PANTALEONI, MAFFEO. — Italian economist, born at Frascati on 2 July 1857, died at Milan on 29 October 1924; professor of political economy at the Universities of Camerino, Macerata, Venice, Bari, Naples, Geneva, Pavia, and Rome; deputy and senator, he was a scientist of considerable renown and, for more than forty years, an animator of economic studies in Italy.
His figure belongs among those of Walras and Pareto. When he entered the scientific arena, the Walrasian construction was already complete, in which economic equilibrium is represented by a system of algebraic equations linking prices and quantities. The Paretian architecture had not yet arisen, which was to confer upon the edifice that elegant form in which economic equilibrium is presented as the result of the conflict between tastes and obstacles (v. PARETO, VILFREDO).
P.’s conception anticipated that of Pareto in its aim of eliminating monetary superstructures. Regarding productivity as an indirect utility, he extended to the sphere of production the conception that J. Jevons had already devised for the sphere of consumption, and thus succeeded in determining the configuration of equilibrium under competition as that in which the ratios of the final degrees of utility, taken two at a time, remain the same for all the subjects present in the market. It follows that, as long as there is a disparity between the final degrees of utility even of only two subjects, the system is not in equilibrium. This means that the resources of the community are not being employed in the manner most advantageous to the community itself. If the disparity concerns direct goods, the desirability of an exchange operation then arises; if it concerns instrumental goods, the desirability arises of a different combination of the factors of production within the same industry, or of a new distribution of those factors among the various industries. Under competition, all economic movement, in the fields as in the workshops, in the domestic market as in the international one, is merely the result of the effort through which millions upon millions of people, moved solely by the criterion of their personal advantage, seek to bring about the best utilization of the collective reserves. And this is achieved precisely in a configuration of equilibrium in which all the ratios of all the degrees of utility are equalized for all the subjects present in the market. Equilibrium thus represents an ideal goal, which continually shifts in consequence of the continual changes taking place in the conditions that determine II. The art of economic policy consists in creating those environmental conditions that allow the process of adjustment to proceed naturally with a minimum of friction.
Upon this foundation rises the system of Pantaleonian individualism, which constitutes the dominant theme of all his scientific production. It is the exaltation of economic freedom, the foundation of civil progress and the safeguard of moral and political freedom. The State is incapable of replacing individuals in evaluating the ratios of the final degrees of utility, and still more incapable of replacing them in the action directed toward achieving their equalization. Its function, therefore, is not to replace individuals wholly or partly, but to create the environment within which individuals may freely carry out operations of exchange, production, and investment. When the State does not deviate from this policy, the economy prospers; the industrial world comes to resemble a boiling sea, in which mountains of lava rise and fall, in flows and ebbs, appearing and disappearing under the action of competition, a force as powerful as the law of gravity. The opposite picture is that of paternalism, dirigisme, socialism, and collectivism in all its forms: it is the stagnant, putrid marsh and constitutes the triumph of incompetence, incapacity, careerism, and greed, without restraint or measure. It ends in parasitism, ruin, and universal misery.
No one, better than P., possessed the fortunate hand for diagnosing this process. His scientific activity in the final period of his life, amid the events of the fortunate first postwar period, was directed toward II. His dry, nervous, agile prose produced essays that constitute a work of art. The picture briefly sketched here does not provide a complete measure of the man: the acute interpreter of facts, the creator of economic semiotics, the profound statesman, the ingenious historian who, in immortal pages, reconstructed the living and throbbing vicissitudes of economic institutions. Above all, it says nothing of the man himself, of the charm emanating from his person, or of his great heart. He had the honor of stimulating economic research in men such as Vilfredo Pareto and Enrico Barone. Nearly all those who cultivated economic studies in Italy during the period from 1890 to the date of his death in 1924 claimed, and still claim, the honor of professing themselves his disciples.
Principal writings: Teoria della traslazione dei tributi (Rome 1882); Dell'ammontare probabile della ricchezza in Italia (there 1884); Principi di Economia pura (Florence 1889, Milan 1931; English translation, London 1898; Spanish translation, Madrid 1918); Lo scandalo bancario di Torino (in collaboration with G. Poli, Turin 1902); Nuove riflessioni e nuovi documenti (there 1903); Scritti vari di economia, 3 vols. (Palermo 1909–10); Tra le incognite (Bari 1917); Note in margine della guerra (there 1917); Politica: criteri ed eventi (there 1918); La fine provvisoria di un'epopea (there 1919); Bolscevismo italiano (there 1922); Temi, tesi, problemi e quesiti di economia politica tecnica ed applicata (in collaboration with Broglio d'Azano [there 1923]); Erotemi di Economia (there 1925); La crisi del 1905-1907, edited by Annali di Economia, I, no. 2, Milan 1925; Il sindacalismo e la realtà storica (Collana degli Economisti, V, Turin 1932); Studi storici di economia, collected and edited by A. de' Stefani and A. Del Buttero (Bologna 1938); Studi di finanza e di statistica, collected and edited by A. de' Stefani and A. Del Buttero (Bologna 1938).
BIBLI: P. Sraffa, A. Loris, s. V. in Economic Journal, 34 (1924), pp. 648–54; G. Del Vecchio-A. De Viti De Marco, s. V. in Giornale degli economisti, 63 (1925), pp. 105–236; M. L. Moore, P.'s Problems in the Oscillation of Prices, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 40 (1925–26), pp. 586–97; G. Pirou, M. P. et la théorie économique, in Revue d'économie politique, 40 (1926), pp. 1144–65; G. Stefani, Un breve corteggio di M. P., in Riv. intern. di scienze soc., 56 (1947), pp. 343–46. Luigi Amoroso