Page 73 - Mediterranea 43

Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 279

10
nicus, Scaruffi and Montanari . It should also be noted that Ceva’s
work was not intended to have explicitly methodological ends, consti-
tuting, rather, a group of precepts to aid the «Prince» (who remained
the chief actor in the economic system) in the wielding of power; the
scientist’s analysis was to serve principally as general orientation, to
adopt for useful and discretionary legislative regulations. For these
reasons, too (and the choice of Latin for the printed text is a clear cor-
roboration), Ceva’s brief study had a distinctly limited circulation and
exercised no direct influence on successive economic thought.
The passages in Cesare Beccaria’s work where we find mathematic
methods applied to economic discussions have a deeper historic and
epistemological weight. In 1762, Beccaria wrote Del disordine e de’
rimedi delle monete nello Stato di Milano (‘Monetary Disorder and Its
Remedies in the State of Milan’), revealing the mathematic talents of
the author – whom fellow students at Parma’s Collegio dei Nobili had
significantly nick-named Boy Newton («Newtoncino»). The first section
of this study presented three fundamental theorems on the value of
coins and some corollaries in political economy. The second part in-
troduced an empiric study of the Lombard case based on data from a
11
study by Gian Rinaldo Carli . As we know, Beccaria made some nu-
meric-monetary errors here in considering the dimensions proposed
and this skewed his conclusions, drawing a number of criticisms.
Further, in Il Caffè Beccaria represented the problem of contraband
with a mathematic model (Tentativo analitico dei contrabbandi, 1764),
advancing, however – as we shall see better – numerous and opportune
doubts. The lessons he held at the Scuole Palatine (published posthu-
mously in Elementi di economia pubblica, 1804), clearly show Beccaria’s
limits – and his caution – in using “geometric demonstrations”,
including, indeed, the fleeting annotation: «It is not possible to fix the
12
intrinsic value of human labor with arithmetic precision…» .

10 See G. Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic
Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. Farnham Uk-Burlington Vt,
Ashgate, 2012. Marco Bianchini has acutely written that Ceva’s audacity consists chiefly
in «discovering an area in which all men are equal and may be represented by a
combination of goods and coin which, in turn, are linked in a network of functional rela-
tionships wholly analogous to those of the physical universe» (M. Bianchini, Alle origini
della scienza economica. Felicità pubblica e matematica sociale negli economisti italiani
del Settecento, Parma, Studium Parmense, 1982 197). See also M. Bianchini, Some Fun-
damental Aspects of the Italian Eighteenth Century Economic Thought, in D.A. Walker
(ed.), Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought, Aldershot, Elgar, 1989, pp. 53-67.
11 For an evaluation of Carli’s monetary intuitions, A. Cova, Pietro Verri e la riforma
monetaria, in C. Capra (ed.), Pietro Verri e il suo tempo, vol. 1. Bologna, Cisalpino, 1989,
pp. 763-88.
12 P. Tubaro, Un’esperienza peculiare del Settecento italiano, cit., p. 202.

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