Notes sur Jean-Baptiste Say et les économistes italiens

The object of this paper is to give the elements which give evidence of the influence of the Italian economists on J.-B. Say and of the steady interest which he showed to at the end of his life for them. This relation, between J.-B. Say and Italy, deserves to be underlined because it is doubtless one of the last French economists who was interested of very near in what spelt on the other side of the Alps. J.A. Schumpeter, in the History of the Economic Analysis, present J.-B. Say as the successor of Turgot and Cantillon, he adds that Turgot and Cantillon is those that the most marked probably J.-B's analysis. Say. If this appreciation does not seem debatable in term of filiation, the influence which Schumpeter attributes to Turgot and to Cantillon should be strongly qualified for the benefit of the Count Pietro Verri who is one of those that the most marked J.-B's vision. Say. It is necessary to clarify however that J. In. Schumpeter quotes Pietro Verri in the chain which drives of F. Galiani to Walras by way of Say. If the influence of the Italian economists was not raised up to here, it likes an indifference towards authors who, done exception of some some as C. Beccaria and F. Galiani, are rarely quoted by the economists specialists of the history of the economic thought. Most of the works in French which deal with J.-B. Say makes raise the origin of its theory of the value utility to the influence of E. Bonnot of Condillac ( 1715-1780 ), either still to Turgot ( 1766 ). Just as much as these filiations, the real origin of its position on the theory of the value is at the author's whom he quotes at the very beginning of the first edition of the Treaty and just as much as he will continue to quote throughout republications and additions: the count Pietro Verri. It contradicts not at all the fact that J.-B. Say assumes a triple inheritance: That of the mercantilistes, the physiocrats and Adam Smith [SAY (on 1972), p. vi].