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Textbooks of Economics during the Ventennio: Forging the Homo Corporativus?

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An Institutional History of Italian Economics in the Interwar Period — Volume I

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought ((PHET))

Abstract

The chapter surveys forty textbooks of economics and related disciplines published in Italy during fascism. It tries to understand to what extent those textbooks contributed to the regime’s goal of creating the ideal fascist citizen, the so-called homo corporativus. It is argued that, at least in their didactic works, a majority of Italian economists were rather unsupportive of that goal and endorsed corporatist ideas only superficially.

The paper surveys forty textbooks of economics and related disciplines published in Italy during fascism. We try to understand to what extent those textbooks contributed to the regime’s goal of creating the ideal fascist citizen, the so-called homo corporativus . It is argued that, at least in their textbooks, a majority of Italian economists were rather unsupportive of that goal and endorsed corporatist ideas only superficially.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a broader historical overview of the evolution of Italian textbooks of economics in the first half of the twentieth century, see Magliulo (2000).

  2. 2.

    See Faucci (1990, 13–18; 2000, 298–303; 2014, 189–191). Also see the distinction between “formal” and “integral” corporatist economists in Cavalieri (1994, 10, fn. 4).

  3. 3.

    According to the CIPEI database of academic economists during Fascism, the earliest occurrence of “corporativism” in the title of a university teaching in economics or related subjects was in 1929, with Filippo Carli’s course in “Corporative Policy and Economics”, at the University of Pisa.

  4. 4.

    For the argument that even this version of corporatism was not totally detached from the tradition of Italian economic thought, in that its roots at least partially lay in the historicist-spiritualist-voluntarist approach shared by many Italian economists of the late nineteenth century, see again Faucci (1990). The Regime’s goal was no novelty. Denouncing the efforts during the first decade of the Kingdom of Italy to bend economics to become subservient of political power, the leading Italian economist of the time, Francesco Ferrara, had publicly voiced his discontent. See Faucci (1995, 20–25).

  5. 5.

    On this specific way of coping with the economics of corporatism, see more amply Magliulo (2000, 64–67).

  6. 6.

    Ferrara had already used the label “chameleons” to chastise those economists who lacked strong principles and belonged to no clear school of thought, see Ferrara (1976 [1884], 368). We reiterate that this label, like all others, is assigned here to textbooks, not to their authors. It should not be interpreted as expressing a moral evaluation of the latter’s behavior. This, by the way, is the reason we decided to avoid using the word “opportunist”—which has a more negative tone—to characterise this group of textbooks.

  7. 7.

    On Enrico Barone’s contributions to modern economics, see Caffé (1987) and Mosca and Bradley (2013).

  8. 8.

    For a through reconstruction of the episode and of Spirito’s proposal, see Cavalieri (1994) and several of the chapters in Barucci et al. (a cura di) (2017).

  9. 9.

    See again Cavalieri (1994) and Dardi (2017) and the literature cited therein.

  10. 10.

    See also Giorgio Mortara’s textbook, where an appendix on “The corporatist economic order”, not even authored by Mortara himself, was added to a basically unchanged table of contents.

  11. 11.

    For many years American business was fascinated by Mussolini and his economic policies, see Diggins (1972, Ch. 7).

  12. 12.

    Though technically sophisticated and quite unique for the time, see Montesano (2015) and Tusset (2009).

  13. 13.

    A professor and, later, rector at Bocconi University, Del Vecchio (1883–1972) was struck in the later 1930s by the infamous racial legislation of the Regime and had to expatriate in Switzerland. After the war, he would resume teaching in Rome and become Treasury Minister in the crucial De Gasperi cabinet of 1947–1948. On Del Vecchio’s important contribution to monetary economics, see Tusset (2014).

  14. 14.

    In “L’ ‘ordine nuovo’ e il problema industriale italiano nel dopoguerra”, presentation at the Study Meeting on the Economic Problems of the New Order, Pisa, May 1942; published in Demaria (1951, 501).

  15. 15.

    See, e.g., Faucci (2014, 191), and, more broadly, Amore Bianco (2015).

References

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of a PRA Grant of the University of Pisa. All translations from Italian in the chapter are our own.

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  1. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Riccardo Faucci & Nicola Giocoli

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  1. Riccardo Faucci
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Correspondence to Riccardo Faucci .

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  1. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Massimo M. Augello

  2. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Marco E.L. Guidi

  3. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Fabrizio Bientinesi

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Faucci, R., Giocoli, N. (2019). Textbooks of Economics during the Ventennio: Forging the Homo Corporativus?. 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_7

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