Search

Rapid change took place in Italian politics and in official Italian statistics in the 1870s. After Pietro Maestri, one of the main promoters of patriotic statistics and the principal architect of official statistics in the 1860s, died in 1871, he was replaced in 1872 by Luigi Bodio (Milan 1840–1910). Bodio was a protégé of the then general secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce, Luigi Luzzatti, himself a student of Messedaglia and representative of the so-called “Lombard–Venetian school” of political economy which traced its roots back to the teaching of Romagnosi. Bodio was also strongly convinced of the high political and scientific mission of statistics, but clearly faced new tasks and a different intellectual climate. He introduced new methodological concerns and a more technical language into the official statistics of Italy, and gained a solid international reputation as head of the International Statistical Institute. Necessarily statistics in the new Italy could no longer be the charged symbol of liberalism, of representative institutions, and of rational government that it had been in the previous period in the midst of “autocratic” regimes. It had become an established institution in the state apparatus, a discipline taught in most universities and high schools. With the annexation of Rome in 1870, the “dispersed limbs” of the national “body” had all (or almost all) been assembled together; the body was finally a whole, although its surface was still marked by wounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unification of Italy makes increasingly possible, though not easy, those [statistical] studies to which the past opposed so many obstacles. The government itself participates in these researches and is anxious to communicate the results to the public. Reciprocally, the economic revolution, which necessarily follows every political revolution, is awakening all national forces and energies, and thus opening a new space to the spirit of enterprise which has been asleep for too long. These words from the Annuario di economia sociale e di statistica pel Regno d'ltalia, by two Piedmontese commentators, P. Duprat and A. Gicca, are indicative of the hopes shared by liberal sectors of public opinion in the early 1860s, after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. They express a still optimistic view of the future that awaited the new nation, and of its capability to mobilize “national forces and energies”, as well as of the possibilities offered by the new state institutions to the development of that most stately and national of all forms of knowledge, statistics. In the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Italy, the process of construction of a liberal order was to receive many benefits from the “social institution” of statistics – to use an expression recurrent in the vocabulary of the official and unofficial publications in those years. It is known that the newly established Direzione di Statistica (Directorate of Statistics) put a special effort into the immediate production of the basic statistics of the nation, namely the population census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have seen how Italian patriotic statisticians, in order to escape the stereotyped images of the peninsula which stressed the torpor and misery of its inhabitants, highlighted by means of numbers and “facts” the signs of progress, the dynamic elements that made the Italian people worthy of the place they were claiming among the industrious and civilized countries of Europe. Yet there were statistics that could be used to support exactly the kind of stereotyping that Italian patriots were trying to avoid; this was particularly the case of “moral statistics”, namely the counting of crimes, suicides, foundlings, and all sorts of signs of disorderly, “immoral” lives, in order to evaluate the morality of a society. From the time of their emergence in the late 1820s moral statistics promised to be a powerful new instrument for ranking peoples and states, or for drawing boundaries within established ones. Lower or higher percentages of violent crimes or of suicides seemed to represent the moral fabric of a society in a way which was both evocative and authoritative, and spoke to the concern about the nature of modern society that gripped the nineteenth-century elites. Although crime was monitored and counted both in the pre-unification states and then in the Kingdom of Italy, the first extended essay on moral statistics bearing on the Italians was published as late as 1865–1866, in Venice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we think about modern states we often envision statistical aggregates. Area, population, size of the gross national product, the level of the national debt, these are identifying features that we take for granted, as an obvious way of representing territorial entities. Yet numbers have not always enjoyed this position, and in fact their rise as a fundamental mode of representation is a relatively recent process. Although the first systematic attempts to provide numerical evaluation of the population and wealth of states can be traced back to the consolidation of modern states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is particularly when the form of the nation-state imposed itself in Europe and America, in the late eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, that statistics became a widespread practice and attracted the solicitous attention of ruling elites and reformers alike. Since Harald Westergaard's studies on the history of statistics, historians have been aware of the “enthusiasm” for social counting that gripped several European countries in the 1830s–1840s. This enthusiasm led to the launching of specialized journals, the formation of statistical societies for the purpose of collecting numerical information on the most diverse social facts and phenomena, and the establishment and consolidation of state bureaus for the collection, classification, and analysis of increasing quantities of data which administrators and political leaders deemed essential for the guidance of political decisions and for the governing of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]