Abstract
De Viti de Marco was an active member of Italy’s parliament for some two decades, liberal, radical, democratic, and very much in favour of free trade. This interview with his biographer Cardini is mainly devoted to his political experience, from the university up to his refusal to take the oath of loyalty to fascism, and it is full of ideas for the interpretation of the years from the end of the nineteenth century to about 1930.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
By the term Risorgimento (1815–70) we mean the period of Italian history in which the formation of a unified national state was pursued and achieved.
- 2.
The Socialism of the Chair was a movement of academics of historicist orientation originating in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, in favor of State intervention in the economy; it had a considerable following also in Italy.
- 3.
A. M. Fusco (1983) ‘Una Lettera Inedita di Maffeo Pantaleoni ad Antonio de Viti de Marco’, Economia delle Scelte Pubbliche, 1, 61–71.
- 4.
W. S. Jevons (1871) The Theory of Political Economy (London, Macmillan).
- 5.
A. de Viti de Marco (1888) Il Carattere Teorico dell’Economia Finanziaria (Roma, Pasqualucci); English translation of the first chapter in M. Baldassarri and P. Ciocca (eds) (2001) The “Theory” and “Application” of Economic Doctrines in Roots of the Italian School of Economics and Finance: From Ferrara (1857) to Einaudi (1944) (New York, Palgrave) III, 505–529.
- 6.
M. Pantaleoni (1889) Principi di Economia Pura (Firenze, Barbera); English translation (1898) Pure Economics (London, Macmillan).
- 7.
Founded in Padua in 1875 and for three years the organ of the historical school, then resuscitated in Bologna in 1886 by Alberto Zorli under the banner of eclecticism, in 1890 75% of the Giornale degli Economisti was purchased by Mazzola, De Viti de Marco and Pantaleoni.
- 8.
L’Unità, a journal founded by Gaetano Salvemini, was published from 1911 to 1920.
- 9.
La Critica, the journal founded by Benedetto Croce, was published from 1903 to 1944.
- 10.
Francesco Crispi (1819–1901) was Prime Minister of Italy from July 1887 to February 1891 and then from December 1893 to March 1896.
- 11.
The political activity of Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) was directed at denouncing and combatting every kind of state intervention.
- 12.
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta (1833–1918) received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907.
- 13.
The Banca Romana, one of the six issuing banks active in Italy before the Bank of Italy was established (1893), was accused in 1892 of having issued notes without authorization and banknotes in double series. Napoleone Colajanni and Ludovico Gavazzi, two members of parliament, had exposed the bank’s irregularities in the Lower House.
- 14.
A. de Viti de Marco (1934) La Funzione della Banca 2nd edn (Torino, Einaudi).
- 15.
Antonio Starabba marquis of Rudinì (1839–1908) was Prime Minister of Italy from February 1891 to May 1892, and from March 1896 to June 1898.
- 16.
Gaetano Salvemini was elected member of the Italian parliament in 1919; Edoardo Giretti (1864–1940) was a radical member from 1913 to 1919.
- 17.
Felice Cavallotti (1842–98) was the founder of the original Italian Radical Party at the end of the 1870s.
- 18.
Connubio refers to Cavour’s policy of 1852, a pact between different chambers of the Italian parliament.
- 19.
The reference is to the period between 1901 and 1914.
- 20.
The radicals Edoardo Pantano (1842–1932) and Ettore Sacchi (1851–1924) took part in Sonnino’s Italian government of 1906.
- 21.
Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928) was Prime Minister of Italy from May 1892 to December 1893, then three times between 1903 and the First World War, and finally from June 1920 to July 1921.
- 22.
Cardini refers to the decision of Giolitti not to intervene in the general strike of September 1904, and to the promulgation in 1912 of the law establishing almost universal male suffrage.
- 23.
As we have said, De Viti’s wife, Harriet Lathrop Dunham, was born in New York.
- 24.
F.S. Nitti (1900) Nord e Sud: Prime Linee di una Inchiesta sulla Ripartizione Territoriale delle Entrate e delle Spese dello Stato in Italia (Torino, Roux e Viarengo).
- 25.
Giuseppe Zanardelli (1826–1903) was Prime Minister of Italy from February 1901 to November 1903. In 1902, to signal his commitment to the South of Italy, he traveled extensively there. The first special legislation for the South of Italy was passed in 1904 by the second Giolitti government (November 1903–March 1905).
- 26.
This issue will also be discussed below.
- 27.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was the 28th President of the United States (from 1913 to 1921).
- 28.
Henry Asquith (1852–1928) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. In his first government he appointed David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Chancellor of the Exchequer.
- 29.
The People’s Budget was passed by Asquith’s liberal government with redistributive aims.
- 30.
By the expression New Freedom is meant Wilson’s reformist policies which included a strong antitrust policy and greater government control over the banking world.
- 31.
In his speech of January 1918 Wilson listed the Fourteen Points on which he based his proposals to found a return to peace. Among the points there was the suppression of commercial barriers.
- 32.
Jules Destrée (1863–1936) Belgian socialist politician, campaigned to get various European countries to resist the German invasion of Belgium of 1914.
- 33.
See A. de Viti de Marco (1918), La Guerra Europea: Scritti e Discorsi (Rome, Edizioni dell’Unità).
- 34.
Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938) was a passionate Italian nationalist in favor of intervention, whereas the purpose of Salvemini’s support for intervention was to create the conditions for democratic change.
- 35.
Leonida Bissolati (1857–1920), an Italian radical politician first, and later a socialist, like Salvemini belonged to the group of democratic interventionists.
- 36.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), 32nd President of the United States (from 1933 to 1945).
- 37.
Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911–2004), 40th President of the United States (from 1981 to 1989).
- 38.
Italy entered the war in May 1915.
- 39.
A. de Viti de Marco (1930) Un Trentennio di Lotte Politiche (1894–1922) (Roma, Collezione meridionale). The book contains a preface by U. Zanotti Bianco (‘Nota Storica sul Movimento Antiprotezionista in Italia’, pp. XI-XXII) and an appendix by Ernesto Rossi (‘La Questione Doganale dopo la Guerra’, 449–480); in 1928 the latter had helped De Viti de Marco to gather together the texts to include in the volume.
- 40.
Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922), jurist, was an influential English constitutionalist.
- 41.
We have already encountered the card index of his library; we will return later to the question of the catalogue of his books.
- 42.
We shall come back to Luigi Einaudi (1874–1961) both as an Italian scholar of public finance, as an intellectual known throughout the world, and as a public servant at the highest level.
- 43.
A. de Viti de Marco (1890) ‘L’industria dei Telefoni e l’Esercizio di Stato’, Giornale degli Economisti, s.II, I, September, 279–306; English translation (2001) ‘The Telephone Industry and State Exercise of Said’, in M. Baldassarri and P. Ciocca (eds) Roots of the Italian School of Economics and Finance (New York, Palgrave) III, 505–529.
- 44.
A. de Viti de Marco (1928) I Primi Principi dell’Economia Finanziaria (Roma, Sampaolesi); English translation (1936) First Principles of Public Finance (New York, Harcourt Brace & Co./London, Jonathan Cape).
- 45.
A. de Viti de Marco (1922) ‘Economie o Imposte?’, Problemi Italiani, II, 13, 15 August, 429–462.
- 46.
A. de Viti de Marco (1930) ‘Al Lettore’ (1929), in Un Trentennio di Lotte Politiche (1894-1922) (Roma, Collezione meridionale) pp. V-IX. This book was republished, with a fine introduction by the editor A. M. Fusco (Napoli, Giannini, 1994).
- 47.
The German translation of 1932 of the First Principles of Public Finance contains a preface in which De Viti deplores the condemnation of Ernesto Rossi. ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ was an anti-fascist movement that played a leading role in the Italian resistance and, after the war, in the rebirth of the Partito d’Azione.
- 48.
Letter to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Roma Pietro de Francisci of November 1931, in E. Rossi (1948) A. de Viti de Marco, Uomo civile, Bari, 5.
- 49.
A. de Viti de Marco (1925), ‘Maffeo Pantaleoni’, Giornale degli Economisti, s. II., XLV, April, 165–177.
- 50.
Laterza publishing house published various books by Pantaleoni between 1917 and 1925; see M. Mosca and M.A. Caffio, (2008) ‘L’archivio Laterza: lettere di economisti all’editore (1901–1959)’, in P. Barucci, L. Costabile, M. Di Matteo (eds.), Gli archivi e la storia del pensiero economico (Bologna, Il Mulino), 283–298.
- 51.
G. Boatti (2001) Preferirei di No: Le Storie dei Dodici Professori che si Opposero a Mussolini (Torino, Einaudi); G. Helmut (1994) Der freie Geist und seine Widersacher. Die Eidverweigerer an den italienischen Universitäten im Jahre 1931 (Frankfurt a. M., Haag & Herchen). These are two books which trace the history of the Italian university teachers who refused to take the oath of loyalty demanded by the Fascist regime.
- 52.
De Viti wrote: ‘The oath … would seem to me to be in contrast with my previous political history and practice, and with the doctrine I have always professed … I have, therefore, reached the decision—for me considerably painful—to ask to go into retirement’, in E. Rossi (1948) A. de Viti de Marco, Uomo Civile (Bari, Laterza), 5 (our translation).
- 53.
Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), member of the Italian parliament and later senator, was one of the founders of the political theory of elitism together with Pareto.
- 54.
Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942) was an Italian anti-fascist historian.
- 55.
A group that did not succeed in becoming a party. L. Einaudi (1931) ‘Per la Storia di un Gruppo che non Riuscì a Essere Partito’, La Riforma Sociale, May-June.
- 56.
We will come back to this aspect of Einaudi’s contribution in a later interview.
- 57.
Antonino Paternò-Castello, sixth marquis of San Giuliano (1852–1914) was the Italian Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1906 and from 1910 to 1914.
- 58.
Nicolò Fancello (1886–1944) was secretary of the anti-protectionist league in Italy and worked on the Italian journal L’Unità.
- 59.
Umberto Zanotti Bianco (1889–1963) in 1910 participated in the foundation of the Associazione Nazionale per gli Interessi del Mezzogiorno d’Italia; he was later an active anti-fascist. We have already mentioned his preface to the political writings of Antonio de Viti de Marco.
- 60.
E. Rossi (1948) ‘Discorso tenuto da Ernesto Rossi alla Fiera del Levante il 12 settembre 1948, alla presenza del Presidente della Repubblica’, in E. Rossi (1948) A. de Viti de Marco, Uomo Civile (Bari, Laterza).
- 61.
Rossi was one of the main collaborators (until 1962) of the Italian journal Il Mondo, founded in 1949.
- 62.
E. Rossi - G. Salvemini (2004) Dall’Esilio alla Repubblica, Lettere 1944-1957, edited by M. Franzinelli (Torino, Bollati Boringhieri).
- 63.
As we know Cardini is referring here to the brother Cesare (Cucù) who died in 1923, the result of an explosion in his home.
- 64.
F. de Viti (1871) Saggio di Lessilogia Italiana (Lecce, Tipografia Garibaldi).
- 65.
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was a very successful portrait painter, well known in many parts of the world.
- 66.
The congress of the Italian National Council of Women took place in Rome on April 20th 1908.
- 67.
A. Cardini (1985) Antonio de Viti de Marco. La Democrazia Incompiuta (1858–1943) (Roma-Bari, Laterza).
- 68.
Many documents of the Italian liberal historian Guglielmo Ferrero are preserved in the archives of Columbia University.
- 69.
Francesco Papafava (1864–1912) was author of the Cronache of the Giornale degli Economisti from 1899 to 1909; they were collected together and published in the volume F. Papafava (1913) Dieci Anni di Vita Italiana (Bari, Laterza).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cardini, A. (2016). From University to the Rejection of the Oath. In: Antonio de Viti de Marco. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53493-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53493-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53492-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53493-4
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)