Gian Rinaldo Carli (1720-1795): Diagnosis and treatment of a monetary plague

Abstract

Gian Rinaldo Carli was an "expert" of money who lived in the 18th century, in an economic environment revolving around national and international trade. Be-longing to a community of scholars who lived in a sort of golden age of pre-classical studies on money, Carli stood out for his insistence on the need to inter-vene to contain monetary imbalance, seen as a serious impediment to the expan-sion of trade and economic dynamism. Carli curved his analysis, which was theo-retical in its depth, to political action and initiative. He sought to craft those rigor-ous empirically based measures that should underlie the practical work of a re-former. The paper aims to understand how Carli introduced rigor into his approach to monetary advice, in order to make it more adequate to meet what he believed was a growing need expressed by the governors of the time, starting with the Em-press of Austria.