GIOIA, MELCHIORRE. - Politician and writer, b. at Piacenza on 20 Sept. 1767, d. at Milan on 2 Jan. 1829. In 1784 he entered the Collegio Alberoni, from which he came out ordained a priest in 1793. Sympathizing with Jacobin ideas, he was imprisoned. Freed through Napoleon's intervention, he took refuge in Milan. He threw off the cassock and devoted himself to journalism. He founded various newspapers. He cherished the idea of an independent Italian State, and again suffered imprisonment, from which he emerged in 1800 after the victory of Marengo.
He held various offices and experienced varying fortunes until the collapse of the Kingdom of Italy in 1814. Years of fruitful work followed. He published the Nuovo progetto delle scienze economiche (Milan 1815-19), Del merito e delle ricompense (ibid. 1818), the Elementi di filosofia (ibid. 1818). Suspected by the Austrian police, he once again endured imprisonment for several months (1820-21). On his release, he continued to publish: in 1822, the Ideologia; in 1824, Esercizio logico su gli errori (these and other works were placed on the Index). His last work was the Filosofia della statistica (Milan 1826). He possessed great culture, drawn in large part from French sources. In philosophy, despite some hint of rising above vulgar sensationalism, he did not emerge from the sphere of the ideological school then dominant. He often indulges in a crude hedonism and utilitarianism. A more original position must be recognized in the social sciences, where he founded statistics as the «economic science of nations», in which «one examines the influence of physical and moral causes, internal and external, on the sources of production, on population, on labor and on habits». In theories of currency and commerce, G. is a follower of the free-trade doctrine.