The German Translation of De Viti de Marco's Primi Principii dell'Economia Finanziaria

The German edition (1932) of De Viti de Marco’s Primi Principii dell’economia finanziaria, actively promoted by the Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern, is an important case study of the transmission of economic ideas from Italy to the community of scholars in the interwar period. This paper aims to analyze the motivations and expectations behind this editorial initiative, its reception and the role it played in the methodological debate on public finance in the 1930s. To this end, a first section examines the research activity carried out by Morgenstern during his stay in Italy in 1928 as a Rockefeller fellow, the close intellectual relations he forged during this period with the leading Italian economists of the time, particularly Antonio de Viti de Marco and Luigi Einaudi, his project to promote a translation of De Viti’s Primi principii. A further section analyses the complex process of translation and adaptation of the Italian text in German, the differences between the German and the previous Italian editions and the intense exchange of correspondence between De Viti, Morgenstern and the publishing house (J:C:B: Mohr – Paul Siebeck, Tübingen), which testifies also the difficult and sometimes dramatic constraints facing the Italian intellectuals under the Fascist regime. The paper addresses also briefly De Viti's contribution to the theory of public finance and his liberal view in the framework, on the one hand of the Italian and Austrian approach in this field and, on the other, of the ‘statist’ approach shared by most German economists. A final section deals with the reception De Viti’s book in the leading academic journals in Germany and Central Europe. Although the majority of the comments made by the reviewers were critical, we conclude that Morgenstern’s initiative had a key role in disseminating De Viti's theoretical work and his approach among a broad German reading community of scholars, opening new paths of research in the field of public finance