as Condorcet expressed all his skepticism about
the deluded use of «the language of geometry» in the «economic
9
sciences»; a use that he discerned in the Lombard scholarship .
Giovanni Ceva, a mathematician expert in hydraulic engineering,
as well as a public official, created an algorithm which aimed at rep-
resenting an economic system through two fundamental variables –
population and the quantity of money in circulation – whose
interaction would, in his opinion, determine the buying power of the
coinage. While, from a theoretic-monetary point of view, Ceva’s argu-
mentation added no significant qualitative knowledge to prior elabo-
rations (and his mathematics were, in reality, limited to simple arith-
metic operations like fractions and proportions), his methodological
innovation consisted chiefly in the attempt to analyze monetary
questions geometrically, dealing with them in precise, univocal, lan-
guage and with rigorous logic.
The problem of the relations between the proportions of the metals
involved and the quantification of monetary circulation had in any
case already been explored since the Middle Ages and, in the Early
Modern period, had become the object of rigorous analyses by Coper-

8 See P. Tubaro, Un’esperienza peculiare del Settecento italiano: la «scuola milanese»
di economia matematica, in «Studi settecenteschi», 2000, n. 20, pp. 193-223. On the
general aspects of the Political Economy elaborated by the «Milanese School» see A.
Quadrio Curzio (ed.), Alle origini del pensiero economico in Italia: il paradigma lombardo
tra i secoli XVIII e XIX, Bologna, Mulino, 1996; P.L. Porta, R. Scazzieri, Pietro Verri’s
Political Economy: Commercial Society, Civil Society, and the Science of the Legislator’,
«History of Political Economy», 2002, n. 1, pp. 83-110; L. Bruni, P.L. Porta, Economia
civile and pubblica felicita in the Italian Enlightenment, in N. De Marchi, M. Schabas
(eds), Œconomies in the Age of Newton, Annual Supplement of «History of Political
Economy», 2003, n. 34, pp. 261-86; L. Bruni, S. Zamagni, Civil Economy. Efficiency,
Equity, Public Happiness, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2007; P.L. Porta, Lombard Enlightenment
and Classical Political Economy, text of the Blanqui Lecture The School of Milan:
Competition and Public Happiness in Pietro Verri’s Political Economy delivered at the XIII
Eshet Annual Conference, Thessaloniki, 23 April 2009, available on http://www.eshet.net.
9 Quoted in E. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, cit.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018 n.43
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)