Pietro Verri
1728–1797 · Italian Enlightenment writer, journalist and historian
Pietro Verri (Milan, 1728–1797) was one of the leading figures of the Lombard Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Italy. A writer, journalist, historian and economist, he took part in the reform of the administration of the Milanese territory under Maria Theresa of Habsburg, and his work is often read as a gateway to economic thought before Adam Smith.
Born into a conservative noble family, he received a strict religious education that he began to question as a young man. After a brief spell in the army during the Seven Years' War, he turned to intellectual life. In 1761 he and his brother Alessandro founded the Society of the Fists, and between 1764 and 1766 the two of them ran the periodical Il Caffè, where readers were drawn into lively debate about civic and cultural renewal, inspired by ideas arriving from France and England.
His economic writing, above all the Meditazioni sull'economia politica of 1771, examines production, money, prices and the balance of trade. Verri preferred real mechanisms of adjustment, such as the creation of new domestic industries that replaced imports, to explanations centred on the outflow of money. He also wrote the Storia di Milano, published in 1783.
His reputation endures as one of the key reference points of the Lombard Enlightenment.
Key ideas
- Price and need: prices depend on effective demand and on plenty, and demand, rather than supply, drives the market.
- Trade balance: imbalances are corrected through import substitution and the growth of the domestic market, rather than through deflation.
- Self-sustaining growth: rising income, new needs and new production feed a mechanism of growth that sustains itself.
- Measuring prosperity: in his view population was the best indicator of national welfare, ahead of the balance of trade and the rate of interest.
Curiosities
A society with a combative name
The Society of the Fists, founded in 1761, took its name from a play on words about fighting, and its members read the most advanced publications arriving from France and England.
Satirical almanacs
In his youth he wrote satirical almanacs, such as *Borlanda impasticciata* and *Gran Zoroastro*, which scandalized Milanese society.
Teachers and influences
Influenced
- Cesare Beccaria 1738–1794
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.