Introduction à la vie et à l'œuvre de Ferdinando Galiani et Chronologie de la vie de F. Galiani

Offer, to the French public, a bilingual translation today remedies a notorious injustice, because the history of the economic thought privileges a reduced group of Anglo-Saxon authors.The translation of Della Moneta in French is a first step. It has sense only in the hope that it will be followed by the other translations of works so fundamental for the forming of the European consciousness and the history of the ideas that: Antonio Genovesi's Lezioni del commercio, Cesare Beccaria's Economia pubblica, Gian Maria Ortes's Economia nazionale. To these Italian authors, it would be necessary to add those, so important, of Spain and Germany. We look, in this introduction, certain number of information about Ferdinando Galiani's biography, about economic and political context of time, as well as about stakes in the debates led in the middle of the XVIII-th century about the monetary system. Whole passages of Della moneta lean on direct observations, readings of works and the polite conversations, so important for the time for the constitution and the distribution of the knowledge. Without doing of artificial reference to the European current events, that it is allowed to us to find that it is not a fate if the " debate on currencies ", in the middle of the XVIII-th, intervenes during a period of changes of political system in most of the Italian States. The best introduction which one can find to the Della Moneta de F. Galiani is moreover the work of Franco Venturi: Settecento Riformatore. For lack of having a French translation of this major book of the history of the XVIII-th century in Italy, we decided to lean on its works as well as on those of the other Italian historians.Ferdinando Galiani