PIETRO VERRI ET JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY: VALEUR, MONNAIE ET LOI DES DÉBOUCHÉS

Abstract

Pietro Verri and Jean-Baptiste Say: value, money and the law of markets. The aim of this essay is to determine what influence Verri may have had on Jean- Baptiste Say. Should we limit Verri’s influence to what Say himself acknowledges in a footnote of the Traité concerning the value of goods, or should we recognize for Verri another and more fundamental role in the formation of Say’s general theoretical framework? If this question has not been raised so far, this may be due to the insufficient attention so far paid in France, but also elsewhere, to the Italian economists of the eighteenth century, except for authors such as Beccaria and Galiani. As we shall see in this essay, Jean-Baptiste Say takes up, against Adam Smith, Verri’s conception of utilityvalue, while against the Physiocrats (and also against what remains Physiocratic in Smith) Say maintains that production is a transformation, not a creation, of matter. At the same time, Say derives from Smith the central importance assigned to the production and exchange of values for values, and the opposition against system builders. In the eyes of Jean-Baptiste Say, Pietro Verri is the most important eighteenth century economist before Adam Smith. In the Discours préliminaire to the 5th edition of the Traité (1826), Say strongly emphasizes the importance of Italian economists. As he writes there: “Count Verri, compatriot and friend of Beccaria, and both a good writer and a great administrator, in his Meditazioni sull’economia politica, published in 1771, approached more than anyone else before Smith the real laws that govern the production and consumption of wealth”.