In memory of Pier-Luigi Porta

Pier-Luigi Porta was born in 1945 and passed away in 2016 in the same Italian city, Milan. He was an impressive professor and scientific researcher who taught and presented his contributions to economics and history of economic thought not just in Milan, but across the world, in many European countries, in Asiaz as well as in America.

His international commitments did not prevent him paying specific attention to two key cities which played a central role in his life, in his education and training but also in the emergence of his ideas and developments in the fields of economics, history and social science, Milan and Cambridge.

Pier-Luigi Porta indeed studied economics and graduated at the Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, in Milan on the 31 October of 1969. His thesis dealt with the field of economic policy and was supervised by I. Gasparini, F. Silva and A. Pagani. He was strongly influenced by I. Gasparini and some of his ideas and views. Later he also became closely acquainted with T. Bagiotti and was also influenced by him after his appointment as Assistant Professor at his Institute at Milan State University. He also spent two academic years at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in 1985–1986 and 1986–1987. Finally he became Full Professor at the Facoltà di Economia, Università di Milano-Bicocca in 1990 till the end of his life.

This meant that P.L. Porta had the opportunity to spend time and to teach in most of the Milanese universities providing academic formation in economics.

Arising from his Milanese origins he also dedicated a part of his contributions to the Scuola Milanese or Ecole de Milan which emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century. This school as Schumpeter stressed, played a major role in the process of transition which permitted the substitution to the Smithian and classical tradition from Physiocracy. It was mainly supported by two Milanese philosophers – Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria – and their followers (in philosophy or in public policy) – the ‘reformers’ according to P. L. Porta – who strongly contributed to the construction of the European Philosophy of the Enlightenment and to the emergence of the concept of civil society based on creativity and public happiness.

This attention paid to the Scuola Milanese opened the way to the interest which P. L. Porta showed to the relations between economics and the civil society considered from the standpoint of the Italian economic thought.

In 1997 P.L. Porta published an important paper in Italian and dedicated to Milan and aspects of the culture of market and competition between 1935 and 1950 (Porta 1997). This contribution discussed the link between economic thought and the prospects for the reconstruction of a 'new Italy' in the final years of the Fascist régime and in the early post-war years.

The second city which played a fundamental role in Pier Luigi Porta’s intellectual but also friendly life was Cambridge (England).

A year after the defence of his Italian thesis in 1969 P. L. Porta left Milan for Cambridge. He became a Research student at the University of Cambridge (in the Faculty of Economics and Politics and in Christ’s College) from September 1970 to September 1972. He worked on development and on the theory of production under the supervision of P. Patnaik, P. M. Deane and G. Heal. He met in Cambridge outstanding economists as N. Kaldor, L. Pasinetti, J. Robinson and P. Sraffa.

Twenty years later in 1993 he became a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College. He also contributed to the organization of several Summer Schools on “Structural change and economic Dynamics” at Selwyn College in the middle of the 1990s with H. Hagemann, H. Kurz, F. Meacci, L. Pasinetti, M. Landesmann, N. Salvadori, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge, B. Verspagen and others. I met him here for the first time and it was the beginning of our meetings during various summers when he was spending a part of his time in Cambridge.

Finally, after the opening of Sraffa’s Archives in the late 1993, at Trinity College thanks to the Wren Library and its main librarian – Jonathan Smith – Pier-Luigi Porta came even more to Cambridge and I met him frequently in this library.

In his analysis of Pasinetti’s book Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians (2007), P.L. Porta adopted the standpoint of the existence of a Cambridge School broadening Pasinetti’s concept of the Cambridge Keynesians. For him, the existence of a Cambridge tradition started with Marshall and the role he attributed to institutions, social rules and economic evolution (in line with Beccattini’s ideas and with the exchanges Beccattini and Porta had); continued with Keynes and his followers (Kahn, J. Robinson, Kaldor); and ended with Sraffa and Pasinetti, without any real contradiction between them and Marshall’s initial contribution.

The attention paid by P.L. Porta to Cambridge and Milan and to the intellectual contributions that social scientists of these cities brought to the history of economic thought in various periods was just part of a very broad base of his research programme. However, it will be shown that these contributions might help to better understand P.L. Porta’s scientific developments.

Three main fields may be selected to point out P.L. Porta’s contribution to economics and to history of economic thought.

The first concerned the relationships between economics and the civil society considered from the standpoint of the Italian economic thought. The Italian masters of P.L. Porta – Bagiotti and Gasparini – probably helped him to understand that economics could not be considered as a closed system independent from other human and social sciences. For him economics was both a scientific and a moral science; within this science anthropological, cultural and social factors could affect the motivations and the contents of individual economic behaviour. This is the reason why P. L. Porta always stressed these factors when he built his own interpretation of civil society implying that this society and its economic system could not be analysed in a context of the usual methodological individualism but in a context implying a relationship between ‘individualism and collective subjects in economic analysis’ (Porta 1984, xi) and using a ‘mixing of subjective and objective elements’ (Porta 1988, 44). This is why civil society is supported by ‘that special form of mutual help that allows not only the survival but the growth of a complex society by means of continuous interaction between market and institutions’ (Porta 2012a, 148).

As we noted earlier, P.L. Porta investigated with R. Scazzieri or alone the main figures of the Italian civil society tradition or of the Italian Enlightenment as Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria or the Lombard Enlightenment.

He also used in collaboration with R. Scazzieri (Porta and Scazzieri 1997) this first approach to build what both authors called an ‘economic theory of civil society'. They started by the elaboration of a history of the origin and evolution of the concept. They then built a logical framework which decomposed the concept of civil society into a number of constitutive elements, such as trust, commercial society, division of labor, horizontal (or ‘civil') network of interpersonal relationships. They also connected the notion of civil society with other classical concepts and developments. They finally applied their approach to investigate the concept of 'international civil society', emphasizing the relationships of trust and relating them to the notions of exchange and division of labour. This contribution allowed them to study the emergence and persistence of international money as well as the logical and historical conditions for ‘partnership equilibrium'. This contribution was especially important since it showed how the Italian civil society or the Italian Enlightenment approach was not only a tradition of history of economic thought rooted in in the city of Milan but also provided analytical tools to explain the modern real world and to understand better its complexity.

The second field that should be mentioned is P.L. Porta’s interpretation of the classical school. This began with the publication of several papers dedicated to the published contributions of Piero Sraffa during the 1986–1996 decade and was further refined by a splendid book he edited and he dedicated to David Ricardo (Porta 2009). This interest for Sraffa’s works was revived by access to Sraffa’s Unpublished Papers and further deepened by the various papers and books published by Luigi Pasinetti relating to this access. P. Sraffa and L. Pasinetti had a deep and drastic influence on P. L. Porta’s interpretation of the classical economic thought. However, he never considered himself to be a member of what he called the school of Sraffians. He had much more analytical sympathy with those whom L. Pasinetti characterized as the Cambridge Keynesians (Pasinetti 2007). For him these Keynesians were discussing “Sraffa in a constructive way, by looking backward and forging ahead, and which it is much more interesting and productive in order to discuss what remains of Sraffa’s Economics” (Porta 2012b, 2013). This was certainly his standpoint when, prior to his death, we edited together Structural Dynamics and Economic Growth (Arena and Porta 2016). For him, it was clear that the apparent disconnection between the civil society tradition and the Cambridge School was not convincing. Welcoming Pasinetti’s conception of institutions and various contemporary works of Quadrio Curzio, Walsh and Zamagni, he was convinced that Sraffa’s legacy had still a future if a connection could be built with the civil society and the classical traditions including into it the role of social norms and rules.

The final field which also enriched P. L. Porta’s contribution to economics was the Economics of Happiness. Here we cannot disconnect his name and the name of Luigino Bruni. Their common work in this field began in 2003 (Bruni and Porta 2003) and was developed in three major volumes (Bartolini et al. 2016; Bruni and Porta 2007a, 2007b, 2016). These books presented the various contributions to the field in the last decades but also gave their own interpretation of this approach and the issues it raised. This interpretation is distinctive and creative for various reasons. It first introduced the individual but also the social dimensions of the concept of happiness, referring to Smith’s moral sentiments, to codes of behavior and to institutions. Therefore, from this standpoint, it showed how necessary it is to consider economics as an open field taking into account the anthropological, sociological, philosophical, and psychological contributions to the field of economics and happiness. It also linked the economics of happiness with the civil society tradition of thought in line with P.L. Porta’s other investigations. It studied the connections between the economics of happiness and the recent developments of welfare economics as well as those of behavioral and experimental economics stressing the importance of social and cognitive psychology for modern economists. It also developed in a creative way the concepts of interpersonal relations and of reciprocity and the role that they may play in contemporary economic analysis. It finally investigated policy estimations and applications within the field.

In the end, I cannot forget to mention in this Journal the fundamental role, the open-mindedness and benevolence for of P.L. Porta during the process of creation and rise of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. He was present from the beginning on the Lérins Islands near Nice and Cannes where this Society was founded in 1994. He then became its Secretary from March 2001 until 2005. He brought his kind, strong, but discreet, support to this process and I will never forget it.

For this reason but also for his exceptional intellectual qualities, culture, generosity and humanity, Pier Luigi Porta will always be in our minds and hearts.