Franco Modigliani是众多的意大利裔经济学家之一。

http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/Preprints/italian.economists.html

Why So Many Italian Economists?

by E. Roy Weintraub

This paper appeared in Rivista di Storia Economica (anno XIII (Nuovo serie), fascicolo 2, 253-259, agusto 1997) which is the copyright holder of record. It is posted here for discussion purposes only. (See Endnote 1)

I recently received an e-mail from a former student. In it, he told me "I have become aware of a fairly large literature on utility and demand written by Italians, and published mostly in the Giornale degli economisti between around 1890 and 1915. The mathematics used is typically fairly sophisticated by the standards of most economists of the time, and a number of results in Slutsky either correct problems in the Italian literature or build directly on foundations built by the Italians, especially Pareto. Despite this, these papers in the Giornale seemed to have been largely (but not completely) ignored outside of Italy right up to the present day."

This is not the first time I have been distracted by the realization that my own intellectual path crosses the tracks of so many more Italian economists than say, French economists, or German economists, or Austrian economists, or Russian economists, or Spanish economists, or . . . .. This observation will, I expect, be taken by readers of this journal as a typical Americo-centric myopia that appears to infect the entire English language literature in economics. Nevertheless I ask you to refrain, for the moment, from thinking "How droll. Another American has seen fit to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus discovers, and Vespucci names, America, and now 500 years later Weintraub discovers Italy. Or rather the existence of economists in Italy. Nice of him to notice, but we've gotten along quite well without his attention thank you." But granting American boorishness, there may be an interesting point which remains: let me try put it in an appropriate perspective.

By far, the largest group of scholars calling themselves economists today reside in the United States. These individuals, and I probably should be counted among them, have been trained in and socialized to the economics profession in one or another of the graduate schools or Ph.D. programs in the United States. As is well recognized in studies of what goes on in these graduate programs, students interested in economics are the inputs, and neoclassical economists are the outputs. (See Endnote 2) That is, by and large, meaning nearly always, Ph.D. students in American graduate programs are trained as neoclassical economists. They take their places in a particular disciplinary community with their own heroes, techniques of analysis, canons, traditions, and histories of economic thought as lives of the saints.

In recent years, I have myself turned to the history of economics from economic theory itself. In this, my new subdisciplinary community, nearly all historians of economics themselves have been trained as economists. Consequently, interest in the disciplinary history is very conditioned by one's understanding of the discipline itself, and as a result the neoclassical tradition, its intellectual figures, and its canonical texts are over studied vis-a-vis other traditions. Since the other traditions seldom intersect with neoclassical economics, a neoclassical economist is hardly likely to stumble across one or another individual who happens to work in those other traditions in the course of being a good neoclassical economist. After all, which Chinese economists, or which Japanese economists made a mark on the 19th century development of economics, and which Spanish economists published in the American Economic Review in the first half of the 20th century?

You see where this argument is headed. It is absurd to claim that there was no work in economics -- broadly understood -- in Japan in the 19th century; it is preposterous to maintain that there were no economists operating in Spain in the first half of the 20th century. But from a Whiggish perspective on the development of economics, such contributions as existed by Chinese, Indonesian, and Argentinean economists played no role in the development in the discipline. Yet even if one does not maintain a Whiggish perspective on history, the residual point remains: those authors made no scientific contributions. As Bruno Latour remarked: "Since the status of a claim depends on later users insertions, what if there are no later users whatsoever? This is the point that people who never come close to the fabrication of science have the greatest difficulty in grasping. They imagine that all scientific articles are equal and arrayed in lines like soldiers, to be carefully inspected one by one. However, most papers are never read at all. No matter what a paper did to the former literature, if no one else does anything else with it, then it is as if it had never existed at all. You may have written a paper that settles a fierce controversy once and for all, but if readers ignore it, it cannot be turned into a fact; it simply cannot." (See Endnote 3)

For there to be a contribution to a literature of a scientific community, the members of the community must be cognizant of the potential contribution. This is why, despite the award of Nobel prizes to Hayek and Buchanan, it is difficult to speak of Austrian economics (of course not as done by Austrians today) as being associated with contributions to economics. And, again, my argument is developed from the perspective of, and within the community of, neoclassical economics, for there is no other scientific economics. (Of course this begs the question of the usefulness of such economic science, but the story of the "scientification" of economics/political economy which began in the latter part of the nineteenth century is precisely the story of the emergence of neoclassical economics.)

This argument suggests one reason there are "so many" Italian economists: the line of activity in the"mathematico-scientification" of economics goes from Jevons and Walras through Pareto, not Marshall. Vilfreddo Pareto's influence, in the sense of his being read and being taken seriously by others in the emergent highly theoretical economic analysis, is palpable. The magnificent intelligence of Vito Volterra, in his inaugural lecture at the University of Rome, lent credence and prestige to the new developments in economics. (See Endnote 4)Those who followed Pareto in Italy -- Antonelli, Barone, etc. -- found their contributions read and understood by Henry Schultz, Griffith Conrad Evans, Henry Ludwell Moore, Ragnar Frisch, Lionel Robbins, John Hicks, R. D. G. Allen, Paul Samuelson, and others. Recall that the three main lines of connection from Pareto to neoclassicism are through LSE, with Robbins and Hicks (See Endnote 5) , through the emergent mathematical (though at that time not yet neoclassical) tradition in the United States with Moore, Schultz, and Evans (See Endnote 6), and through the Harvard group around the physiologist L. J. Henderson which involved Schumpeter, Samuelson, and Talcott Parsons (See Endnote 7). The stabilization of neoclassical economics, the canonization of the neoclassical vision, had an extended family in Italy. Which other giants of economics at the end of the 19th century left such a tradition? The line from Karl Menger through Bohm-Bawerk ends in Othmar Spann and Hans Mayer in Vienna, Austria. (Once Hayek had moved to England, we need to speak of neo-Austrian economics.) The line from Walras in France ended with Walras: Allais was sui generis, and quite apart from influential university appointments for himself, or his students. Of Wicksell, and Ohlin, and Myrdal, and Lindahl, we have a mostly defunct tradition of business cycle analysis made obscure by the Keynesian shadow. Which leaves, of course, Jevons and Marshall and pre-Keynesian Cambridge economics. Yet even that tradition is on the wane; those who swore by the Marshallian supply-demand apparatus lived only for a time at Chicago with Friedman, Stigler, and Becker, and their anti-general equilibrium anti-mathematical tastes: in today's Lucasian Chicago the idea of general equilibrium is no longer taboo.

Nevertheless, for Americans the history of economics, which is to say the history of economics to which American neoclassical economists are connected, is a Cambridge, England construction; the stabilization of discursive practices imposed upon English language economics by Marshall, his Principles of Economics, his political machinations, his personal system of rewards and punishments, his dismissive marginalization of Edgeworth, of Walras, of Moore, defined the one way, the right way, to think about doing economics, and hence who was an economist. In so constructing the discipline, Marshall imposed order on the unruly past as well, defining as well those dead British males who were worth reading, and from his Cambridge perspective placing the royal line of succession back through Mill and Ricardo and Malthus and Smith and so on. That Marshall and his students paid little attention to Pareto and other Italian developments is part of what produces "surprise" among historians of thought: if Cambridge, meaning Marshall at that time, took little cognizance of Italian economists, then they did not exist. (See Endnote 8) Thus there emerged a Cambridge-o-centric view of the economic universe; that society of economists who talked only to one another was characterized by Gunnar Myrdal with his comment about "the Anglo-Saxon propensity for unnecessary creativity which comes from a systematic inability to read the Germanic languages." (See Endnote 9)

The language issue has some bite for answering my title's question. For some of Pareto's writing was early translated into English; this is important since even though Edgeworth, and later Robbins and Hicks -- and in America Griffith Conrad Evans -- read Italian, Marshall was not so able. Of course few French authors ever wrote in English, and almost no Japanese economists prior to 1950 wrote anything in English. And while a number of Scandinavian economists wrote for, say, the Economic Journal, few German economists wrote in English. After World War Two, when scientific work was increasingly work published originally in the English language, traditions were reconstructed in English language texts, as new cohorts of American historians of economics read back into the past. That Italian economists had better connections to England than did others, and thus language connections, becomes then part of the story.

The partial answer then to my title question has two elements: first, Pareto's importance in the most significant Post War tradition in economics, the neoclassical synthesis, makes those who built upon his work interesting to economics. Second, to the extent that the Marshallian tradition inappropriately undervalued Italian economics, and we in the Anglo-American tradition re-meet Italian economists, we are "surprised" to see them; and thus we (as my title suggests) "question" their ubiquity.

In any event, the order that Cambridge imposed upon the history of economic analysis as a sequence of U.K., if not Cambridge icons -- Edwin Cannan of course wrote on Smith --brings Piero Sraffa -- who wrote on Ricardo -- into our discussion. While it is true that Sraffa's papers in 1925-1926 let the air out of some Marshallian tires, the Cambridge tradition became a tradition of Sraffa and Keynes and those whom they influenced. It is not my task here to appraise the contributions of Piero Sraffa but rather to note his role in connecting long sequences of non-neoclassical Italian economists to post-Marshallian Cambridge, England. The Sraffian or neo-Ricardian tradition established itself in Italy with the work of Luigi Pasinetti, Piero Garegnani, etc. but this emergent literature found its voice in English, and a hearing among Post Keynesian economists connected to Cambridge, England. In a larger sense though most economists after 1936 (at least until the 1970s) were Keynesians, and thus were connected to Cambridge even if they despised the anti-neoclassical venom which made either bastards or monsters out of those who had different opinions about arcane problems in capital theory. If we thrill to the stories of Samuelson's Keynesian conversion experience at Harvard, and Klein's ode to the Keynesian revolution, we look to Cambridge as the source of the Light, and pay respect to the Cambridge world-view in which Pareto-Italians did not exist. (I remark, in passing, that the "big tent" of my subdiscipline (the History of Economics) includes within it, even encourages membership in it, those who write about the ideas of dead economists even though the authors of those papers are not, nor do they consider themselves to be, historians. Thus the eighteen hundredth article explaining why Keynes's theory of money is better in some sense than Friedman's finds a publication outlet in a journal in the history of economics. The Sraffian tradition thus "produces" work in the history of economics that is neither history not history of economics: and my path and theirs connects. But eventually, with so many (albeit non-neoclassical) economists in Italy looking for recognition among English speaking economists, when connections were made to the larger English language community of economists, neoclassical economics was reestablished in a country which had continuous connections to the English literatures. But there is another connection as well between English language economics, especially English economics, and Italian economics.

There is an immense literature in history, cultural and social history, about England's love affair with Italy. Whether we need go back all the way to Roman times and ask about the colonies' wish to assess the colonizer, or we seek to understand classical (i.e. Greek and Roman) influences upon English life and culture, the English have always headed toward Italy to nourish their souls. And thus it appears in recent years that individual influences -- like Richard Goodwin, like Frank Hahn -- have reconnected in a very direct way the communities of economists in Italy with those in England. And with such Americans as Hyman Minsky, Jan Kregel, Axel Leijonhufvud, and Edmund Phelps the ties that bind the study of neoclassical economics in Italy to American institutions has been enhanced. Certainly there are French students who have gone to Berkeley with Debreu over the years, and in recent years the stream of Asian Ph.D. students to the United States has turned into a rich and plenteous river. But the practice, in Italian graduate programs, of students spending a year or so in an American graduate department has forged new links and brought many more Italian economists and American economists together. In my own non top-ten economics department in the United States, a department of approximately 25 individuals, we have one professor who shares an appointment with the University of Rome, a senior faculty member who lives part of the year in Rome, and a graduate of Bocconi who received an American Ph.D. In addition, we have two visitors in this (not atypical) year who hold appointments in Italian universities.

And, of course, I seek chances to return to Italy.

Notes

1. Professor of Economics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina USA 27708-0097. This note was originally a question I posed to my friend and colleague Gianni Toniolo, who asked that I put ill-formed speculations on paper. While I alone am responsible for what appears here, he should be blamed for insisting that I commit the public act of writing about these issues.

2. See for example Arjo Klamer and David Colander, The Making of An Economist. Boulder, Colorad Westview Press, 1990.

3. Bruno Latour, Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, page 40.

4. Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, The Invisible Hand. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.

5. Recall the words: "Our present task may therefore be expressed in historical terms as follows. We have to reconsider the value theory of Pareto, and then to apply this improved value theory to those dynamical problems of capital which Wicksell could not reach with the tools at his command." John R. Hicks, Value and Capital. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939, p. 3.

6. See my "Vito Volterra, Griffith C. Evans, and Antiformalist Matematization of Economic Theory", to be delivered to the XXth International Congress of the History of Science, Liege Belgium, July 1997.

7. I have written about Pareto's "influence" on Samuelson in Chapter 3 of Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. See also Barbara S. Heyl, "The Harvard `Pareto Circle'." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1968, 4:316-34.

8. I note here that there is a journal devoted exclusively to Marshall, and related topics; the Marshall Studies Bulletin is edited and published in English through the University of Florence.

9. This observation appears in the Preface to the 1939 English translation of Myrdal's Monetary Equilibrium. How Cambridge economics developed the creation myth that classical economics was replaced, by an act of Cambridge will, by Keynesian economics is nicely set out in Robert Leeson, "Keynes and the `Klassics': An Interpretation." Discussion Paper, Department of Economics, University of Western Ontari London, Ontario, Canada, 1996.