Political Economy as Intellectual History: Pier Luigi Porta

This paper reconstructs the intellectual and scientific contribution of Pier Luigi Porta by calling attention to Porta's interest in the processes of analytical fusion in the dynamics of economic knowledge (formation of ‘hybrid’ theoretical schemes). Porta's intellectual programme developed at the crossroad between analytical reconstruction and historical reconstruction. Hybrid schemes bear the mark of historical context, and are themselves cues into the constellations of beliefs characterizing any such context (see also Barucci, 1983 for the related issue of the relationship between economic theory and ‘economic culture’). In this connection, the methodological canon of the Cambridge intellectual history school (see, in particular, Skinner, 1969) has undoubtedly been an important influence in shaping Porta’s approach to the intellectual history of economic analysis (see, for example, Porta, 1988, Porta, 1992a). At the same time, his focus on the analytical dimension of conceptual constructions made him to investigate how the ‘ideal types’ of exchange and production get combined with each other in ‘hybrid’ theories (as in Smith’s analysis of commercial society), while maintaining their identity and heuristic function as distinct benchmarks for the exploration of the economic fabric of society. The above approach delineates a conception of economic theory as a theory of political bodies. This explains why, in Porta’s intellectual trajectory, the reconstruction of classical political economy has been the breeding ground of interconnected strands of research that have led him to examine the cognitive premises of social coordination and division of labour, the conditions of ‘public happiness’ in a political body, and the relationship between institutions and structural dynamics along trajectories of economic improvement. In particular, Smith’s theory of imagination and sympathy, as developed in the Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Smith, 1980 [1795]) and in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1976b [1759], led Porta to address (in collaboration with the present author) the epistemic roots of congruence in the social sphere. The interplay between direct and indirect knowledge defines the codes of association from which Smith’s ‘sympathy’ derives. It also draws attention to the formation of internal worlds that may be different form the one directly experienced and in which the apprehension of a commonality of possible situations may generate social coordination ‘by virtue of imagination and likelihood’.