Umberto Meoli

This article uses bare URLs, which are uninformative and vulnerable to link rot. Please consider converting them to full citations to ensure the article remains verifiable and maintains a consistent citation style. Several templates and tools are available to assist in formatting, such as reFill (documentation) and Citation bot (documentation). (August 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Umberto Meoli (26 August 1920 – 17 May 2002)^[1] was an Italian historian of economics, known as a maverick of the Italian Left who eschewed Marxism in favour of British pragmatism.

Biography

Early life

Meoli was born in Padua, one of nineteen brothers; his father was a pharmacist from a small town near Benevento, and his mother was from Padua.

Education

In 1940, at age 20, Meoli began his service in the

In 1961 Meoli married Rachel Toulmin, an Englishwoman and lecturer at Padua University. Rachel Toulmin was the younger sister of Stephen Toulmin, a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Southern California.^[4][5]

Academia

Meoli was briefly a

It was during his time at Camera del Lavoro that Meoli became influenced by the Canadian Harry Gordon Johnson, one of the most active and prolific economists of all time. Gordon's main research was in the area of international trade, international finance, and monetary policy. In 1961, Meoli made a special journey to the University of Manchester in England to meet Johnson. He quickly became a close friend of both Philip Andrews, A former President of the Royal Economic Society,^[6] Andrews was senior researcher at Nuffield College at the time ^[7][8][9] and Elizabeth Brunner^[10][11] with whom Meoli shared an admiration for Alfred Marshall and a more skeptical view of John Maynard Keynes.

In 1961, Meoli published the first book in steady flow of books, in which would increasingly concentrate on the history of economic thought and ideas.

By 1970, Meoli became Professor of the History of Economic Thought at Camera del Lavoro, and shortly afterwards was invited to occupy a similar chair at the

Italian academic circles

In addition to his

Meoli always thought of himself as a man of the Left. However, he early became convinced of the unacceptable limitations of Marxist economic theory, and his books and articles struck many of his leftist colleagues as a kind of apostasy. Meoli's writings exhibited an ever-growing respect for British pragmatism, and the economic liberalism of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Alfred Marshall. As an example of his unconventional approach, the figure of Gustav von Schmoller has been highlighted by authors like Francesco Traniello,^[13] who has indicated the importance that Schmoller, like Gustav von Schönberg, Adolph Wagner and Albert Schäffle, among others, gave the ethical element of the political Economy, whereas Umberto Meoli associates the figure of Schmoller to those of Lujo Brentano and Karl Bücher as the most representative authors of the development of the Economic Historiography.^[14] Eventually seen in Italian academic circles as a maverick and a great Anglophile, Meoli's leftist friends tolerated the irony, largely because Meoli would comment on their dismay with sudden eruptions of laughter.^[15]

Works

• Umberto Meoli, Lineamenti di storia delle idee economiche, unknown binding, UTET Libreria,
  ISBN 88-7750-018-2

• History of economic thought

References