Pantaleoni was by general consent one of the protagonists, if not the protagonist, of the renaissance in Italian economic thought from the “prostration” of the 1870s to the eminent position it came to occupy on the international scene at the turn of the century (Barucci 1972).
He masterminded the spread of marginalism in Italy, spotted and encouraged potential talents such as Pareto and Barone, launched a new series of the languishing Giornale degli economisti, and pursued a line of research in which marginal analysis was instrumental in supporting his liberal convictions and in outlining a suggestive sketch of a theory of social dynamics.
By no means a tranquil academic, his career was interrupted twice for political reasons. The first time was in 1892, when reactions to his attacks on the government’s protectionist policies forced him to resign from his post as director of the Scuola Superiore di Commercio of Bari. Reinstated as professor at the University of Naples, he quit again in 1896 after the clamour caused by his denunciation of secret deals concerning the failure of the colonial campaign in Abyssinia. For a while he went into voluntary exile in Switzerland, where he held a chair at the University of Geneva from 1897 to 1900. He also acted as a manager of the Cirio food company, as liquidator and supervisor of bank affairs (this role involved him in particularly bitter disputes), and as a Member of Parliament elected with the votes of the extreme left in 1900 (a temporary alliance that broke down well before his resignation in 1904). He settled definitively as a professor at the University of Rome in 1902, but this did not calm his political activism. From about 1910 on he veered towards extreme right-wing positions, to the point of participating in D’Annunzio’s self-proclaimed regency of Fiume in 1920 and acting as economic adviser for the first Mussolini cabinet from 1922. Sudden death in 1924 put an end to a restless political itinerary. Reconstructions of episodes in Pantaleoni’s life can be found in Michelini (1998, 2011) and Magnani (2003); a complete bio-bibliographical sketch in Augello and Michelini (1997); in English, see the essays collected in Baldassarri (1997) and Groenewegen (1998).Some personal features of Pantaleoni can be traced back to his origins and early years. He was the son of an Irish lady of patrician lineage and a liberal Italian patriot, Diomede Pantaleoni, a physician, scholar, and collaborator of Cavour. Half-Irish birth and early education in French and German schools account for his fluency in the main European languages and the international bent of his personality: for example, announced as a guest at a party given by the Marshalls at Balliol Croft, visiting Edgeworth at Nuffield College and endorsing him for election to a professorship, being offered a chair (declined) at the University of Chicago while in difficulty at Naples, addressing the British Economic Association (BEA) annual meeting in 1898, being extended the honour of a session devoted to his ideas on dynamics at the 1909 American Economic Association (AEA) meeting. Devotion to his father’s political ideals may account for the reactionary brand of liberalism that he professed all through his life, his blunt opposition to all forms of socialism, and his condemnation of both the corruption of the emerging business class during the Crispi years and Giolitti’s tendency to appease social strife by means of concessions to the labour movement. The absence of a party committed to a liberal agenda on the Italian parliamentary scene may have been responsible for Pantaleoni’s swinging from one extreme to the other of the political spectrum. The brief idyll with the socialists of the early 1900s gave way to his turning to nationalism during World War I and to fascism later on, finding no stopping-place in the middle. Moreover, in his later years he tended to spice his political tirades with a charge of violent anti-Semitism, which cast a shadow on his international reputation (Dalton 1923). As argued below, Pantaleoni the economist cannot be fully understood without considering the direction and intensity of his political involvement.
Despite the unpleasant drift of his later years, Pantaleoni’s personality was attractive to the point of inducing characters as far from his political leanings as his lifelong friend De Viti de Marco (1925) and the young communist Piero Sraffa (1924) to commemorate him in singularly warm terms. Behind the vast public display of energies was a private man of stunning erudition, a sharp reasoner, a brilliant speaker and an even more brilliant teacher. In contrast to his acknowledged role as the herald of pure economics in Italy, he was little equipped with mathematical training and inept at formal analysis, which he could not master beyond elementary geometry and calculus. Correspondence with Pareto (1960) and Barone (Magnani and Bellanca, 1991) shows the two friends patiently tutoring him in the fundamentals of mathematics. However, in economics he seems to have been the master of himself.