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In the light of the recent literature on the intellectual history of inequality, this paper offers the first survey and a tentative classification of the Italian literature addressing issues related to social mobility, from the late 19th century to the "Economic Miracle" of the 1950s. During these decades, the foremost Italian economists and statisticians (among others, Pareto, Gini, Einaudi and Pantaleoni) worked on issues highly related to the modern understanding of social mobility, from the role of inheritance to the intergenerational transmission of status. While reflecting the evolution and debates in Italian society, these authors also participated in a broader international debate, which should lead us to reconsider the supposed lack of interest in inequality among the economists of this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of Spencer's ideas is now generating a good deal of analysis. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of Spencer's work on economic thought. It also analyses the way in which this work was interpreted by the Italian economists. In particular, it investigates the influence of Spencer's theory of evolution on the thought of Pantaleoni (1857–1924) and Nitti (1868–1953). These two representative Italian scholars were on opposite sides for their economic methodology and the issue of government intervention in the economy. The paper clarifies whether their two divergent visions on social change could both be in accordance with Spencer ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberalism was a powerful ideology and 'thought collective' between the two World Wars and after WWII. The paper aims to enquire into the channels through which neoliberalism dwelled in Italian intellectual, economic and political history, from the early 1920s to the mid-1970s, unveiling the role of public intellectuals like Einaudi, and hardly unknown think-tanks like Ceses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new interpretative framework for Galiani's monetary theory. The main argument is that, by adopting “the methodology of successive approximations” (correctly attributed to him by Luigi Einaudi), Galiani investigated the theoretical foundations of the two archetypal moneys: metallic money and paper money. On these foundations, he developed the model of a complex monetary economy based on the coexistence of a metallic and a fiduciary circulation. The paper also illustrates how the experience of the “public banks” of Naples inspired his analysis, thus shedding new light on the theoretical and institutional richness of his monetary thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper delineates a profile of Luigi Einaudi as an economist and answers to the question: what kind of economist was Einaudi?. It describes the major trends of classical and neoclassical economic thought that influenced his background and focuses on his conception of economic science: method and vision, fields of application (from the Italian economy to the the Great Crisis) and his theory of economic policy (Buongoverno). The paper maintains that Einaudi possessed the qualities of the great economists of the past but his understatement in the manner of presenting his positions and his style of argument have overshadowed the great economist he was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines public expenditure in the Italian public finance literature between the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Three aspects are considered: the factors that determine the growth of public expenditure; integration of the tax and expenditure sides in the theory of shifting and incidence of taxation; and the general productivity of public expenditure. The main conclusion of the paper is that Italian economists have examined the problem of public finance in a general context, taking into consideration both taxes and public expenditure at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews some of the most representative Italian scholars, starting from De Viti de Marco and ending with Fasiani, conventionally considered the first and the last scholar of the Italian tradition. Their positions are discussed firstly in terms of the economic role they attributed to the State and, secondly, in terms of how they considered public goods and public needs. The paper then shows how their analysis depended on political, sociological and ethical assumptions about the State. Finally, it is argued that Italian tradition turned to alternative political and sociological approaches to the State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the theories of progressive taxation debated in the Italian public finance literature between the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. The survey presents only the main arguments, stressing their connection with the international literature. Among the Italian economists, apart from a few opponents, the idea of progressive taxation is agreed upon, even though it is not well founded from a theoretical viewpoint. The main result of the paper is that the main case for progressive taxation is to be found in political and social reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the political background that prevailed in Italy after the unification of the country in 1860, many economists were attracted by the prospect of playing an active role in politics. In particular, thirty academic economists became MPs between 1860 and 1923. Many of them became ministers and three of them were appointed prime ministers. The quantitative analysis attempted in this paper reveals the professional and social characteristics of this group of economists and the importance of their political commitment. Many of them sat in parliament for more than twenty years. In both houses, they often played a technical role, concentrating their efforts in the discussion of the economic issues on the agenda. But they did not refrain from becoming involved with questions of a more direct political nature. The high number of economists who were elected deputies even after the Reform Bills of 1882 and 1911 – which gradually extended the suffrage – implies that they took part in open political contests and built up a network of patronage in their local constituencies. In particular, some indicators – like their presence in the ministries and councils of education and the role they played in the creation of institutions of research – show that they exerted their political influence to facilitate the institutionalization and professionalization of economics. Last, some interesting generational differences are highlighted in this paper. In the period between 1861 and 1922, the relationship between political and scientific/academic reputation was inverted. Whereas the economists of the Risorgimento generation employed their political role as a means to obtain tenure in universities, those of the younger generation trained after 1876, who had received a more specialized education in economics, profited by their reputation as scientists and professors in order to foster their political ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of institutionalisation of political economy has become of increasing interest in tracing the evolution of economic thought. This paper presents a comparison of the development of these processes in Italy and Spain, through the analysis of the presence of political economy in some institutions in both countries between 1860 and 1900: universities, economic associations, economic journals and national parliaments. This essay aims at supplying new insights to the consolidation of economics as a scientific and socially appreciated field of knowledge, and exploring the influence of the form of institutionalisation on the economic ideas diffused in a particular country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides a brief introduction of papers that were delivered at a Conference held in Pisa, Italy in Autumn 2001. Names of papers presented at the conference; Aims and objectives of papers presented.

Even if Pareto never worked in public finance, he had some influence on the Italian public finance scholars. This paper aims to direct new light onto such a methodological influence. Firstly, it is pointed out that the Paretian idea of science deeply influenced the late scholars of the Italian tradition. Secondly, it is shown that Paretian sociology was less important than his economic methodology. Thirdly, it is argued that, in a generalized Paretian approach, most public policies may be studied under economic hypothesis; it remains true that, in the Paretian approach, public choices may be explained by sociological reasoning only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic literature is giving new attention to Lionel Robbins' main contributions to economic theory, confined for several decades to the Essay, systematically misunderstood as the manifesto of the epistemology of neoclassical economics, where its underlying ontology characterized by rational maximizing agents, social atomism and a positivistic approach to economics is systematized and laid down. This paper aims at verifying ‘which’ Robbins was received in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s and what was the attitude of Italian economists, from the manifold approaches that characterized the debate in Italy in that period, towards him. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the formative steps of ‘Classical’ Political Economy under the joint influence of the Italian and Scottish Enlightenment. Pietro Verri is a leading figure of the Italian Enlightenment and he belongs to the Lombard branch of the Italian School of Political Economy (sometimes named ‘School of Milan’) during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Schumpeter's treatment of the ‘School of Milan’ describes Pietro Verri as ‘the most important pre-Smithian authority on Cheapness-and-Plenty’. A careful canvass of the texts substantiates Schumpeter's suggestion. Verri stands out as a key figure in the transition from Physiocracy to the Smithian system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the Italian debate on municipalization between the 1880s and the 1920s and is divided into two parts. The first deals with the emergence of the municipalization in the late nineteenth century as a component in the birth of the Social State. The second part concerns the analytical tools elaborated by some leading Italian economists in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when municipalization was the expression of an entire lifecycle, with an early expanding stage (until World War I) and a later stage (under Fascism) of prevalent stagnation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the prevailing literature, the study of economic dynamics began at the end of the nineteenth century, at least four decades before Hayek's and Samuelson's essays on dynamic equilibrium, as Pareto's dynamic insights prove. Throughout this early phase of the discipline, economists interested in dynamic studies put forward a wide spectrum of suggestions. This paper investigates the lines of research that sprang from the Italian debate either according to or in opposition to the Paretian mechanistic legacy, aiming to show that a growing awareness of subjective variables' role weakened the mechanistic faith of the strictly Paretian followers, pushing them toward probabilistic analysis, anchoring dynamics to uncertainty and disequilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]