Abstract
The chapter provides an overview on Italian economics under the fascist regime. The period saw the strengthening of academic institutionalisation and the rise of a new profile of economic expert operating in State-owned companies. Conversely, the dictatorship interrupted the traditional free circuit of ideas between theory and policy. While fascist censorship was engaged in inspecting comments on official economic policies, the economic profession watched over the recruitment of academics to defend the scientific level of the discipline. The compromises which academics were forced to accept generated a majority of passive fascist economists and only a minority of assenting economist fascists. It was with the racial laws of 1938, which excluded Jewish citizens from holding public positions, that the world of Italian economists was turned upside down.
Translated by Matthew Armistead.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1923, the Banco di Roma, which had been in crisis for some time, was taken over by the Società Nazionale Mobiliare [National Society of Securitized Credit] (controlled by a Subsidy Consortium made up of the Banca Commerciale Italiana [Commercial Bank of Italy] and Credito Italiano [Italian Credit (Company)]. In 1933, with the creation of the IRI, both the Bank of Rome and the other two banks mentioned passed under the control of this holding and became, from 1937 onwards, “banks of national interest.” See Zamagni (1993); Castronovo (2013).
- 2.
Alfredo Rocco was Minister of Justice from 1925 to 1932 and signed the penal code and the criminal procedure code in 1930.
- 3.
OVRA—Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell‘Antifascismo (Organisation for the Supervision and Repression of Antifascism)—was the secret police in Fascist Italy from 1930 to 1943 and of the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945.
- 4.
See, in this collection, Stefano Misiani and Manuela Mosca, “The Persistence of Tradition: The Economists in the Law Faculties and in the Higher Institutes of Business Studies (1922–1943)”.
- 5.
See, in this collection, Fabrizio Bientinesi and Marco Cini, “The ‘New Entries’: From the Schools for Corporative Studies to the Faculties of Political Sciences”.
- 6.
The first higher school of commerce was established in Venice in 1868. There then followed those of Genoa (1886) and Bari (1886), while others were founded in other cities only at the end of the century. See Augello and Guidi (1988).
- 7.
The successful entrants were Marco Fanno, Fabrizio Natoli and Emanuele Sella, and those excluded were, among others, Carlo Cassola, Giovanni De Francisci Gerbino, Umberto Ricci and Guido Sensini. For all references to this specific case and to a vast picture of competitions in political economy, financial science and statistics listing all the committee members and the scholars promoted and excluded in the period 1891–1924, see Barucci et al. (2017).
- 8.
For a wide-ranging discussion of these themes, see, among the books published in English, Bosworth (2005) and Duggan (2012). The literature on Mussolini in languages other than Italian is considerable and easily found. The problem is different for those wishing to find a way through the endless literature on these issues in Italian. Suffice it to say that it grows by no less than ten major works a year.
- 9.
See Bjerkholt and Parisi (2015, 98, 106).
- 10.
- 11.
Giacomo Matteotti, an intellectual and socialist politician, was killed by a fascist squad on 10 June 1924, probably on Mussolini’s order.
- 12.
On this point, which in fact is not well known, and about which a rich documentation has been published for the first time, see Spallato (2013), a paper presented to the conference Corbino economista e politico economico held in Naples on 3–5 June 2010 by the Istituto Italiano di Studi Filosofici [Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies], whose acts were never published. The contributions to the conference were largely published in volume 2 of 2012 of Il pensiero economico italiano (Barucci and Cattabrini 2012) and of the journal Libro Aperto, nos. 72–74, 2013.
It is worth recalling that an article by Corbino (1942), which showed the great superiority of the naval power of the Allied Forces over the Italo-German Axis, contributed to the suspension of the publication of the Giornale degli Economisti.
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Barucci, P. (2019). Italian Economists and the Fascist Regime: Only an Ambiguous and Painful Continuity?. In: Augello, M., Guidi, M., Bientinesi, F. (eds) An Institutional History of Italian Economics in the Interwar Period — Volume I. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32980-8_2
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