Total Science: Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy 9780773577015

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics
2 Entrepreneurship and Rivalry: Statisticians in the Academy
3 The Politics of Expertise: Statisticians and the State
4 Form and Substance: A Science of Architectonics
5 The Theory and Practice of Totalitarianism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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a total science

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A Total Science Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy jean-guy prévost

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca G

G

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn 978-0-7735-3539-8 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine-free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Prévost, Jean-Guy, 1955– A total science : statistics in liberal and Fascist Italy / Jean-Guy Prévost. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3539-8 1. Statistics – Italy – History – 20th century. 2. Statisticians – Italy – History – 20th century. 3. Fascism – Italy – History – 20th century. 4. Gini, Corrado, 1884–1965. 5. Science and state – Italy – History – 20th century. i. Title. ii. Title: Statistics in liberal and Fascist Italy. ha37.i82p74 2009

314.509’04

c2009-901708-3

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics

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2 Entrepreneurship and Rivalry: Statisticians in the Academy 3 The Politics of Expertise: Statisticians and the State 4 Form and Substance: A Science of Architectonics 5 The Theory and Practice of Totalitarianism Conclusion Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme. The research on which it rests was made possible by two sshrc grants (410–97–0412 and 410–2001–1374) as well as initial financial support from the Programme d’aide financière à la recherche et à la création (pafarc) of the Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam). Conducting the research and writing the book would not have been possible without the help of a number of people. Paolo Garrona, then Director General of the Istituto nazionale di Statistica, and Paola Geretto, director of the istat library and a very fine historian of Italian statistics herself, have been especially welcoming and helpful. Luisa Montevecchi, of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome), has provided judicious advice. Thanks to Piero Garbero, I was able to make use of the resources of the Pasquale Jannaccone library, attached to the Political Economy Department of the University of Turin. Mauro Reginato introduced me to the Diego De Castro library, also at the University of Turin, but attached to the Mathematics and Statistics Department. Giacomo Cuva, then a student in history at the University of Rome, collected various data for me, notably on the holders of statistical chairs. Over the years, I have also worked at the Biblioteca Alessandrina at the University of Rome La Sapienza, at the Biblioteca Nazionale and the Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, also in Rome, as well as at the Fondazione Einaudi in Turin. I sincerely thank the personnel of all these institutions. I have also frequently overcome distances thanks to the Interlibrary Loan Service of the

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uqam library (Alix Évrard and Donald Dunleavy deserve special mention here). During the years I devoted to the preparation of this book, I was able to discuss various aspects of it with a number of colleagues. Besides those already named, I must mention Rosa Gini, Monica Pratesi, Sandro Rinauro, Luidi Di Comite, Enrico Castelli Gattinara, Éric Brian, Alain Desrosières, Bruno Marien, Robert J. Leonard, Robert Nadeau, and Dalie Giroux. Jean-Pierre Beaud, Gilles Dostaler, Yves Gingras, Giovanni Favero, Giovanni Maria Giorgi, Dora Marucco, Francesco Mornati, Filippo Sabetti and Francesco Cassata all read and commented on an earlier version of the manuscript. The two anonymous reviewers chosen by McGillQueen’s University Press to assess the manuscript also made encouraging and helpful remarks. I am also especially grateful to Elise Moser, whose advice and queries have significantly improved the style of this book. A very early draft of the introduction was published by the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (cirst) as a research note in 2000–01, under the title Science et fascisme: le champ statistique italien. An earlier and much shorter version of chapter 1 was published in 2002 as “Genèse particulière d’une science des nombres. L’autonomisation de la statistique en Italie entre 1900 et 1914” in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 141–142 (March): 98–109. An earlier version of the first part of chapter 5 was published in 2001 as “Une pathologie politique: Corrado Gini et la critique de la démocratie parlementaire” in Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 13: 105–128. Presentations dealing with material now in this book were made on various occasions: at the Société québécoise de science politique 1999 annual meeting (Ottawa); at the Social Science History Association 1999 annual meeting (Forth Worth, Texas); at the cirst “Friday Seminars” (2000); at the Hayek Conference held at Cerisy-La-Salle (2000); at the Dipartimento di statistica e matematica applicata all’economia at the University of Pisa (2003); at the Dipartimento d’economia of the University Ca’Foscari in Venice (2005); and at the Dipartimento di Economia Politica of the University of Turin (2006). On a more personal note, I wish to express all my gratitude to my friend Enrico Castelli Gattinara and his family, who offered me hospitality on so many occasions. Giuliana Quartullo, Alfonso Bracci,

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Giampiero De Marco, and Stefano Moro have also become dear friends whom I long for when not in Italy. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my late wife, Danielle Choquette (1956– 2008), on whose support and love I was always able to rely. Jean-Guy Prévost

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a total science

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Introduction Statistics has expanded its jurisdiction over all phenomena of life. Benito Mussolini (1926)

The history and sociology of scientific activity under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes have generally focused on two dimensions: the relationship between scientific communities and the state, and the nature and content of the knowledge produced in such a context. Italian statistics of the Fascist era was distinguished by original, consistent, and widely recognized scientific and technical developments as well as by the clearly hegemonic position it acquired vis-à-vis Italian social science at that time, providing us with a peculiarly interesting case in this regard. Fascist Italy, the first regime to openly strive for the establishment of a totalitarian state, immediately suggests comparison with Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. The former stands as probably the starkest case of the combination of absolute power with an all-encompassing ideology. Political conformity was ruthlessly enforced, and formerly autonomous scientific bodies were brutally brought to heel if not subjected to outright terror. The “ideologizing” of science, based on what was seen as the opposition between proletarian and bourgeois science, led to an official ban on genetics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics (not to mention social and economic theories other than Marxist), as well as to the triumph of fraudulent theories, with sometimes disastrous practical consequences, as evidenced by the infamous episode known as Lyssenkism (Josephson 1994; Krementsov 1997; Graham 1974; Lecourt 1976). In the case of statistics, we know that during the 1920s Soviet statisticians still had their own journals, kept regular contact with their foreign colleagues and considered themselves accountable first and foremost to strictly scientific standards; following the advent of Stalin, and

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particularly from the beginning of the Great Terror, links with the external world were cut, ideological orthodoxy prevailed over professional norms, and statisticians embarked on a desperate attempt to anticipate the changing expectations of political rulers (Stanziani 1998; Mespoulet 2001; Blum and Mespoulet 2004). Although the course of the Nazi regime was less straightforward in this matter – as in others – it also provides us with a clear case of scientific ideologizing, this time in accordance with the fundamentally racist character of the Hitlerian Weltanschauung, particularly the opposition it drew between Aryan and Jewish science, and the support it gave to “racial” disciplines. The scientific community in Germany was also brought into political line, subjected to coercion and sometimes brutality, though repression was much more targeted than in ussr – Jewish scientists being of course the foremost victims (Guérout 1992; Olff-Nathan 1993; Pfetsch 1994). Many eminent German statisticians, such as Friedrich Zahn, president of the International Statistical Institute during the first half of the 1930s, or Johannes Müller, president of the State Statistical Office in Thuringe, enthusiastically embraced the new course, claiming to be first and foremost soldiers rather than scientists (Aly and Roth 2004, 8–9). The advent of the Nazi regime offered a wide field for their “fantasies of omniscience,” at least until the chaotic radicalization of the late 1930s led to the disintegration of German official statistics (Tooze 2001, 24–5). Fascist Italy calls for a much more nuanced portrait. To be sure, political conformity was enforced, as shown, for instance, by the 1931 loyalty oath to the regime required of all university professors, on threat of dismissal. From 1938 on, the enactment of anti-Jewish legislation was also backed up by “scientific” arguments about the need to defend the “Italian race”. However, the aggiornamento (updating) of Italian government statistics and statistical teaching in the first years of the Fascist regime testifies to the importance that the new leadership, especially Il Duce, attached to statistics as a tool of management and control. Statistics, as a specific complex of theories, hypotheses, techniques, and routines, may be seen as the intersection of a variety of disciplines (demography, economics, sociology, biometry, criminology, etc.), for which it provides a robust methodological foundation, as well as a point of connection between science, management, and politics. It should come therefore as no surprise that the proponents of a stato totalitario saw

Introduction

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statistics as the applied social science par excellence. It is thus only to be expected that rigid political and ideological control would be maintained over such an important activity. The interventions of political authorities into statistical matters (before and after as well as during Fascism) were frequent and multi-faceted. They oversaw the distribution of resources, nominations to the most important bureaucratic-scientific positions, and the role statistics could (they hoped) play in the monitoring of demographic and economic policies. Mussolini, the regime’s central figure, with direct political authority over the Istituto centrale di statistica from its creation in 1926, frequently intervened in statistical matters, offering vigorous support for the reform of official statistics, inquiring regularly about data, criticizing certain results and sometimes censoring them. But Italy never approached the complete “de-structuring” of the statistical profession that the ussr experienced under Stalinism. Despite an exacerbated nationalism, the idea of an original “Italian” statistics cannot be compared to that of “Aryan science”; nor did Italian official economic statistics ever – despite government declarations that could be seen as favourable to corporatism and autarchy – become a pure accounting practice, as was largely the case in Communist planned economies. During the greater part of the Fascist ventennio (the twenty years of Fascist rule from 1922 to 1943), Italian scientists, judges, military officers, industrialists, and businessmen succeeded in maintaining a considerable degree of autonomy when compared to their Soviet or German counterparts. As has been written of Italian academic life in general, this situation may be described as “a constant search for arrangements and compromises, during which adherence to the regime’s political orientations [did] not exclude the defence of traditional areas of power and autonomy,” one result of which was the persistence of independent professional bodies as well as of scientific norms and standards in research and debates (Belardelli 2005, 40). In many respects, for the world of science, the passage from Liberal to Fascist Italy meant continuity rather than abrupt change. Using Solingen’s ideal types of relationships between scientific communities and the state, the case of Italian statistics may be described as one of “happy convergence,” which “assumes a high degree of consensus between state structure and the aspirations of scientists” – at least until the regime had reached a high degree of “totalitarization.” Despite the obvious lack of political pluralism,

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convergence – happy or simply objective – between statisticians and the Fascist state is hardly disputable: the interest shown by authorities in statistics, the resources they provided for its development, the evident affinity between the policies put forward by the government and the nationalist ideology shared by most members of the statistical community all combined to tie its destiny to that of the regime. After the promulgation of the anti-Jewish laws in 1938, the situation became much more difficult, at least for a part of the community. Those who disapproved – discreetly, in most cases – of the alignment with Germany, of official racism, or of the perspective of economic autarchy, generally chose an approach of “passive resistance.” This includes individuals who tried at first to evade the oath imposed on professors, who wrote to Mussolini denouncing the anti-Jewish decrees or – extending the meaning of resistance to its utmost limit – who kept an embarrassed silence about anti-Semitism. The model of “deadly encounter,” in which political accountability replaces scientific autonomy and scientists are faced with the risk of various forms of persecution, including exile and physical annihilation, applied primarily to statisticians of Jewish origin, who were forced to relinquish their positions in 1938. On the other hand, the rise of the squadrista Giuseppe Adami to the position of general director of government statistics on the sole basis of his political credentials and in spite of the overt opposition of professional statisticians, or the bizarre episode of the Racist Scientists’ Manifesto, the content of which was apparently unknown to its signatories, both indicate a significant weakening of scientific autonomy during the final years of Fascism. A fourth model, that of “ritual confrontations,” may be applied to the case of Italian economists: though they all proclaimed, in a ritualistic manner, their agreement with the ideas of corporatism, partisans of economic orthodoxy remained clearly hostile to state intervention, planning, and bureaucracy throughout the Fascist era, constantly trying to reintroduce, under a slight corporatist coating, the fundamental truths of their discipline.

autonomy and its limits: statistics as discipline and institution Italian statistics from the early to mid-twentieth century has been the object of sustained scholarly attention during the last two

Introduction

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decades or so. Within this body of work, mention should be made of what might be called the “internal” history of the discipline, that is, those studies that play a role in symbolically asserting the autonomy of statistics; in other words, the historiography of the scientific discipline of statistics conceived as the rational reconstruction of the genesis and development of a set of concepts, techniques, and devices. The Italian contribution to the development of modern statistics has been both original and important, as demonstrated by the inclusion in four successive editions of the International Statistical Institute’s authoritative Dictionary of Statistical Terms of more than sixty entries taken from a much longer list of concepts proposed by Corrado Gini, which were without equivalent in AngloSaxon statistics (Kendall and Buckland 1957, 1960, 1972, and 1982). A good sample of this internal literature, written in the impersonal style typical of the self-confident sciences, can be found in the volume published in 1987 by the Società Italiana di Statistica under the title Italian Contributions to the Methodology of Statistics. It covers a variety of topics that benefited from significant Italian contributions; for instance, means and their properties, the study of variability and concentration, indexes of dissimilarity, the concept of transvariation or the analysis of qualitative variables (Naddeo 1987). An even more important study is G. M. Giorgi’s monograph on the genesis and evolution of the famous Gini coefficient: focussing on the mathematics involved, Giorgi’s work is a detailed examination of the successive formal devices that led to the perfecting of both the coefficient and those coefficients it generated in turn (Giorgi 1992). A critical appraisal of histories of statistics written by and for statisticians must take into account the state of the discipline at a given historical moment. The absence of any contextual element in such studies should not be understood as a shortcoming on their authors’ part, but rather as a clue to the role such works play within a discipline, which is to proclaim its autonomy. In the case of Giorgi (who is the current editor-in-chief of Metron, the journal launched in 1920 by Corrado Gini himself), his monograph was intended to reassert the importance of the coefficient against the opposition and criticisms it had encountered, in Italy and elsewhere, from the moment of its inception. The length of the annotated bibliography in Giorgi’s work is in itself a clear indication of the coefficient’s relevance and consistence: it lists 442 papers whose primary focus was

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Gini’s coefficient. In this sense, the genre of “internal” history may be likened to Festschrifts, or obituaries, whose authors are often disciples of the subjects; their positions within the disciplinary hierarchy rely on appropriate handling of their masters’ scientific and symbolic legacies (Brian 1994, 73). To continue with the example of Gini, undoubtedly the major Italian statistician of his epoch, this sort of discipleship was apparent in the two major papers written to pay him homage on the occasion of a conference held in Rome in 1960. The first, which dealt mainly with Gini’s contributions to statistical methodology and was also a vigorous assertion of the originality of the Italian statistical school, was written by Vittorio Castellano, who had just been named president of the Faculty of Statistical, Demographical and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Rome (a faculty created by Gini in 1936 and chaired by him until his retirement) and would become editor of Metron upon Gini’s death in 1965 (Castellano 1961).1 The other paper was written by Nora Federici who became editor of Genus, another journal founded by Gini (Federici 1961); it considered Gini’s contributions to the social sciences, insisting on a unitary vision underlying them. In these cases as well, failure to take into account the external context emphasizes the coherence of the author’s career and his body of work at the time of his elevation into the disciplinary pantheon. Thus, even though Gini had held eminent positions under the Fascist dictatorship (notably as the commanding figure of government statistics from 1926 to 1932), one would search these texts in vain for any reference to the political context: the word “fascism” never appears in these texts; nor does “dictatorship” or even the name Mussolini.2 However, context returns with a vengeance when we move from the history of coefficients and formulas, i.e., statistics as a science, to the history of institutional functions, i.e., statistics as an activity of the state. Here, even “official” narratives, such as the monograph published in 1996 by Giuseppe Leti under the auspices of the Istituto nazionale di statistica (istat), quotations from various acts and decrees, or of communications between Mussolini and the officials in charge of government statistics, reveal the effects of the authoritarian character and the structure of political authority on the quantity and quality of statistical work. For instance, from 1926 on, official statistics fell directly under the authority of the prime minister (presidente del Consiglio); they were influenced by

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the preferences of rulers (as expressed notably by the pro-birth demographic policy) and by unforeseen turns of events (e.g., the boycott of Italy following its conquest of Ethiopia). Leti dedicates the third part of his monograph (more than 100 pages out of a total of 600) to the specific connection between “Mussolini e la statistica pubblica italiana” (Leti 1996).3 In writings from a more independent perspective, the role of context is also quite clear, as many authors locate the history of Italian public statistics within larger interpretive narratives, such as the transformations undergone by public administration, the development of the social sciences and the correlative formation of public space, the structuring of a technocratic discourse and the relation between the regime and reformist technical elites, and the elaboration and implementation of population management policies (see Lanaro 1979; Melis 1988 and 1996; Padovan 1999; Misiani 2007). The focus of all these works is again autonomy, but as a problem to be examined rather than as a given. To what extent were the inquiries and surveys conducted by official statisticians during Fascism true to the ideals of science, technical quality, and neutrality that were the proclaimed ethos of statisticians, in Italy as elsewhere? To what extent, on the other hand, were such inquiries subjected to distortion or manipulation, or used for purposes of propaganda rather than enlightenment (De Sandre and Favero 2003; D’Autilia 1992)? What was the exact role of statisticians – who were in most cases also demographers – in the definition and implementation of various demographic policies? Were they instigators, technicians, or merely collateral beneficiaries of the importance attached by the highest authorities of the state to one of their central objects of study (Ipsen 1996; Treves 2001)? More generally, given the scientific prestige of statistics, to what degree did the technocratic, nationalist, and biologizing discourse of the majority of statisticians play a part in preparing the advent of an authoritarian-totalitarian regime and, later, its racist laws (Israel and Nastasi 1998; Maiocchi 1999)? Judgments about the degree of scientific autonomy statisticians were able (or willing) to preserve in such a political environment or about the scientific value of inquiries and analyses produced by istat during the Fascist era differ according to the importance one gives to the ideological aspect of a statistician’s writings, to the interpretation of certain conflicts, or, more simply, according to

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chronology. Thus, based on the obviously nationalist and totalitarian uses made of Corrado Gini’s neo-organicist theory, and the latter’s designation as head of istat, S. Bertaux concludes that official statistics during that period were “first and foremost a servant of the state in its dimensions of propaganda and population control” (Bertaux 1999, 593). For their part, De Sandre and Favero point to the international character of the norms regulating statistical work at that time and draw two clear distinctions: one between “social philosophies” and “holistic political ethics” and, on the other hand, statistical surveys and analyses; and another between istat, as the body in charge of survey research and the establishment of statistical series, and the university as the natural locus of theory and speculation. This leads them to conclude that, in spite of the context, statistical work conducted at istat during that period “seems to have preserved a substantial degree of autonomy and of empirical scientific dignity” (De Sandre and Favero 2003, 54). Similarly, Treves describes demography during the ventennio as a “regime science,” in the sense that there is a very neat homology between “the statistician’s and demographer’s habitus,” which approaches population movements (births, deaths, marriages, migrations) in terms of numbers and aggregates, and an authoritarian or totalitarian discourse that referred to such units as states, masses, or nations rather than to individuals. But, on the basis of a minutely detailed analysis of their writings, Treves nonetheless insists on a distinction between the work of statisticians-demographers as students (studiosi) of population and the rather different role they would or could have had as technicians (tecnici) of demographic policy. She notes that the boundary between these two functions was much less visible after 1938, when the enactment of racist legislation coincided with a vigorous resumption of the regime’s totalitarian dynamics (Treves 2001, 236–7). According to D’Autilia, there were frequent episodes of censorship that exemplified the brutal intrusion of political criteria “contrary to any professional or scientific ethics” and “perfectly in line … with a totalitarian policy of information control” (D’Autilia 1992, 113–4). According to Leti, however, cases of true censorship were confined to the period of economic sanctions (1935–36) and to the war years (1940–43) and can thus be largely explained by circumstances and resource allocation problems, with Mussolini’s interventions at other times amounting to not much more than examining data before releasing them and offering “an

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interpretation that lessened or exalted their significance” (Leti 1996, 321).

italian statistics as a ‘field’ The concept of a “statistical field” offers an interesting insight into the institutional-cum-intellectual developments that characterize Italian statistics during the first half of the twentieth century. The “field,” which may be defined as a structured and multidimensional set of positions governed by specific criteria of legitimacy, constitutes an appropriate framework for taking into account the scientific as well as political activities of a given group, the system of norms, incentives, and constraints within which these activities are deployed, and the relations of such a system with others (Bourdieu 1971, 1992, and 1997; Ringer 1990). Yet, if a rich tradition of administrative statistics existed in nineteenth-century Italy (the 1880s are often referred to as a golden age in this regard), no real statistical “field” had in fact begun to emerge before the twentyyear span whose center may be located at the start of the Great War (1915). Up to that time, the few university chairs that were dedicated to statistics were found in law (giurisprudenza) faculties, and teaching amounted to not much more than displaying masses of data pertaining to the national territory, population, and government. Only as of 1910 did a network of laboratories, institutes, and schools of statistics begin to appear, allowing for the bringing together of statisticians and the accumulation of intellectual and material resources, including libraries and computing devices, as well as standardization of the discipline, notably through the dissemination of textbooks and the introduction of examinations to be taken by all would-be recruits to government statistical services. Statistical literature offers a more or less similar story. The Annali di Statistica, created in 1871, was still the sole statistical periodical at the turn of the century and its content was limited almost exclusively to the results of official statistical inquiries and announcements of decisions taken by statistical authorities. The more theoretical and innovative work, as well as debates between statisticians, was dispersed among journals of a more general character or belonging to other disciplines, chiefly political economy. Then, in 1911, the Giornale degli economisti, which had been publishing some statisticians on a regular basis, was renamed Giornale degli

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economisti e rivista di statistica. In 1920, Gini launched Metron, which was especially devoted to statistical methodology, and, in the following years, nearly a dozen statistical journals came into being. Italian official statistics, which had been declining steeply for some three decades, were spectacularly revived in 1926 with the reorganization of the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica (css) and the creation of istat. There was soon a very sharp increase in the number of inquiries made, publication delays were considerably shortened, and statistical personnel became more professional. From then on, a real gulf developed between nineteenth-century scientific-literary statistics, aimed at the enlightened public, and the new Italian statistics, now largely esoteric. Being a statistician in the 1920s and 1930s required a high degree of technical competence and implied membership in a network of specialists, who were governed by their own rules and who exerted their intellectual and scientific authority on an extended domain of investigation. The Italian statistical field that emerged during that period was thus structured along two axes: on one, the world of academy and “pure” science, with its statistics chairs, its laboratories, institutes, and schools; its various forums, scientific societies, meetings, and its network of publications. Taken together, these organized the dissemination of knowledge, the transmission of know-how, and the strengthening of common identity among the members of the field. On the other axis was the practical world of government statistics, or of statistical research in the private sector, where statisticians had to rub shoulders (and numbers) with empirical reality. Those two axes preceded (by a few years) and survived Fascism, in a manner that strikingly contrasts, for instance, with the tragic destiny of Russian statisticians under Stalinism (whose careers often ended in prison, deportation, or before a firing squad), as well as with the withdrawal of many major figures of German statistics following the fall of Nazism (Stanziani 1998, 411–16; Blum and Mespoulet 2004, 140–1; Tooze 2001, 283–4). In the case of Italy, the continuity is quite remarkable: the style of Italian statistics, the schools and tendencies among which the field was divided, even the political views of many major statisticians were largely defined during the ten to fifteen years preceding the March on Rome and remained largely intact after the regime’s downfall. The existence of a specific field implies by definition a relative degree of autonomy. In fact, the existence of a scientific (or any

Introduction

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other kind of) field attests to its success in becoming autonomous from other spheres of activity. In this case, what allowed Italian statistics to develop significantly as a scientific discipline and as a set of practices was precisely the intellectual autonomy statisticians continued to enjoy under a totalitarian regime, the permanence (or quasi-permanence) of norms defined primarily by the state of the field (and could not therefore simply be identified with the political imperatives of the day), and the value and originality of their intellectual production. The autonomy of a field is made manifest by, among other things, the existence of debates and controversies that, given their esoteric character, remain outside the reach of those who do not command the specific competence required from members of the field. More often than not, these discussions were part of theoretical or methodological statistics, which was of course the most abstract and the most formalized part of the discipline. This autonomy was, however, not absolute: given its legal-institutional status, its position within public administration, and its importance in the eyes of political authorities, official statistics necessarily served as a kind of interface between the statistical, bureaucratic, and political fields. Thus, the impressive growth in the teaching of statistics during the 1920s, the creation and initial success of istat, and the funding and support of certain research programs were in a large measure the result of an input of public resources. On the other hand, periods of scarcity of the same resources and, on occasion, ukases on the part of political authorities led to less fortunate periods. But if the global structure of the field and the distribution of positions within it were largely the result of struggles that took place during the time of its emergence and thus before the advent of Fascism, one of the results of the interest Fascist authorities had in statistics was a notable increase in autonomy for the statistical field and a significant increase in available positions and the resources that came with them. In contrast, the 1938 racist laws, which drove most Italian statisticians of Jewish origin into exile, had a profoundly destabilizing effect on the field, brutally suspending its ordinary functioning norms and subjecting it to extraneously defined criteria. The nature and form of the changes that altered and reshaped the statistical field, the controversies and struggles it experienced, cannot be explained solely by reference to the ideal of a neutral, technical, and scientific statistics, although in Italy, as elsewhere, that is

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the way statisticians describe themselves and their enterprise. In many cases, statistical debates can be read as the technical translation or the formalized gist of properly political debates. The direction taken by these debates and their (often provisional) outcome are largely due to the struggles and strategies of individuals concerned with strengthening their own positions within the field. A great deal of the energy expended by the field’s most eminent members is thus dedicated to the accumulation of material and symbolic resources, to the creation of barriers and filters designed to regulate access to these resources, and to the development of networks and alliances within and outside the field. Studying the history of a field requires close examination of the distribution of symbolic capital within it and of its fluctuations during the period under consideration. The analysis of a field’s functioning and that of the political and ideological role played by a scientific community therefore require significant empirical work, bearing on individuals’ writings as well as on the institutional context within which these writings obtain recognition. It thus becomes possible to move away from internal intellectual history and militant hagiography, two genres that are very present within the field under examination, and also to avoid a purely external kind of history, which remains blind to the specific rules that govern “the universe of those who produce works” (Bourdieu 1995, 10). However, the problem of defining the boundaries of the field and of assessing the positions around which it is structured can be analysed only through critical use of the criteria put into play by the agents themselves. In this regard, I have started from the bio-bibliographies of Italian statisticians published in Statistica, the official journal of the Italian Society of Statistics, between 1956 and 1959.4 Statistica was at that time edited by Paolo Fortunati, one of the prominent figures of the Italian statistical school, which represented a specific pole within the field; but gathering these bio-bibliographies clearly had an ecumenical purpose and a number of the statisticians included in it had been widely known for their indifference, their estrangement, in some cases their hostility, towards that school of thought. This wide definition of the field’s boundaries should be interpreted precisely as an effect of the existence of a field and an obvious indication of the shared interest of various tendencies, groups, or schools in positing themselves, whatever their rivalries, within a sufficiently extended space.

Introduction

15

object and structure of the study The following study is thus not meant to be a history of Italian statistics as a set of formal, methodological, and technical devices; a compendium of the demographic and economic theories shared by statisticians; or a history of official statistics. It will, however, be necessary to take into account all these aspects in order to show how those who defined themselves first and foremost as statisticians (rather than as demographers, economists, or civil servants) succeeded in obtaining and maintaining a position that specifically enabled them to address a number of issues pertaining to population, wealth, or (political) authority with adequate (scientific) authority.5 Indeed, given their position within the academy and/or official statistics, the scientific prestige and recognition attached to their work, within and outside Italy, and the specific skills and resources they invested in a number of technical-political issues (such as the settlement of the war debt), Italian statisticians have been able both to play an important ideological role in rallying scientific and technocratic elites in support of the authoritarian decisions imposed on the country at crucial moments and to take advantage of this role to consolidate their positions, thereby aspiring to a higher degree of practical influence (through the project of a corporative statistics, for instance). In other words, what we need to examine is how – through what schemes, struggles, alliances, and opportunities – Italian statisticians have succeeded in building and, to a large degree, maintaining their collective autonomy in a problematic political context. My primary purpose here is to illuminate the specific intellectual project to which, in spite of differences and rivalries, most of those who defined themselves as statisticians throughout the period were committed: an overlapping quantitative social science that was defined by its method rather than by a specific object, whose scope included domains of inquiry traditionally identified with sector-based disciplines such as sociology, economics, demography, etc., and to which only those whose command of the formal devices defining that method was acknowledged by their peers could make useful contribution. In that sense, this study (though it will largely rely on them) differs from those that have focused on istat as an institution or on the role of statisticians qua demographers – no doubt a legitimate perspective given the importance of population policies during the ventennio – by

16

A Total Science

arguing that the position and prestige earned by statistics and statisticians during that period was dependent upon precisely this specific intellectual project. The intellectual and institutional foundations of this endeavour for a “total science” were undoubtedly laid during the period that extended more or less from 1905 to the years immediately following the Great War, but the advent of Fascism offered, through a combination of extended opportunities and ideological affinities, an environment within which it could prosper. As regards intellectual history, the object of this study can be defined as follows. By examining a specific community – that of Italian statisticians during the first half of the twentieth century – it is meant as a contribution to the growing interest in the cultural dimensions of Fascism but focusing on the “rational” or the “scientific,” in contrast to the “romantic” or the “irrational,” associated with Nietzschean and Sorelian influences, or the “mystic,” exemplified by cases such as that of Julius Evola.6 Regarding the more general theme of ideology and ideological change, the present study deals with a corpus that has not been examined much from that angle. The work of statisticians, those “intellectuals/officials” par excellence (Isnenghi 1979), which is highly specialized, often esoteric, has the merit of generating undeniable constitutive effects: numbers, of course, thanks to which political decisions can be taken – but first and foremost a series of tools (the Gini coefficient probably being that period’s best-known legacy) which allow the issues to which these decisions referred to acquire manageable coherence.7 Regarding the numerous attempts to define Fascist ideology, this study adopts a rigorously nominalistic position. The two decades during which Italian Fascism was in power saw the appearance of a wide variety of discourses whose purpose or effect was to support it. In that sense, it is more consistent with the complexity of historical reality to take into account the diversity, in both content and form, of the ideological constructs that existed under Fascism than to try to identify a highly improbable ideal type or common minimum denominator.8 All the same, a correct account of social reality’s inherent complexity requires that the products of intellectual activity be examined by analysis of a corpus whose constitution is the result of an objective dynamic – that is, by combining the analysis of discourses with that of practices and techniques that can convert the object of theoretical speculation into an object of practical

Introduction

17

intervention, as well as with the study of channels, networks, apparatuses, and institutions that allow for the dissemination and eventual acknowledgment of these discourses and practices. Rather than following a strictly chronological approach, which is the one generally favoured by authors interested in a specific institution such as government statistics, I have chosen to examine the statistical field, a more complex territory, by considering various dimensions and combining diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The first half of this book (chapters 1, 2, and 3) thus deals with the emergence and structuring of the Italian statistical field, while the latter half (chapters 4 and 5) is dedicated to the project of a “total science”. Indeed, while a rather neat division of intellectual labour between (a) mathematical statistics (essentially probability calculus), (b) statistics as an activity concerned with the production of quantitative series according to rigorously defined protocols of inquiry (broadly, official statistics), and (c) academic social science – the analysis of economic and social phenomena through theoretical constructs developed in institutional contexts different from the context of the design of tools intended for numerical data analysis (mathematical statistics) as well as that of the collection and tabulation of data (official statistics) – emerged in many other countries during more or less the same period, the ambition of Italian statisticians, and more specifically of the group that came to be identified with statistica metodologica, consisted of maintaining a state of non-division among those three activities. This was achieved through a remarkable effort to: develop the discipline within the academy through the creation of increasingly complex structures that sought to insure the autonomy of statistics vis-à-vis mathematics (laboratories, institutes, schools, and faculties of statistics); establish a strong position for the scientific element within government statistics, thanks notably to the bureaucratic-scientific activities of many academic statisticians during the war and its immediate aftermath; and aggressively seek the annexation of the various domains of social and economic inquiry to statistics through a massive editorial presence and the creation of learned societies (in sociology, eugenics/genetics, etc.) dominated by members of the field. If the notion of a statistical field seems here especially suggestive, it is precisely because of the homology that exists between the cognitive project of a “total” science and the extended institutional space its promoters were able to occupy.

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A Total Science

The concept of a statistical field offers the advantage of considering together aspects that are often examined separately: the theoretical and epistemological foundations of a science, its applications, the formation of a scientific community and its institutions, the political views of its members, etc. This stands in contrast with the kind of analysis that is founded upon a neat distinction between, on the one hand, the “internal logical-scientific coherence” of theories, categories, propositions, and arguments, whose examination belongs to the philosophy of science, and, on the other hand, the place of these theories, propositions, arguments, etc. as “social phenomena interacting with other social phenomena in the formation of the public sphere” (Padovan 1999, 26). Focusing on the statistical field rather than on the statistical system or institution, talking about a statistical rather than a demographic field, implies that the set of relations thus identified can be granted a significant degree of density and consistency as well as efficiency. The hierarchic patterns that were established at the precise moment when statistics gained its disciplinary autonomy were reproduced throughout the discipline’s institutionalization. Similarly, clashes over a number of issues (demography, for instance) cannot be understood unless they are set against the contending forces that govern the field. The dynamics of relationships between official statistics and the whole field also vary according to the combinations of scientific prestige and bureaucratic power that can be observed at any given moment. Even if I cannot envision an exhaustive study – the thorough examination of Italian statisticians’ intellectual project probably exceeds the abilities of a single individual – using the concept of field allows for a simultaneously global and dynamic perspective. The structure of the study is as follows. Chapter 1 concerns the genesis of the statistical field, that is, the emergence of Italian statistics as a specific scientific discipline. This came about through a process that involved a radical departure from the intellectual corpus that had been developed throughout the nineteenth century under the name of statistica, as well as a systematic demarcation from the older disciplines of mathematics and political economy. This episode, which occurred between 1905 and 1914, was characterized by the arrival on the academic scene of a new generation of statisticians (the most brilliant among them would dominate the field for half a century) and the simultaneous rise of a “new” statistics, in which the technical dimension would become central.

Introduction

19

Almost at one stroke, there was an obvious change in the style of statistical papers, in the nature of the debates that mobilized the attention of statisticians, and in the skills required to take part in these discussions. It was during this period that the methodological perspective later identified with the Italian statistical school was first put forward, therefore settling once and for all the recurrent dilemma of nineteenth-century statistica, whether statistics was a method or a science. In chapters 2 and 3, we move from the history of statistics as a discipline to that of the institutional vectors that led to the structuring of the statistical field. Structuring may be defined as the complex and multi-faceted expansion and ramification process the field went through during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. More precisely, I intend to examine the infrastructure or material basis of the field. Compared with a discipline such as philosophy, statistics – which combines highly abstract procedures (conceptual definition, index construction, hypothesis formulation, etc.) with others that are much more time-consuming (data collection and classification, computations, etc.) – require the maximization of human and material resources through an efficient division of labour. Accordingly, from the 1910s on, the history of Italian statistics was punctuated by the creation of a variety of cooperative ventures, of which the laboratory offered the basic model (and the institute, a more complex avatar). If the word laboratory connotes the scientific ideal with which its promoters yearned to be identified, the statistical laboratory – and, on a larger scale, the official statistical bureau envisioned as a national laboratory – can also be considered, with regard to the division of labour, as an analog of the industrial enterprise. This structuring of the field was pursued simultaneously along the two above-mentioned axes, that of the scientific or academic world – with the expansion in statistical teaching, the development of statistical research, and the dissemination of its results through a growing number of editorial ventures – and that of the practical world, with the radical reorganization of government statistics by the mid-1920s, of course, but also with changes that occurred during the war and its immediate aftermath, when many “new” statisticians were recruited as technical experts by the Italian government or by international organizations in order to address, scientifically, a number of political and economic issues. Their capacity to be present in both worlds, to combine theory and practice,

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A Total Science

science and action, is what accounts for the eminent position reached by statisticians in the more general Italian social-scientific scene during the interwar period. Chapters 4 and 5 will examine more closely the project of a “total” quantitative social science, thus considering the statistical field from the perspective of the territories or domains of reality over which statisticians have tried to extend their intellectual authority. To be sure, such an undertaking, which could not but encounter some competition on the part of other social scientists, especially economists, had to be built on stable foundations. I will thus start by analysing the statisticians’ “discourse on method” whose purpose was to establish the epistemological priority of their discipline over any form of inquiry about reality, the effect of which was to set up a hierarchy that defined the field, i.e., the superiority of pure over applied statistics. From this methodological discourse, it becomes possible to decipher a set of theoretical positions that correspond to the general structure of the field and in which the rivalry between those who considered themselves first and foremost statisticians and those who identified themselves primarily as economists appears central. One can also reconstruct from this methodological discourse another defining feature of the field: the idea of a peculiar originality of Italian statistics as opposed to mainstream (or Anglo-Saxon) mathematical statistics, which reached its peak on the occasion of the Società italiana di statistica’s first scientific meeting (1939), with Gini’s address on “the dangers of statistics”. This ambitious project of a “critical revision of the principles and methods of statistics,” which was launched in a context of growing isolation from the international statistical community because of the war, may indeed be interpreted as a kind of scientific equivalent (or better: a theoretical sublimation) of the Fascist ideal of “autarchy.” I will then describe the various architectonics put forward by Italian statisticians as competing frameworks for the project of an encompassing quantitative social science. Among the imaginary topographies that were elaborated in this context, the most radical and comprehensive was surely Gini’s neo-organicism, in which the biological dimension remained fundamental – but the major blocks in this Grand Theory (the cyclical theory of nations, economic pathology, the study of primitive populations) succeeded in holding together and in resisting its critics, up to a point, only as long as its

Introduction

21

author was able to spend the considerable scientific capital he had earned in the sub-field of statistical methodology. Finally, this totalitarian intellectual undertaking includes the statisticians’ contribution to political theory, in which the schemes and devices that were characteristic of their professional habitus (measurement, weighing and aggregation procedures, analysis of concomitant variations) were put to use in an effort to rationalize authoritarianism. It also includes an incursion into the field of practical politics, where the debate about economic planning that went on during the last years of the Fascist regime and in its immediate aftermath pitted those who, in spite of the corporatist discourse they could not openly discard, remained faithful to classical economic orthodoxy, against those who, reviving the idea of “corporatist statistics” that had timidly emerged in the mid-1930s, called for much more significant regulation of the economy, in which statistics and statisticians would hold key positions and simultaneously achieve their own personal political reconversions. The conclusion will briefly examine the state of the statistical field following the Second World War in an attempt to measure the respective proportions of continuity and difference with regard to the preceding era.

1 The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics

The purpose of this chapter is to account for the emergence of modern Italian statistics as an autonomous scientific discipline. More precisely, it seeks to examine the manner and stages through which a specific domain was identified, demarcated, and carved out for statisticians over a period of ten to fifteen years within the Italian academic world. To this end, we will examine a number of episodes intended to establish the nature of statistics as a discipline, and thus to support the legitimacy of its claims. The goal of the work conducted during that period was to draw boundaries that distinguished statistics from contiguous domains of inquiry or potential competitors, to equip its practitioners with a conceptual and technical repertoire that endowed them with specific skills, and to redefine a certain number of concepts, problems and objects in a way that enabled some form of exclusive appropriation. The most significant result of this process was to weaken the very close identification, up to the turn of the twentieth century, of statistica as an intellectual undertaking with its political-administrative acceptance. On the eve of World War I, the word referred to a new set of theories, hypotheses, techniques, devices and problems (probability calculus, correlation coefficients, index numbers, representative method, etc.) whose successful command required a considerable intellectual investment. This development, evidenced by the elaboration of a series of formal devices that resulted in an exponential growth of the space taken up by mathematical notation in statistical papers and textbooks, led to a redefinition of the statistician’s profile; it also brought about the emergence of a social space and of networks that were open only to those individuals whose compe-

The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics

23

tence was acknowledged. Thus, a porous yet very real boundary was established between a statistical field and other, external areas. Even if the empirical and pragmatic dimensions of statistical activity remained extremely important for many within the field and offered a scientific-bureaucratic basis for their activities, the figure of the statistician was no longer synonymous with that of the civil servant attached to registration or census duties. Henceforth, one could find statisticians in laboratories, in industry, in the banking system, in insurance companies, and they concerned themselves with a whole set of theoretical issues largely independent of the practical problems that were the domain of official statistics. At the same time, a statistician’s competence could be measured by his command of the knowledge and routines that allowed him to move within the complex social space encompassed by the statistical field. The emancipation of Italian statistics, which primarily occurred during the fifteen years or so between the turn of the century and the Great War, was a two-pronged process. On the one hand, Italian statistics, which had up until then been understood as an administrative-social-scientific activity that made use of numbers, but relied on a very basic repertoire of mathematical techniques, had to reach a higher technical level: that is, it had to adopt an elaborate set of highly formal devices, but without becoming a sub-field of the noble and well-established discipline of mathematics. On the other hand, statistics, while it developed a more general character, nevertheless also had to resist the attraction of political economy, a discipline that lacked the lustre of mathematics but still benefited from an undeniable theoretical prestige and a certain level of formalization, and to which statistics was closely linked, through the choice of its objects of inquiry. The increasing autonomy of the field of Italian statistics, which may be described as a “mathematization” process, will be analysed as follows. First, we will draw a picture of the periods preceding and following the turn of the century, so as to highlight the rapid mutation the intellectual activity designated as statistica underwent at that time. We will then consider two episodes that had a strong structuring effect on the genesis of modern Italian statistics: (a) the appropriation, by Italian statisticians, of the concept and calculus of probability, notions with which they were previously mostly unfamiliar and that would be posited, from then on, as a central element of the discipline’s core; and (b) the development, in the wake of specific debates relative to

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A Total Science

Pareto’s wealth distribution curve, of the Gini coefficient, a flexible tool that would advance the representation of statistics as a general method rather than a specific science. Finally, we will examine the exclusion or marginalization this redefinition of statistics caused for those who were trained before the turn of the century and who were not able to incorporate the skills now vital for acknowledgment as a member of the field.

theoretical and methodological statistics before and after 1900 The “mathematization” of Italian statistics, exemplified by the existence of methodological debates that required a command of a number of complex mathematical notions and techniques as well as by the growing space devoted to mathematical notation in statistical papers and handbooks, can be seen as the most conspicuous trait, the graphical imprint, so to speak, of the emergence of a distinct and relatively autonomous statistical field. During the Risorgimento, by convention dated 1815–60 (Riall 1994), the word statistics evoked an essentially descriptive literature, within which the role of figures and tables was initially quite modest. The establishment of a centralized administrative system in the wake of unification, the beginnings of industrialization, the resonance of Adolphe Quetelet’s work all combined to stimulate an interest in exhaustive and precise knowledge of the new nation’s economic and social conditions, and in the development of a wide range of statistical inquiries (Patriarca 1996).1 Yet neither decennial censuses, nor the steady flow of statistical reports on industry or the living conditions of labouring classes during the late nineteenth century, although they led to a surge in volumes and articles replete with figures and tables, and embodied a redefinition of statistics, which added to its “functions of description, compilation and data collection” that of the “investigation of the laws and causes (…) of the concatenation of facts,” put into play any especially complex mathematical notions (Pazzagli 1980, 800). The bibliography of Luigi Bodio (1840–1920), who was the dominant figure in Italian statistics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, is quite revealing as to the objects and forms that filled the intellectual universe of statisticians in that era (Favero 1999). Bodio was the head of Italian official statistics from 1873 to 1898, secretary of the

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25

Giunta Centrale di Statistica del Regno d’Italia from 1872 to 1898, a position that was then transformed into that of president of the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica, which he held until his death. This high-profile bureaucrat, who became senator in 1900, was also one of the founding fathers of the International Statistical Institute, of which he was secretary from 1885 to 1905, and then president from 1909 to 1920 (Bonelli 1969). Although the bulk of Bodio’s writings were concerned with the disclosure of original data (census results, vital statistics, industrial statistics, statistics of property, strikes, instruction, crime, marriage, divorce, etc.), the energy he devoted to methodological concerns, i.e., reflection on the construction and implementation of cognitive devices, was in no way negligible. These dealt mainly with problems such as the coordination of data collection, the harmonization of classification methods, the construction of mortality tables, or the fine-tuning of various progress indexes (economic, social, moral, intellectual) – that is, with problems and tools closely related to the specific objects of each inquiry. The mathematical skills that were then required of a technician of statistics remained quite modest. Turning to the statistical writings featured during the same period in a first-rate economic journal such as La Riforma sociale, for instance, one finds the same implicit view of methodology: essentially, how can one grasp, with the help of figures and numbers, social phenomena such as the professions, social classes, unemployment, strikes, international trade, etc. (Marucco 2000a). Opposed to the fundamentally concrete or specific nature of the methodological concerns that were characteristic of Bodio’s work or of La Riforma sociale, was the abstract and multipurpose nature of the objects that aroused the interest of the new generation of statisticians of the early 1900s: probability calculus, correlation indexes, concentration ratios, interpolation techniques, etc. The objects of applied methodological reflection remained; they even, at times, mobilized major investments, but from then on they held a subordinate position within the hierarchy of methodological issues. The upsurge of a new set of problems, concepts, techniques, and skills, by the specialization it entailed, drove the establishment of new divisions of labour and, consequently, the emergence of a field distinct from the pragmatic scienza dell’amministrazione (administrative science) as well as from the more theoretically oriented scienze sociali (social sciences), between which statistics had been divided up to then.

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A Total Science

The Giornale degli economisti (GDE) offers a vantage point to one who wishes to observe the nature of this change. Created in 1875 under the patronage of the Associazione per il progresso degli studi economici and under the guidance, at first, of Eugenio Forti, who was sympathetic to the interventionist, industrialist, and protectionist positions defended by the economists of the LombardoVenetian school such as Fedele Lampertico, Luigi Luzzatti and Luigi Cossa, it soon ceased publishing, in 1878. It began anew in 1886, this time under the intellectual control of Maffeo Pantaleoni and Vilfredo Pareto, the two beacons of Italian marginalism, economic liberalism, and free trade. In 1911, the GDE changed its title to Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica. Alberto Beneduce and Giorgio Mortara, both professors of statistics and both recently nominated (as referendari) to the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica, joined Pantaleoni and Antonio De Viti De Marco, another outspoken partisan of laissez-faire economics, specializing in public finance, as co-editors (Bagiotti 1952, 177–207). From 1875 to 1920 – that is, until the birth of new statistical journals such as Metron and Economia – the GDE published no fewer than 275 papers under the heading of theoretical and applied statistics, according to its 1939 cumulative index. (Its classification system was derived from that of the International Economic Bibliography, prepared under the auspices of the League of Nations, and whose Italian section had been entrusted to the GDE [see Bagiotti 1952, 197–9].) This endurance contrasts favourably with the ephemeral existence of another significant statistical journal, the Archivio di Statistica (1876–83), edited by Luigi Bodio, Cesare Correnti, and Paolo Boselli under the theoretical guidance of Angelo Messedaglia, whose inaugural lectures at the University of Rome were regularly published in the Archivio (Favero 2000). Above all, compared with the Annali di Statistica, which was created in 1871 mainly to publish official statistical reports and inquiries, the GDE granted considerable room to the theoretical and methodological dimensions of statistics, with approximately a third of the above- mentioned 275 articles falling under this sub-heading. The semantic range, the nature of the debates, and the rhetoric falling under the category of statistical theory and methodology varied considerably during this half-century. Conveniently, the year 1900 is a useful reference point in this matter. In the last issue published that year, one finds, under the name of Achille Loria, a brief

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27

Ferraris

Gabaglio

Della Bona

Del Vecchio

Virgilii

Salvioni

Figure 1.1: Theoretical statistics in the Giornale degli economisti (1877–1895): textual network and quotation practices.

article entitled ‘Intorno ad alcune opinioni del Bortkiewicz in materia di statistica teoretica’. Loria (1857–1943), then a professor of political economy at the University of Padua, was a well-known figure in Italian social science and theoretical socialism for his work on ground rent and books such as La legge di popolazione ed il sistema sociale (1882), La teoria economica della costituzione politica (1886), and Analisi della proprietà capitalista (1889) (Faucci 2000). His statistical paper anticipated the controversy about the law of small numbers that would unfurl in the pages of the GDE from 1907 to 1910 (about which more will be said later). However, it is of interest not because of its intrinsic merits (Loria’s paper would be completely ignored by the protagonists of the later debate), but because of the considerable space it devoted to mathematical notation: by its graphical appearance, it broke neatly with the literary style characteristic of the contributions to statistical theory published up to then by the GDE. The fifteen or so articles dealing with statistical methodology that appeared in the GDE before 1900 constitute a clearly confined corpus on their own. Published over a period of some twenty years (1877–1895), they were the work of a group of six authors: Carlo Francesco Ferraris (1877, 1886, 1891, 1895), Giovanni Battista Salvioni (1888, 1892, 1895), Giuseppe Salvatore Del Vecchio (1877, 1878), Filippo Virgilii (1889, 1890), Antonio Gabaglio (1878), and Giovanni Della Bona (1878). With the exception of the latter, each of these authors was quoted by at least one of the others, as illustrated in the textual network that appears in figure 1.1. The recurrent theme in the corpus was that of the definition and partition of statistics: the idea was to delimit the proper domain of statistics within the larger conceptual space of the social sciences, and to sketch its specific topography as well as its internal dividing lines. Thus, in his 1876–77 inaugural lecture at the University of

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A Total Science

Bologna, where he had just been nominated to the chair of statistics following the 1875 ministerial by-law relative to the teaching of statistics within giurisprudenza faculties, Del Vecchio (1845–1917) began by summarizing the history of statistics, underlining its “positive” character, and defining it as “the science of the masses of human and social phenomena, of their movements and of their laws” (1877, 101; see also Giva 1990). Ferraris (1850–1924), who held a chair in administrative sciences at the University of Pavia and then one in statistics at Padua, exhibited a similar vision, which, in the context of the construction of the post-unification Italian state, sought to define the specific function of the social sciences, notably of statistics, vis-à-vis the administrative and legal sciences (1877; Beneduce 1996). The same can be said of Gabaglio, whose Teoria generale della statistica, published originally in 1880 (an extended version was issued in 1888), remained a reference until the end of the century. His inaugural lecture at the University of Pavia in 1878 insisted, following the path opened by Quetelet, on the validity its mathematical dimension conferred upon statistics. One of the central questions of the rhetoric of these inaugural lectures and of the introductory chapters of textbooks, regarding which every author was expected to take a stand, was that of deciding if statistics was a method or a full-fledged science, with its specific domain of inquiry. Most authors preferred the second of these alternatives, but their answer was generally of a syncretic character (among the textbooks that included this topic, we may mention Ferroglio 1880, Gabaglio 1888, Virgilii 1891, Errera 1892, and Tammeo 1896). All the articles that came under the heading of theoretical statistics during those years shared the same concerns regarding the nature of the discipline as well as the same outspoken confidence in its “positive” character. Undoubtedly, as C. Pazzagli, a student of that period, wrote, the paternity of such views should be granted to Messedaglia; his inaugural lecture at the University of Rome in 1872 already drew the major outlines of the program to which the abovequoted authors would adhere (an extended version of it appeared in the Archivio di statistica in 1879), but its dissemination was insured by the GDE (1980, 801). There is a striking contrast, though, between the insistence all these authors put on the privileged position statistics must be awarded because of its mathematical character, the frequent appeal they make to the authority of Quetelet, Laplace, Fourier, or

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Cournot, and the perfectly literary bent of their own writings. Curiously, these passionate commendations of numbers are conspicuous for their lack of them. Such is the case with Del Vecchio’s and Gabaglio’s lectures, but also with Della Bona’s article, which, despite the promising title “Le leggi dei grandi e dei piccoli numeri nelle scienze fisiche e nelle scienze sociali” (“The Laws of Large and Small Numbers in Physical and Social Sciences”), contains neither formulae nor data. Surely, we do find some sparse data, a few percentages, a mean or a ratio here or there – for instance in Ferraris’s articles – but the main thrust of these contributions is the search for the discipline’s foundations; the authors’ imagination is driven by the taxonomic dimension, as illustrated by the frequent use of the word “partizione” (notably present in the titles of Salvioni 1887 and Ferraris 1891). Only in F. Virgilii’s article on historical and mathematical statistics (1889) do we find explicit mention of mathematical formulae (on probability calculus). As Pazzagli wrote, in a paper quoting from Gabaglio’s treatise as well as from Messedaglia’s inaugural lecture, “notwithstanding the repeated assertion of the innovative role granted to mathematical calculation, concretely (the authors) often limit themselves ‘to the most elementary notions of statistical arithmetic’ and come to admit … that in many cases ‘statistics can content itself with very modest mathematical operations, of an almost elementary character’’’ (1980, 810). In statistical textbooks published during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the place awarded to mathematics is also quite minimal. In the most elaborate cases, that of Gabaglio’s treatise (1880), for instance (but see also Majorana-Calatabiano 1889 or Errera 1892, who put forward the same methodological program), it is restricted to a very succinct presentation of probability calculus, a somewhat more explicit exposition of the computation of various types of means (arithmetical, geometrical, harmonic) and of the varieties of graphic presentation (tables, diagrams, stereograms). As a matter of fact, Gabaglio’s mathematical orientation, modest by later standards, landed him in trouble: after having held the statistics chair at the University of Pavia since 1878, he chose to leave it at the end of the 1880s, moving back to the communal Technical Institute he had come from. According to his biographer, “efforts made … in favour of strengthening the mathematical method in a discipline traditionally taught within law faculties and where the use of statistics was exclusively conceived to support

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A Total Science

Table 1.1: Statistical articles published in the Giornale degli economisti, 1875–99 and 1900–24 (numbers and percentages) Topics Theoretical and methodological statistics Economic and financial statistics Demographic statistics Social statistics Total

1875–1899 15 (23.4)

1900–1924 70 (30.7)

27 (42.2) 12 (18.8) 10 (15.6) 64 (100.0)

95 (41.7) 44 (19.3) 19 (8.3) 228 (100.0)

legally-oriented research were not appreciated very much, precisely because of the excessively technical orientation that was adopted” (D’Autilia 1998, 817). A textbook published by Napoleone Colajanni in 1904 seems on the other hand a perfect example of that statistica that was on the verge of leaving the scene. It included a discussion about the vexata quaestio of whether statistics was a science of social facts or a method, and thus relevant also for the facts of nature. It also suggested a partition that was derived from the one proposed by German statistician Rümelin and disseminated in Italy by Ferraris, Salvioni, and Virgilii. This partition was founded upon a division between “methodological” statistics – itself subdivided into “theoretical” statistics or general methodology and “technical” statistics or special methodology – and “expositive” statistics – also subdivided, into “descriptive” statistics, whose purpose was to take note of the “quantitative manifestation of observed phenomena,” and “investigative” statistics, whose aim it was to discover “causes and empirical laws” (Colajanni 1904, 100–1). The next quarter of a century (1900–24) witnessed a considerable change in this regard, since the GDE published during that period no fewer than 228 articles dealing with one or the other aspect of statistics. Table 1.1 illustrates this growth, the articles being classified according to four categories. In relative terms, it is quite obvious that the most significant increase concerns the category of theory and methodology. But the most important thing is that this increase accompanied the emergence of a new generation of statisticians and a change in the content of articles published under that heading. Indeed, authors from the first network simply vanish from the pages of the journal and new names emerge, such as those of Giorgio Mortara, Corrado Gini, Costantino Bresciani, Luigi Amoroso, and Rodolfo Benini.2

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Table 1.2: Most frequent authors on statistical theory and methodology in the gde, 1877–95 and 1900–24 Pre-1900 group A. Gabaglio, 1840–1909 G.S. Del Vecchio, 1845–1917 G.B. Salvioni, 1849–1925 C.F. Ferraris, 1850–1924 F. Virgilii, 1865–1950

Post-1900 group R. Benini, 1862–1956 C. Bresciani, 1882–1963 C. Gini, 1884–1965 G. Mortara, 1885–1967 L. Amoroso, 1886–1965

The generational character of this methodological divide appears clearly in table 1.2, where the latter are compared with the authors of the former group. The two groups are clearly different. The earlier group, Del Vecchio, Salvioni, Ferraris, and Gabaglio, were all born by the middle of the nineteenth century and their careers had been launched at the time of Italy’s unification. The later cohort, Bresciani, Gini, Mortara, and Amoroso, were all born in the 1880s and came of age during the first decade of the twentieth century, becoming professors soon after. Between these two groups are Virgilii and Benini, whose entry into the academy went back to the late 1880s and whose divergent trajectories offer a remarkable portrait of the transformation undergone by statistics at the turn of the century. Virgilii’s position within the statistical field became more and more peripheral as time went by, the work he published being aimed more and more at a public outside the field; his famous little Manuale di statistica was reprinted regularly up to the late 1930s, but it remained completely immersed in the problems and vocabulary of late nineteenth century statistics (De Plato 1999). Already in 1903 the commission in charge of examining Virgilii’s demand for promotion to the rank of professore ordinario, and on which, incidentally, Benini – who was only three years older – sat, had criticized his “lack of originality” as well as “the absence of a body of work in which mathematical applications to statistics, which he recommended so strongly on a methodological level, were effectively put to use” (Marucco 1999a, 508). As one of the twelve contenders for the chair of statistics at the University of Palermo in 1908, Virgilii, who was forty-three years old at that time, was not even considered for the short list, which included the names of the much younger Alberto Beneduce (thirty-one), Costantino Bresciani (twenty-six), Corrado Gini (twenty-four), and Giorgio Mortara

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(twenty-three) (acs 1897–1910, b. 275). When Virgilii applied for the Padua chair of statistics in 1913, the commission described his Manuale (which had by then been reprinted fifteen times) as “elementary” and deplored its lack of any presentation of more recent statistical developments (acs 1912–16, b. 6). Benini, on the other hand, would play a leading role in the discipline’s redefinition. At the beginning of his career, he had held a chair in the history of commerce at the University of Bari, from 1889 to 1896. He then moved on to Perugia, where he was appointed to a chair in economics, and, a year later (1897), to Pavia, where he held a chair in statistics until 1907. He then moved to the University of Rome, where he held the chair of statistics until 1918, and then, until his retirement, a chair in political economy (Dall’Aglio 1966; Favero 2006b). Benini was the first statistician to declare categorically, in his Principii di demografia (1901), that statistics was fundamentally a methodological discipline; he wrote that it was “in substance a branch of Logic and, more precisely, a method” (1901a, 10). He was also the author of Principii di statistica metodologica (1906), the seminal work that would become a cardinal reference for the new generation and would consign all previous textbooks to oblivion. However, as in any kind of generation gap, the important factor here was not age as such, but rather the state of statistical knowledge at the time of these statisticians’ intellectual training. The decisive fact in this regard is what S. Stigler calls “the English breakthrough” linked with the names of Galton and Pearson (1986, 265). Thus, for instance, Benini was the first Italian author to establish a clear difference between the widely used but vague notion of statistical relation and that of correlation, which was defined by the existence of concomitant variations (1901b), as Bresciani would later acknowledge (1909a). How long it would take for such a distinction to take hold is evident in the still vague acceptance of the notion of correlation we find in Niceforo’s Forza e ricchezza (1906), a work that otherwise made significant use of statistical data. The advent of the mathematical dimension within Italian statistical culture is exemplified by Vito Volterra’s 1901 paper in the GDE: “Sui tentativi di applicazione delle matematiche alle scienze biologiche e sociali.” That Volterra, the major figure within Italian mathematics, chose to write for a journal read by economists and statisticians, testified symbolically to the new turn taken by Italian social science. The Pareto-Edgeworth debate about the income dis-

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tribution curve, which occurred within the pages of the Giornale in 1896–97, was an early manifestation of that turn. Volterra would publish again in the Giornale in 1906, giving an enthusiastic review of Pareto’s Manuel d’économie politique. And Volterra was once again closely associated with the destiny of Italian statistics when he presided over the rebirth of the Società italiana per il progresso delle scienze (sips), which, in 1907, held its first meeting since 1875. Participants in this meeting voted in favour of a division of the sips into fourteen sections, the precise headings of which would represent the “positive and experimental disciplines” – including political economy and statistics as a combined section – so as to avoid, according to one of them, the risk that the Society would “be invaded by pettifogging lawyers, political schemers, or literary hacks” and make sure that it “remained insulated from the petty quarrelling of jurists, the logomachy of sociologists as well as the ideologies of philosophers and theosophists” (Ricci 1907, 1107). Among the most active participants in that meeting and the following (1908) were Benini, Gini, Bresciani, and Mortara, the old guard generally staying away. From then on, highly technical statistical papers were published on a regular basis, in the GDE as well in other journals where statistical literature was welcome. Probability theory, Bortkiewicz’s law of small numbers, the mathematical properties of various types of means, the measurement of correlation, concentration, or dependence, interpolation techniques, etc., all became frequent subjects of exposition or debate. Bresciani played a decisive part and was in fact the main Italian relay in the dissemination of Anglo-Saxon contributions during these years. In his 1909 papers dedicated to the measurement of correlation and to the theory of frequency distributions, which both had a clearly didactical intent, he insisted on the “unfamiliarity” of Italian statisticians with regard to the methods developed “in England by members of the so-called biometric school” (1909a, 401), and on the fact that “certain recent methods have not yet been taken into account by all those who do statistical research” (1909b, 701). The sole Italian names he mentioned were those of Benini and of the engineer Luigi Perozzo (to which we may add that of physician and anthropometrician Ridolfo Livi, from whom he borrowed data). Bresciani’s role as disseminator of foreign contributions at that time is also borne out by the chronicles he published in 1907 under the title “Rassegna del movimento scientifico, Statistica,” in which he

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signalled and summarized the work of many English authors (including Pearson, Edgeworth, Galton, and Yule), and the other wide-ranging epistemological and methodological papers he published during the following years (1910a, 1914a, and 1914b). It should therefore come as no surprise that by 1913, just a dozen years after Benini’s pronouncement on this issue, Umberto Ricci could write: “It has become a common saying that statistics is a method” (1913, 1). And two years later, in the second edition of his Teoria statistica generale e demografica, A. Contento, who held the chair of statistics at the University of Catania, summarized the evolution of Italian statistics by distinguishing three moments: that of description, which covered more or less the first half of the nineteenth century and was concerned with the collection and display of facts; that of investigation, the program for which had been set forth by Messedaglia and that consisted of inquiring into the causes of phenomena; and finally, that of theory or methodology, which Contento defined as “that complex of fundamental rules to be followed when we study phenomena” (1915, 6; in the first edition, Contento, while presenting the rival viewpoints regarding the nature of statistics – science or method? – had already sided with the Beninian or methodological view [1909, 28–9]). Mastering this new body of concepts, problems, techniques and know-how required a much higher level of specialization and expertise; thus, giving way to a new division of intellectual labour, it contributed significantly to the emergence of a distinctive statistical field.

mathematics, statistics and probability The existence of a conscious field-building strategy, centred on the demarcation and specification of an autonomous statistical domain, appears with utmost clarity when one considers the manner in which the concept and calculus of probability were seized upon by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Up to that time, probability theory had not been the object of sustained attention on the part of Italian statisticians, even though they often referred to it. To be sure, engineer Luigi Perozzo had devoted a celebrated article to this topic as early as 1883, yet most of the textbooks used for the teaching of statistics by the turn of the century did not go much beyond the most elementary notions of probability, even though they attempted to earn some symbolic credit by

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evoking what was still an esoteric topic. The fact that Perozzo was an engineer was of course significant, since his training was thus radically different from that of most professors of statistics, who often came from law faculties. Only with Benini’s 1906 Principii di metodologia statistica, in which some forty pages were dedicated to the “elementi di calcolo combinatorio e di calcolo delle probabilità,” did this situation begin to change. (It should be mentioned, however, that he had already published the paper “Probabilità statistica e probabilità matematica” in 1898.) Nonetheless, the first two editions of Contento’s Teoria statistica (1909 and 1915), another significant textbook of the early twentieth century, devoted only a very limited space (some thirty pages out of six hundred or so) to probability calculus and its applications. A much more sophisticated approach to probability could be found at that time among Italian mathematicians such as Francesco Paolo Cantelli and Guido Castelnuovo. In 1905 Cantelli (1875–1966), a mathematician and actuary, published Sui fondamenti del calcolo delle probabilità, which would initiate a series a major contributions to the subject, among which was the “strong” or uniform law of large numbers (Delsedime 1975). His friend and colleague Castelnuovo (1865–1952), who would become one of the major figures of twentieth-century Italian mathematics, held the course on probability theory at the University of Rome from the turn of the century. The very first Italian treatise on the subject, Calcolo delle probabilità, which was published in 1919 and had a number of editions, was an outgrowth of this teaching (Togliatti 1978). Up until the publication of Castelnuovo’s textbook, the reference work on probability used by Italians was French (Bertrand 1889). It should also be mentioned that Ugo Broggi and Tullio Bagni had also published, in 1906 and 1915 respectively, monographs in which they made significant use of probability calculus. Of the authors who were considered statisticians but who were not mathematicians by trade or background, the one who made the most sustained contribution was undoubtedly Corrado Gini. Despite having studied mathematics (and biology) as an optional subject within the course of his degree in law, Gini was however obviously at ease with the topic; he did not lack self-confidence. Over a very brief span (1907–11) and at a very early age (he was born in 1884), Gini wrote and published a number of papers that established probability as an essential part of the Italian statistician’s trade as well as

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his own reputation within the emerging field. These were his 1907 laurea thesis, written under the supervision of Salvioni, about sex ratio at birth, of which an expanded version was published the following year (Gini 1908), a series of theoretical papers published in various journals and devoted to the concept of probability and its applications, and a string of polemical articles directed against the so-called law of small numbers and eliciting bitter reactions from the law’s exponent Ladislas von Bortkiewicz, who was the most eminent German mathematical statistician at that time. Gini’s first significant contribution was “Teoria logica e psicologica della probabilità,” a lengthy paper written in 1907 but published only after his death; it was written in a less technical style than the other articles he wrote during the same period, and it presented his ideas in a more exhaustive manner. In it, Gini wondered why, given the admittedly paramount importance of the topic, recent, otherwise accurate statistical treatises had devoted such scarce, incomplete, and often inaccurate coverage to probability theory (1907a, 7). According to him, this unfortunate situation was due to the fact that probability theory and its philosophical foundations had up until then been explored by philosophers and mathematicians rather than by statisticians, as well as to the still incomplete character of the theory itself. Gini’s paper was dedicated to mapping and exploring this territory from a statistician’s point of view. The Scienza delle probabilità could thus be divided into three distinctive areas: (a) the philosophical, which dealt with the fundamentals of the concept and measurement of probability; (b) the mathematical, or probability calculus per se; and (c) the practical, which was concerned with applications of probability calculus to concrete phenomena. This latter part could in turn be divided between formal or deductive applications, which were concerned with phenomena the nature of which was well-known, and investigative or inductive applications, the object of which were phenomena not sufficiently well-known to be ascribed determined probabilities. As instances of the first type of applications, Gini mentioned the theory of chance games, that of observation errors, the distribution of gunshots around a target, the kinetic theory of gas, etc. As examples of inductive applications, he mentioned Quetelet’s inquiries on anthropometric characteristics, those of Galton and Pearson, Bortkiewicz’s law of small numbers, etc. (4–5). From there, Gini proceeded to make two prescriptive assertions,

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@

Logical theory (fundamental principles) Psychological theory (methods for determining probabilities)

Mathematical part (probability calculus per se)

Practical or statistical part

@

@

Science of probability

Philosophical part

37

Deductive applications (well-known phenomena, determined probabilities) Inductive applications (little-known phenomena, undetermined probabilities)

Figure 1.2: Gini’s Scienza delle probabilità (1907).

which can be viewed together as a bold move regarding the specification of an autonomous statistical field. On the one hand, he put the formal and investigative applications of probability right at the heart of statistics broadly conceived: he described these applications as “the most objective and the most subtle” part of statistics and defined the discipline’s progress as extending the range of phenomena that could be submitted to the calculus of probabilities. On the other hand, he designated as properly statistical the practical part of probability, thus establishing a consequent division of intellectual labour between philosophers, mathematicians, and statisticians. Statistics and probability could thus be envisioned as two largely intersecting sets, and statisticians were not necessarily to be subordinated to mathematicians, since each group could claim hegemony over its own province within the new Scienza. Moreover, given the technical nature of the subject, philosophers could be challenged by statisticians within their own domain. Gini’s “Teoria logica e psicologica” was an instance of this. In fact it was on their own turf that Gini challenged them when he presented a paper on the concept of probability to the Italian Philosophical Society’s Second Congress, held in Parma in 1907, under the chairmanship of mathematician and philosopher Federigo Enriques (Gini 1908). The logical and psychological theories that gave the 1907 unpublished paper its title were, according to Gini, the two dimensions of the properly philosophical part of the science of probability. The first one dealt with the concepts of chance and probability and was there to provide probability calculus with its fundamental principles. The

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second one dealt with the methods “by which we practically determine fundamental probabilities.” All things being equal, Gini even credited statisticians with clear overall superiority, arguing that application of the calculus of probabilities to concrete phenomena required “full knowledge and long-standing practice of statistical technique” (3–7). Gini came back to these issues in the two main theoretical papers he published on the subject in 1907 and 1908. In both of them, Gini displayed a remarkable command of the subject as well as a strongly empirical orientation. In “Contributo alle applicazioni statistiche del calcolo delle probabilità,” he delved more deeply into the distinction between deductive and inductive probabilities and, in the wake of Wilhelm Lexis’s work in the late 1870s, examined problems related to dispersion within statistical series. Interestingly, the only Italian contribution he mentioned in his thorough review of the literature was Benini’s 1906 Principii, thus emphasizing the novelty of the subject with regard to the Italian statistical tradition. In “Che cos’è la probabilità,” which was an expanded version of the paper presented at the 1907 philosophers’ meeting as well as a summary of his unpublished paper’s main conclusions, he looked into the logical foundations of probability and began by recalling the main criticisms that were made against both the classical and empirical conceptions of probability.3 The classical conception of probability, which was founded upon the notion of the “equipossibility” of the modalities of a phenomenon (“the probability of a phenomenon is the ratio of the number of modalities favourable to the phenomenon over that of all possible modalities, all modalities being equally possible”), was considered, if not tautological (equipossibility could only mean equiprobability), at least unclear – a judgment on the equipossibility of two events relying, according to some, on the absence of any reason to believe in the inequality of their probability (the subjective view) or on positive reasons deriving from the nature of the phenomenon itself (the objective view). The empirical conception of probability, which was founded upon the repeated observation of a phenomenon’s occurrence (“the probability of a phenomenon is given by the ratio of the number of times a phenomenon is observed and the total number of observations, given that this latter number is sufficiently high”), was on its part criticized because of its approximate character (whatever the number of observations, a higher number would change probabilities).

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Gini criticized both conceptions for considering probability as “an abstract quality of phenomena, independent from the time and place circumstances in which phenomena occur”. He suggested a more comprehensive, but at the same time more concrete definition, a “new empirical definition” according to which probability could not be related to a “singular fact” but always to a “concrete class of phenomena” (1908d, 148–51). In another lengthy paper published in 1911 (“Considerazioni sulle probabilità a posteriori e applicazioni al rapporto dei sessi nelle nascite umane”), Gini sought to bridge the gap between a priori probabilities and experimental data in a manner that, according to I. Scardovi, anticipated Carnap’s inductive logic and the revival of Bayesian methods (Scardovi 2001, xiii–xiv). That same year, Gini’s views were thoroughly discussed by Luigi Galvani, a mathematician at the University of Cagliari, where, at the time, Gini held the chair in statistics. Even though Galvani’s professoral rank (he was assistant to the infinitesimal calculus chair) was not equivalent to that of the younger Gini, getting the attention of a mathematician was, on the part of a non-mathematician, a very clear indication of his work’s significance. Collaboration between Gini and Galvani would be strengthened, the same year, by the latter’s writing of a mathematical appendix to the former’s 1911 paper. (This would be a lasting alliance: at Gini’s request, Galvani would join istat as head of the mathematics and cartography service in 1926, as well as at the School of Statistics of the University of Rome in 1929.) Gini’s thesis, which dealt with “the most time-honoured subject of quantitative social research, birth ratios” (Porter 1986, 248; see also Brian and Jaisson 2007), and for which he was granted the Vittorio Emanuele II award for social and political sciences by the University of Bologna, offered an impressive example of the uses to which probability calculus could be put for analysing social data. Starting from the fact that statistical observations showed a regular excess of male over female births but that these observations were nevertheless subject to measurement error, Gini gathered an extensive array of data and submitted these to critical scrutiny. Making use of Lexis’s techniques, he examined whether the distribution of observed excesses across different periods of time, different locations, or different modalities of other phenomena conformed to subnormal, normal, or supernormal dispersion, and went on to

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develop his own theory of dispersion. In a manner that has been correctly described as somewhat similar to modern Exploratory Data Analysis (Forcina 1987, 330), Gini tested a number of hypotheses on his data sets and examined relations between large numbers of variables. (A second part, to be concerned with further explorations of statistical relationships between the sexual distribution of births and a number of social and economic variables, was announced by Gini as having been written, but, to my knowledge, it was never published.) Here again, Gini discussed the specific legitimacy of statistics and its boundaries vis-à-vis already-established sciences; by the same token he insisted on the necessity of specialization and the benefits it offered. Was statistics restricted to the establishment of facts? Should one consider “as an illicit intrusion into territories that did not belong to statistics any attempt at interpreting collected data and drawing from them general conclusions”? Could one consider as equivalent, for instance, “the technique of the microscope, that all practitioners of the newer sciences know and apply to their disciplines for specific purposes,” and the technique of statistics? Yes, in principle, answered Gini, but on a practical level, “despite its apparent simplicity,” statistics seemed “so vast and so complex, so rich in painstaking mathematical applications and subtle philosophical problems … that only minds trained for this field of study will be able to use it with a guarantee of success” (1908c, 18–9).4 The comparison between the technique of microscopy and statistics was made again by Gini in his 1913–14 Padua lectures, as noted by Contento, who agreed that one should not interpret this as a third position, distinct from that which defined statistics as a method and that which defined it as a science (1915, 43); yet, by insisting the technical character of statistics, it is quite evident that Gini drew its boundaries more firmly. Another significant event in the emergence of an autonomous Italian statistical field was the debate over Bortkiewicz’s law of small numbers. Over the course of two years (1907–09), no fewer than six papers dealing with this issue were published in the GDE. Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1868–1931) was then an associate professor of statistics at the University of Berlin who pursued the line of research opened by Lexis, but in an increasingly mathematical direction (Porter 1986, 254; Stigler 1986, 237). His name had become widely known in the international statistical community following the appearance of his 1898 brochure Das Gesetz der

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Kleinen Zahlen, in which he established that rare events, such as the number of Prussian soldiers killed by horse kicks or the number of Prussian children committing suicide over a number of years, conformed to a Poisson distribution. The title he chose suggested a contrast with the “law of large numbers,” but Bortkiewicz’s point was, rather, about rare phenomena. The debate was launched by two Gini papers, “La legge dei piccoli numeri” and “La regolarità dei fenomeni rari,” in which he aimed heavy artillery at the so-called law of small numbers: he altogether denied its existence, questioned its usefulness for the understanding of the phenomena it purported to illuminate, and contested the denomination chosen for it by Bortkiewicz. According to Gini, any series of rare events was but a modality of a larger series: thus, male Prussian children under ten who had committed suicide in a given year were a subset of all male Prussian children under ten, as well as one of all persons having committed suicide that year irrespective of age, of all male Prussian children under ten having died that year, etc. What was the use of knowing that the proportion of a phenomenon in relation to other more general phenomena was constant when the latter were also constant, if the frequency of these phenomena was in fact variable (1907c, 770)? Moreover, for social scientists, probability calculus was not so much a “criterion for the prevision of the frequency of phenomena” as a tool for isolating the effects of accidental variation from those of constant causes (a point emphasized by Lexis and exemplified in Gini’s dissertation). Gini took great care to exhibit his familiarity with probability theory, but he opposed the purely scientific interest of certain of its applications to the practical interest of others, clearly revealing his preference for the latter (1908a, 209). This attack by a newcomer elicited immediate reaction, first from Costantino Bresciani, who had studied under Bortkiewicz in Berlin, and then from Bortkiewicz himself. According to Bresciani (1908), Gini’s criticisms were beside the point as well as groundless. For his part, Bortkiewicz accused Gini of completely misunderstanding the issue and of not having read him correctly (1908; 1909). Obviously, Gini and Bresciani/Bortkiewicz were talking at cross-purposes. Gini’s rejoinder (1908b) was quite illuminating in this respect: it exhibited a clear contrast between the theoretical and mathematical outlook of the latter and his own, empirically and practically driven, which was to become a trademark of the Italian school. Ironically, in his rejoinder the statistician

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the intruder and the privileged: personal merit vs social capital In a paper published in 1964 – to be read with caution due to post facto reconstructions – Gini attributed his early entry into the academic world (“I was for a few months the youngest professor in the Italian public universities system”) to the interest his 1907–1909 work on probability calculus elicited among “the representatives of exact sciences. The latter’s authoritative judgment could not but influence the commissions set up to designate the holders of statistics chairs, the members of which were often very competent in other branches of statistics, but almost wholly ignorant of probability theory”. Gini also insisted on the social obstacles he had to overcome within the emerging field thus assigning all the more importance to his personal and scientific qualities: he came from a rural area and knew nothing of the academy and its ways; he was even ignorant of the “names of the professors teaching the subject to which (he) was to dedicate (him)self”; he had studied under the supervision of a professor (Salvioni) who was marginalized because of his political leanings and his bad temper; he was “devoid of extra-academic protections and welcomed as an unexpected and undesired intruder by a lot of seasoned, very influential and ultra-protected competitors, among whom were Bresciani-Turroni, Mortara and Beneduce” (Gini 1964, 255). Reality is a bit more complex. Gini came from a rich agrarian bourgeois family, Bresciani from a middle-bourgeoisie family (his father, an engineer, died at the early age of thirty-five), Beneduce from a family of modest condition, while Mortara’s father was a prestigious academic and a close friend of Benini. It is however, true, that in 1907–08, Gini was probably the least endowed among these four, as regards experience, titles, or contacts. While Gini’s training was exclusively Italian, Bresciani and Mortara had studied in Berlin under Bortkiewicz; the Mortaras were in fact an academic dynasty, well integrated into the political elite (the father, who was closely linked to F.S. Nitti, one of the major figures of Liberal Italy, would become president of the Corte di Cassazione and, for a short time [1919–20] minister of Justice); as for Beneduce, who was a few

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years older (he was born in 1877), he had been trained as a mathematician, had published a number of statistical papers since 1902 and had embarked on a bureaucratic career within the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, after having been put in touch with Nitti through the Mortara family. It should be added that Gini’s family wealth would allow him to set up, in 1920, his own journal, Metron, of which he remained the owner and publisher up to the time of his death. (Federici 2000; Bini 1992; Bonelli 1966; Lenti 1967)

who was to play the most conspicuous part in the formal mathematization of Italian statistics clearly expressed his reservations regarding an excessively mathematically oriented statistics. By 1910, the calculus of probabilities had thus been clearly appropriated by a group of Italian statisticians, among whom Gini and Bresciani were obviously two rising stars. Incidentally, both of them, as well as Mortara and Beneduce, were on the short list for the 1908 Palermo contest – Bresciani was the one chosen (Bini 1992, 15–6).5 Up to a few years before, the preceding generation of Italian statisticians had commented on, and sometimes paid due reverence to probability, within works that had a largely administrative outlook and were quite elementary with regard to mathematics. With the debate over Bortkiewicz’s law of small numbers, Italian statistics had for the first time taken up a strictly statistical point, on an unprecedented level of sophistication. The subject of the polemic was not one about which any social scientist could easily make up his mind, but rather a narrowly technical issue whose importance could not be adequately measured without a mastery of all its facets. Gini could, while toning it down a bit, quote Danish statistician Harald Westergaard, according to whom statistics without probability calculus was “pure amateurishness” (Gini 1907b, 119). All the same, by being a pure form, free of any specific empirical reference, probability paradoxically put Italian statistics in the position of a full-fledged discipline, available as a methodological adjunct to all empirical sciences, rather than as a science restricted to a distinctive object or as a specific chapter of mathematics.

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esotericism, mutual recognition and closure of the field Another example, admittedly less important but also significant, of the manner in which the esotericism of technical debates restrains access to a field is the 1914 discussion between Mortara and Bresciani on the uses of the correlation coefficient (r). According to Mortara (1914b), the correlation coefficient was overly sensitive to very weak correlations and at the same time almost insensitive to correlations above a certain threshold. He advocated, notably regarding the study of economic phenomena, the use of another coefficient, z, whose advantages were that it “indicated which fraction of the variation of two phenomena depended upon the relation which united them” and that it increased at a much lower rate than r, even if it had the same limits, 0 and 1 (the formula for passing from r to z was: z = 1 – 1 – r2 ). In his reply (1914b), Bresciani, who had established his reputation as the Italian expert on correlation, argued that the problem raised by Mortara disappeared when linear correlation was understood as the relationship between variations of a phenomenon and the means of corresponding variations of another phenomenon (rather than that between variations of a phenomenon and the “singular determinations” of another, as Mortara purportedly believed).

economics, statistics, and the measurement of inequality The forum that hosted these developments in Italian statistical theory was first and foremost, as its title indicated, a journal written by and for economisti. As such, it also took a considerable part in the emergence and consolidation of a tradition of mathematical economics exemplified by the name of Vilfredo Pareto, whose legacy would be claimed in the 1920s and 1930s by authors such as Luigi Amoroso, Felice Vinci, or Alfonso de Pietri-Tonelli, all of whom could rightly claim by that time the titles of both statistician and economist.6 Pareto’s work on his famous wealth distribution curve, which constitutes a central episode in this story, was indeed initiated in the pages of the GDE, with an 1895 paper, “La legge della

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domanda.” In it, Pareto claimed that he could extract from a mass of statistical data on income in a number of European countries “a very simple empirical law” describing the distribution of wealth (1895, 60). Pareto’s major contributions on the subject were published (in French) during the following two years, in a paper called “La courbe de la répartition de la richesse” as well as in the second volume of his Cours d’économie politique.7 In these writings, he gave a clear formulation of what became known as Pareto’s law or curve and put forward the inventive and mathematically convincing approach that would earn him a lasting place in both the histories of statistics and of economics (Busino 1965; Valade 1990; Barbut 1999). By displaying series of data corresponding to a given income x and the number of persons N earning an income equal or higher than x on a two-dimensional diagram, Pareto observed that they formed a straight line that could be described by its gradient (α) and its ordinate at the origin (A). According to Pareto, a rise of α, which corresponded to a reduction in the percentage of individuals whose incomes were higher than x, indicated a rise in the inequality of the distribution, while a decrease of α pointed to the contrary phenomenon. Yet, the examination of a significant number of empirical distributions showed a strong constancy of α. Pareto’s point was that, since the distribution of income and wealth exhibited a similar pattern in a vast number of countries and over a long period, a fundamental law was at work: it was no use pretending, as socialists did, that a redistribution of wealth offered a solution to poverty. Only an improvement in production, i.e., a growth of aggregate revenue at a pace faster than that of population, could. The subject migrated back rapidly into the pages of the GDE with Pareto’s reply to a critique published by British economist and statistician F.Y. Edgeworth in The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Edgeworth 1896; Pareto 1896). Another Pareto paper on the subject was published (1897a), only to be followed by a second Edgeworth reply (1897; it had been solicited by the editor of the GDE, M. Pantaleoni) and a final rejoinder by Pareto (1897b). For quite a while, Pareto’s distribution curve aroused surprisingly little interest within Italy. For a decade, the sole major academic figure to tackle the issue was Benini (1897; 1906). Things would change drastically in the following decades, but what this time lag clearly reveals is the conspicuous absence, at the time Pareto developed his work on the distribution curve, of competent Italian

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interlocutors. Such people, whose names we have encountered already, would come of age precisely between the publication of Benini’s Principii and the Great War.8 But before they would publish a stream of contributions on the Pareto distribution curve, a decisive episode in the emergence and structuring of the statistical field would have taken place: that is, the genesis of that other famous statistical artifact known as Gini’s concentration ratio. The starting point in the genesis of Gini’s rapporto di concentrazione can be traced to a paper presented in October 1908 at the second annual meeting of the Società Italiana per il progresso delle scienze (sips) and published a few months later in the GDE. In this paper (Il diverso accrescimento delle classi sociali e la concentrazione della ricchezza), Gini was concerned with differential reproduction among social classes, an issue that had by that time solicited the attention of a vast array of authors interested in population matters and led to a variety of hypotheses (again, very few Italian authors were mentioned in the paper’s impressive review of the literature: Pareto, Benini, and, for data they had gathered, Alfredo Niceforo and Ridolfo Livi). It was in the latter part of the paper, devoted to the problem of wealth concentration, that Gini established the basis of what was to become his claim to lasting fame. Discussing the definition of the equality or inequality of wealth distribution, he argued that a correct assessment of it required an index that could relate given segments of a population to their share of the national wealth. Starting from Pareto’s hypothesis of a constant relation between a given level of income and the number of income recipients located above it, Gini established an analogous relation between the number of income recipients and the total amount of income earned by them. From this, he developed δ, an index he defined as the exponent to which a given share of the total amount of income over a given threshold should be raised in order to obtain the share of population that owned it: the higher the value of δ, the more concentrated the wealth (Gini 1909, 48). And while “Pareto, relying on the approximate constancy of the α coefficient, concluded that the distribution of wealth was constant,” Gini observed “a tendency of δ to rise” and thus a tendency to the concentration of wealth, though variable from one country to the other (55–6). Gini came back to the issue at the following meeting of the sips, held in September 1909. An expanded version of the paper he pre-

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sented then (Indici di concentrazione e di dipendenza) was published the following year in the famous Biblioteca dell’Economista. This collection of monographs had been launched by Francesco Ferrara in 1850 and it offered the Italian public translations of works by authors such as Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus, etc. Being published in it was a clear indication of the resonance Gini’s work had immediately gained. (Other statisticians whose work had also previously appeared in the Biblioteca’s catalogue were Benini [Principii di statistica metodologica, 1906] and Mortara [Le popolazioni delle grande città italiane, 1908].) By comparison with the preceding paper, Indici was a more thoroughly methodological work, in the sense that it was more focused on the development of appropriate tools than on the resolution of empirical questions such as the existence and extent of differential reproduction among social classes. Gini’s intention was clearly expressed in a letter he wrote to economist Vladimiro Furlan in September 1910. Comparing his work with that of Pareto, Gini described it as “a bit more extensive,” in the sense that it was not restricted to the study of economic phenomena, but at the same time “much more modest,” in that he was searching for formulas that would facilitate the practical study of concentration and dependence (Pareto 1975c, 704–5). It has rightly been said of Indici that it laid the foundations of a general theory of concentration, irrespective of the empirical problems that had originally stimulated Gini’s interest (Giorgi 1990, 185). Yet, concentration of wealth remained the major theme and, much more clearly than in his previous paper, Gini stressed the difference between Pareto’s α (which corresponded with the curve’s inclination) and his own δ, which he saw as a much better fit with the empirical data and that radically invalidated Pareto’s conclusion about the sameness of wealth distributions across time and space. If there was a theoretical relation between the two indexes (δ = α/α–1), δ seemed much more sensitive to variations, which led to the conclusion that the uniformity observed by Pareto was a result of the index he had chosen to measure inequality. Finally, interpreting δ was quite straightforward (an increase in its value meant an increase in income concentration), while the meaning of α wasn’t all that clear. For Pareto, as mentioned above, an increase of α – or a decrease in the proportion of individuals whose income was higher than x – indicated an increase in the inequality of the distribution, while for Benini, such a phenomenon could be read as a

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decrease in inequality (Gini 1911b, 48–50). The nature of the indexes retained by both authors had a decisive effect: while α took into account only the number of persons according to classes of income, δ also took into account the total amount of income apportioned to each of these classes (Gini 1909, 56). In Variabilità e mutabilità: contributo allo studio delle distribuzioni e delle relazioni statistiche, Gini explored primarily the notion of mean difference,
, an index that he considered as “the most appropriate to the measurement of demographic, anthropological, biological and economic phenomena” (1912a, 22). Mean difference, which focused on the measurement of deviations between a number of observed quantities rather than on the more familiar concept of measuring deviations between these observed quantities and their arithmetic mean or their median, had already been used in the past by German astronomers Jordan, von Andrae, and Helmert, as mentioned by A. Gili (1987, 20) and as Gini himself admitted in a footnote. Gini maintained however that he had taken notice of their work only after he had completed his own, and insisted on the complete originality of his demonstrations (Gini 1912a, 58–9). Furthermore, it had remained unknown to all Italian statisticians and, moreover, neither in Italy nor elsewhere had it been the object of such elaborate and systematic treatment. Gini’s concentration ratio, R, was however introduced in his 1914 Sulla misura della concentrazione e della variabilità dei caratteri. Compared with Gini’s earlier contributions, R offered a number of remarkable properties. The most evident superiority of R over δ was its simplicity, which lay in its standardized character: by contrast with δ whose limits were variable, R always varied between 0 and 1. It was also a very general index, that could apply to any quantitative variable and whose value could be estimated also in the case of grouped data. A long list of examples was included in Gini’s paper, for which R had been computed by himself or by Alberto De Stefani and his students: these cases (fifty-two overall) dealt with physical (for instance the height of Italian conscripts in 1890) or economic properties (for instance incomes in Saxony, Norway, or Denmark). Finally, in an imaginative manner, R was linked to other statistical tools. Notably, R offered a precise measurement equivalent to the Lorenz concentration curve, a graphical method for presenting wealth concentration that had been developed in 1905. R was defined as the ratio of the area

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Figure 1.3: Original graphical representation of the concentration curve (Gini 1914, 1229)

located between the concentration curve and the absolute equality diagonal (or equidistribution line) to that of the orthogonal triangle located under the latter. But R could also be linked to
, the index devised by Gini two years earlier, R being equal to half the arithmetic mean of the absolute values of differences between all pairs of data. The work of G. Pietra, A. De Stefani, G. Dettori, F. Savorgnan, E. Porru, etc., all authors mentioned in the 1912 and 1914 papers, testifies to a quick dissemination of R and other variability and concentration indexes developed by Gini during these years.9 Criticism addressed to them would also emerge rapidly. Very early on, Giorgio Mortara had expressed his skepticism towards Gini’s general approach (1910 and 1911).10 Building on Mortara’s remarks, C. Bresciani, who was obviously of a different cast of mind from Gini’s, published a review of the latter’s work in 1916 in which he questioned its originality as well as its relevance. According to Bresciani, relying on mean deviation from the arithmetic mean, as he himself had done in 1910, gave results that were as satisfactory as those Gini had obtained through the use of mean difference (1916, 68–70).11 Ricci defended a similar position (1916). G. Pietra’s contributions (1914–15 and 1917), on the other hand, offered a strenuous defence of Gini’s approach and went further in the same direction: thanks to his training in pure mathematics – something of which, despite his talent, Gini was devoid – Pietra was

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able to present a more satisfactory formal treatment of the Lorenz curve as well as of the relations and concordance between various concentration and variability indexes, such as R, mean deviation from the mean, mean deviation from the median, or standard deviation (for an assessment of Pietra’s analytical work, see Giorgi 2005, 304–8). The emergence of Gini’s concentration ratio may be seen as both a decisive episode and a specular image of the relation between Italian mathematical economics and the Italian statistical field. Given the specific legitimacy their discipline inherited from a well-established tradition, given the material resources it derived from an already considerable network of university chairs and journals at the turn of the century, and given the intellectual prestige earned by Pareto’s work, which was regarded as an impressive instance of the application of mathematics and statistics to social phenomena and recognized as such by no less an authority than Vito Volterra, Italian economists were in a good position to claim some form of dominion over Italian statistics and thus subordinate its development to their specific needs. But whereas Pareto’s wealth distribution curve remained closely linked to the specific problem from which it emerged and was for quite a while always presented as “la curva dei redditi” (it would of course later become autonomous and be put to a wide range of applications), we can see, on the other hand, how Gini had moved, over a very short period of time, from the specific discussion of δ, which had been introduced as something of a methodological appendage designed to solve a specific problem, to a higher level of generality and abstraction, devising a whole theory of concentration and variability that led in turn to a multi-purpose concentration ratio, itself in relation to other polyvalent tools such as Lorenz’s curve or
. Given their style and density, the three monographs produced by Gini in 1910, 1912, and 1914 were a novelty in the Italian statistical panorama. What they exhibited was the existence of an integrated statistical methodology that was formally independent from the specific problems and issues characteristic of economics, demography, or other disciplines (distribution of incomes, of gender at birth, of physical or biological characteristics, etc.), but at the same time appeared as indispensable to any satisfactory treatment of these problems and issues. Gini’s work benefited notably from the constant – and strongly legitimizing – support of mathematician

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F.P. Cantelli, who had read the manuscript of Variabilità e mutabilità and would himself dedicate a paper to the mean difference (1913). In a short series of steps, Gini had thus cleared the way for what came to be known as statistica metodologica, a sub-field that was posited as the federating centre of all branches of applied statistics and as the core which assured statistics its autonomy from any substantive discipline. In the same breath, Gini posited himself at the centre of this sub-field, and an intellectual entrepreneur who had not and would never gain real recognition as a bona fide economist thus rapidly became the emblematic figure of Italian statistics.

exclusion and marginalization The manner in which the Italian statistical field emerged between 1900 and 1914 had a number of lasting social and epistemological effects upon the structure of the field itself as well as upon its relations with Italian social sciences in general and with the international statistical community. In some respects, this story presents features that can also be found in other scientific disciplines that underwent a “mathematization” process.12 As regards the level of epistemology, more precisely the issue of the territorial partition among scientific disciplines, the result was to firmly establish statistics as a kind of knowledge that was simultaneously abstract (a logic, to use a word chosen by the protagonists themselves) and concrete (“never lose touch with reality” became a sort of moral imperative). Statistics thus understood was far more than the mere elaboration of quantitative series and it required true mathematical skills; yet it remained quite distinct from what mathematicians themselves were doing under the same rubric of statistics. It is indeed significant that, despite the legitimizing recognition and support they received from mathematicians like Cantelli or Galvani, Gini’s contributions on probability or the law of small numbers were never presented, save one exception, in genuine mathematical forums.13 The distance between methodological and mathematical statistics (or, to put it better, between the statistics done by statisticians and that done by mathematicians) would grow throughout the 1920s and 1930s. This mutual estrangement is obvious in the criticisms that Marcello Boldrini, one of the most eminent figures in the statistical field at the time he wrote, levelled

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against the general statistics of Carlo Emanuele Bonferroni, an eminent mathematician who held a chair in financial mathematics, first in Bari (1923–33) and later in Florence (1933–60). According to Boldrini, Bonferroni’s book, which he located “at the antipodes” of his own views, “does not deal with Statistics as we understand it, that is as a system of direct methods intended to solve concrete problems,” but rather, according to the definition its author gave of general statistics, as “the study of sets of numerical observations,” independent of the “concrete content of these sets.” Boldrini went on: for statisticians like us (Bonferroni was always referred to as a mathematician), “relationships are between things … hence [our] desire for … a rich series of applications that go beyond mere numerical examples, that deal, if we might spell things out clearly, with true variability and not that of the n first natural numbers” (Boldrini 1942b, 337–9; emphasis added). The gap between, on the one hand, the empirical and concrete view of methodological statistics and, on the other hand, abstract and mathematical statistics, as well as the stakes regarding autonomy that can be linked to it, are equally well-defined in a condensed article published in 1938 by Francesco Brambilla, and that dealt with two of the same Bonferroni’s books, Elementi di statistica generale and Teoria statistica delle classi e calcolo delle probabilità. According to Brambilla, who, incidentally, would be employed for a while as Bonferroni’s assistant and soon become a major figure in the Società italiana di statistica (sis), one could, on the basis of these books, identify two rival views of methodological statistics: that of Bonferroni, which defined it as “the study of sets of numerical observations” or “the theory of statistical properties of sets of numbers”; that which defined it rather as “the study of collectively typical phenomena” and to which all in the statistical field subscribed, mutatis mutandis. The first definition – of which we just saw how Boldrini saw it – clearly put statistics in the orbital field of mathematics and was part of what Brambilla described as “a process, and an intensive one, of ‘purifying’ probability calculus from everything empirical and related to specific objects or facts.” On the other hand, the second definition (which Brambilla preferred, notwithstanding the fact that his work was much more mathematically oriented than that of Mortara or Gini), because it identified “the sphere of phenomena that it considered as its field of study,” provided methodological statistics with the status of an autonomous

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discipline (Brambilla 1938, 399–400). This conflict or, at least, contrast, which was constitutive of the field’s definition, had been clearly set out by Gini in the mid-1920s: it was a foundational truth, he said, that, for statistics, “mathematics were no more than a means” (1926, 706). This view would get a more elaborate theoretical expression in 1939, on the occasion of the first sis meeting: in his inaugural lecture, Gini, in a manner that contrasted with his enthusiasm of three decades earlier, embarked on a thorough critical revision of the contribution of “Anglo-Saxon” mathematical statistics and of probability calculus to statistics (the lecture was significantly entitled “The Dangers of Statistics”). As regards the social dimension, an obvious consequence of the autonomization process was to exclude or move to the periphery of the emerging field all those statisticians who did not possess the mathematical skills that were now indispensable if one was to be able to understand the new debates and their significance. Anyone who now wished to become a statistician had to show his command of probability theory and of the new tools that had been crafted so as to transform concepts that late nineteenth-century statisticians could only apprehend in a vague or qualitative manner into quantifiable and measurable properties (correlation, dispersion, concentration, dependency, etc.). The possession of such skills became the ticket one had to show in order to gain admittance to the field. As shown above, participants in the new debates were essentially young statisticians born in the 1880s, while statisticians from the older generation, who had joined the academy during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and whose work had been published in the Archivio di statistica or in the pre-1900 Giornale degli economisti, were gradually leaving the stage. As a matter of fact, the recurrence of scientific disagreements or polemics, far from being a symptom of crisis within the field, led to greater cohesion, since it defined with clarity the circle of legitimate positions and participants: confrontation henceforth became a form of mutual acknowledgment (the Mortara-Bresciani discussion on the merits of the correlation coefficient offered eloquent testimony of this process). This phenomenon of defining the circle of legitimacy is also exhibited, as we have seen, by the citation practices of authors. Thus, in Gini’s four memoirs discussed in the preceding section, as well as in Bresciani’s papers on correlation, references can be classified in two categories: those of foreigners and those of Italians of the authors’

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generation (with the exceptions of Benini and Pareto, whose profiles were compatible with the requirements of the new field). The cultural gap induced by mathematization is also evidenced by impatience and an absence of respect for the old mentality on the part of younger statisticians. A rising star like Mortara was especially caustic in this regard. In his brief report on the International Statistical Institute’s Fourteenth Session, he deplored the place still occupied by the “bureaucratic element,” and wrote, notably, “If we did not fear accusations of irreverence, we would say that the Institute’s vast majority of members still consider mathematical statistics with the same mixed feelings of compassion and contempt that animate certain wives of illustrious scientists in front of their husband’s work” (1914a, 71). In a paper published two years earlier, Mortara had also lamented the fact that “even among undoubtedly superior minds, hostility against exact methods is so deeply rooted … that we hear people proclaim the sterility of formulas and the uselessness of ‘superior logarithmic computations’’’ (1912b, 565). Already in 1910, in his own report on the Institute’s Twelfth Session, Beneduce had insisted on the necessity for statistics to emancipate itself from “its ancillary position towards public administration.” Now, according to him, it was precisely the present methodological turn that would allow statistics to master “its function and proper dignity” (1910, 115). The severe reproaches to which Virgilii was subjected in 1903, and his humiliating defeat in the 1908 Palermo contest, clearly demonstrate the process by which a seasoned practitioner could be driven off to the field’s periphery. In the 1913 Padua contest, the commission described Virgilii as a “good popularizer” without giving him further consideration; in 1924, Virgilii, who was then in Siena, moved from the statistics chair to that of political economy (acs 1912–16, b. 6; acs 1897– 1910, b. 275). In 1916, on the occasion of the Cagliari contest designed to choose a replacement for Gini (who had moved to Padua), the report of the commission (which included Benini, BrescianiTurroni, Francesco Coletti, Gini, and Pantaleoni – it had its share of members of the new generation) estimated that, although Riccardo Bachi’s candidacy had evident merits with regard to empirical research, his “titles” with regard to theoretical statistics were limited to the domain of “inquiry methods” (in other words, methodology in its older form); the commissioners criticized him for a lack of “contributions in which the candidate would have demonstrated

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his capacity in doing more profound research and using more subtle methods” (acs 1912–16, b. 2). In the 1903 contest for the statistics chair at the University of Catania (the commission, composed of Luigi Bodio, Fedele Lampertico, Napoleone Colajanni, Carlo Francesco Ferraris, and Benini, offered a perfect image – if we except the latter – of the outgoing generation), qualifications comparable to Bachi’s were still the nec plus ultra of statistica and had allowed Augusto Bosco to triumph with all honours due (acs 1897–1910, b. 255). Pietra, who, in contrast with others, had received a genuine mathematical training and had established clearly his methodological competence through the publication, in 1914–15, of his two highly technical papers on the problem of discordance among indexes, expressed without compunction the vision that the new generation had of itself and of its predecessors a few years later in a small article whose title was precisely “A proposito di competenze”: At a certain epoch, I mean a few years before the war, a modest mathematical culture and an elementary familiarity in the workings of basic formulas sufficed in endowing with some prestige the practitioners of statistics. I do not mean that there were not also great statisticians who had a deep knowledge of mathematics and could apply it to our discipline with great skill and success. But it is a fact that precautions in the use of research methods, however refined they may have been, the elegant games around numbers that would obediently submit themselves to the most curious dances, a careful and modest recourse to means and relations, remained for most of statisticians the peculiar virtues of statistics, and if they sometimes ventured into computing a correlation coefficient, they did not understand its true scope nor its analytical significance. At the same time, statistical methodology, with the powerful aid of mathematics, was making giant steps on the international scene. Henceforth, in every country, the notable distance that now exists between the old empirical School and the new, rigorously scientific approach; henceforth the irritated reaction of those survivors of the old School that refuse to concede their defeat, as well as a tendency to hang on to the old methods on the part of these young people who do not have the cast of mind nor the

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sufficient mathematical training needed to embrace the new methods. We must add that, on the one hand, those practitioners of neighbouring sciences who are too exclusivist and persist in wanting to relegate statistics to the more modest level of simple research methods end in making common cause with the older approach; and, on the other hand, it becomes more and more difficult for one to distinguish correctly, if one does not himself possess advanced skills, between a serious practitioner and a shrewd profiteer of novelties. (Pietra 1936, 4–5) In a text that could have served as a rejoinder (if it had not been written the year before), Epicarmo Corbino, an economist specializing in economic history who held a chair in Naples, also recognized, although only in order to mock it, the triumphant mathematical character of statistics. He lamented the fact that “we are now in such a situation that, if we have not completed a degree in mathematics, we cannot understand any of the methodological dissertations, and nobody knows anymore for sure if the arithmetic mean of two and four is three or some integral of a function”; Corbino also deplored that this “excess in mathematics” drove away from statistics not only the public but also all those who, in order to obtain their degree in law or economics, “must swallow a whole lot of knowledge that is of a very low generic usefulness” (1935, 300–1). The generation gap can also be detected in the complaints of members of the older generation who did not recognize the discipline of which they had been the forerunners, or who were incapable of meeting the new standards, in spite of valiant efforts. Thus, in a paper published in 1916, Salvioni deplored the fact that “the machine,” i.e., methodological statistics, had now taken over the whole place (254), upsetting “the fortunate equilibrium between the rational concepts and the algebraic and geometric elements” (256). In this review of the nostalgic book written by his colleague and contemporary Gaetano Ferroglio (whose title was Abbandonando la cattedra di Statistica), Salvioni evoked in an ironic and bittersweet manner the “biometric refinements of neo-mathematicians,” the “algebraic and geometric statisticians,” “the mathematical invasion Italian statistics was subjected to,” and the “deceitful formulas” (256–7). To the “exclusive monopoly” coveted by the mathematical tendency, he opposed the “humanist” way, which sta-

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tistics should not renounce, and finally ended up advocating a form of syncretism (263–4). As Gaetano Zingali wrote in his obituary notice of Salvioni, he was “a master of the old school” who “exhibited his conservative tendencies by seeking to resist … the attacks by which mathematics was conquering statistics” and “one is at pains to discern in statistics as it is taught today by Benini, Gini, or Mortara the discipline he (Salvioni) taught with no less nobility” (Zingali 1926a, 107). When G.S. Del Vecchio ventured into the mathematical domain with a paper that was in fact not very complex given the transformations undergone by the discipline, addressing the problem in a somewhat anachronistic manner (it was a discussion of Messedaglia’s ideas about means), he earned himself a strident reply (Del Vecchio 1910; Vecchi 1911). But nowhere was the exclusionary effect that resulted from the technical and specialized orientation taken by statistics more remarkably expressed than in the reply addressed in the summer of 1926 by the recently nominated Presidente del Consiglio Superiore di Statistica, Corrado Gini, to the Presidente del Consiglio dei ministri Mussolini, when the latter suggested that among the statisticians and economists that were to join the redesigned css be included Senator Alberto Geisser, co-editor, with Luigi Einaudi, of La Riforma Sociale. Geisser, responded Gini, was “certainly a renowned specialist about the economy and social problems, as well as the author of many contributions on these topics, but he (was) not a technician of statistics” (Leti 1996, 299n7; emphasis added). Such an answer, which testified to the emancipation of Italian statistics, could not have been uttered a quarter of a century earlier. Indeed, the formula “tecnico della statistica” began to appear regularly in the adjudication commissions reports only after the Padua contest of 1913. While it may suggest a certain narrowness of perspective on the part of a candidate thus qualified, it was on the contrary intended as a very positive comment on the part of the commissioners; those candidates who did not show a sufficient command of technique or could not exhibit an original technical contribution could not hope to be chosen for the chair. Beyond the anecdote, Gini’s reply to Mussolini vividly exemplified the existence of established criteria that were characteristic of an autonomous statistical field and that could be used as a barrier against outsiders.

2 Entrepreneurship and Rivalry: Statisticians in the Academy

On the eve of the Great War, Italian statistics had emerged as an autonomous scientific discipline that was radically different, in form and content, from the more “literary” statistica that had been practiced by professors of the previous – or soon to leave – generation, whose methodological concerns focused primarily on the status (science or method?) and partition (theoretical, technical, descriptive, investigative, etc.) of their subject and on the basics of social inquiry. It was also clearly distinct from the firmly established disciplines of mathematics – compared to which statistics was more practical – and political economy – compared to which it was more general. In 1908, a group of young statisticians who were soon to reach the rank of professore had joined economists in section fourteen of the reborn Società Italiana per il progresso delle scienze (sips), intent on devoting themselves to positive and experimental science. In just a few years time, Bresciani, Gini, Mortara, and others had lived up to expectations and, through a number of decisive methodological contributions, had significantly redefined the content and form of Italian statistics. From an institutional point of view, however, the state of Italian statistics remained far from impressive. The teaching of statistics was located mainly within giurisprudenza faculties, where all future civil servants were trained, as well as in the Istituti superiori di commercio e di economia. In none of these settings could statisticians become a significant or critical mass; here or there, they necessarily remained in an adjunct position. Regularly, some of them expressed the discomforts they felt, being in charge of a compulsory yet non-juridical subject in a faculty dedicated to the professional

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training of future lawyers. A. Contento and F. Virgilii, for instance, both proposed that chairs of statistics be relocated within faculties of philosophy (Contento 1903; De Plato 1999, 156). Besides the Annali di Statistica, which had been inaugurated in 1871 under the authority of the Direzione generale della statistica and were largely devoted to the publication of various census and survey results, there was no academic journal specifically devoted to statistics (the Archivio di statistica, whose dominant figures were L. Bodio and A. Messedaglia, lasted no more than six years, from 1876 to 1882). This was especially true for the period 1883–1910, during which industrial and legal statistics had taken the lion’s share of the Annali (whereas from 1871 to 1883, and again from 1912 on, methodological contributions were frequently published in its pages). Statistical literature was therefore scattered among a variety of journals and published materials that were not expressly identified with statistics as a discipline: first and foremost the Giornale degli economisti, of course, but also the Rivista italiana di sociologia, La Riforma sociale, Critica sociale, Rassegna delle scienze sociali, as well as the accounts and reports of various academies and learned societies. As a result, the position of statistics within the editorial panorama was strikingly homologous to its situation within the academy: it remained somewhat behind the lines, with a predictable lack of prestige, both within and outside the scientific field. Finally, government statistics, despite a brilliant season in the 1880s under Bodio’s leadership, had fallen, by the early twentieth century, into a dire state. Among the symptoms of this decadence of Italian official statistics, sternly denounced by minister Francesco Nitti, a major political figure of the Giolittian era,1 were the steep decline in its budget (from 450,000 liras in 1891, it fell to 160,000 in 1910), in its personnel (from 177 to forty-five employees for the same period) and the considerable delays in the publication of statistical series, if not their complete cessation (Leti 1996, 61–3; see also D’Autilia and Melis 2000, 41–9).2 On many occasions, this situation gave rise to alarming protests, severe criticism, and disillusioned sarcasm;3 yet, in spite of some efforts toward reform, paralysis seemed unshakeable. Yet, in a manner analogous to that by which, during the decade 1905–14, a mathematically sophisticated statistics had displaced the largely descriptive learning known up to then as statistica, a series of entrepreneurial moves made by the same generation of statisticians would produce spectacular

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results at the institutional level also, consolidating and expanding all dimensions of Italian statistics during the 1920s and 1930s. The emergence of Italian statistics as an autonomous discipline between 1905–14 was only the initial episode in the genesis of a statistical field. It could not offer, by itself, any guarantee as to the extent, density, and configuration of such a field. This chapter and the following will consider what may be designated as the structuring of the statistical field. Structuring is defined here as the whole process of institutional expansion and enlarged reproduction of the field that occurred more or less from 1910 to 1940. This covers two main areas. One is the academy and the scientific world in general, where a remarkable development of the discipline’s institutional positions occurred through a significant growth in the number of statistics chairs, but mostly through the establishment of a new division of labour around statistical laboratories, institutes, and schools, which, in striking contrast with the individualistic and humanistic model of the old-fashioned statistica, allowed for a much more efficient mobilization of human and material resources. The other is government statistics, which underwent a spectacular recovery in the mid-1920s and where the “new” statisticians, after having succeeded in establishing themselves as experts during the war and its immediate aftermath, were called to fill the top positions, thereby enabling a shift of resources that would strengthen their position within the academy. To be sure, these developments did not occur without struggles or conflicts. In fact, the expansion and consolidation of the statistical field went hand in hand with the polarization of a number of groups, according to a combination of theoretical and political positions. There were also competition between disciplines, and personal rivalries, so that by the end of the 1930s in a context where politics and ideology commanded that the organic character of collectives be translated into the principle of organizational unity (one party, one trade union, one corporation in each economic sector…), statisticians paradoxically gathered in not one but two scientific bodies, the Società italiana di statistica (sis) and the Società italiana di demografia e statistica (sids).

from chair to laboratory: a new model A first estimate of statistics’ degree of consolidation within the academy may be provided by the growth, at various points in time,

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in the number of chairs explicitly dedicated, or closely linked, to this discipline. This growth is at first sight rather impressive, since the number of chairs trebled in the course of three to four decades. Thus, for the twenty-seven universities or comparable higher education establishments that could be found in Italy at the end of the period and that were likely to host a statistics chair, there is growth from a total of six full professorships in 1900–01 (held by G. B. Salvioni [Bologna], G. S. Del Vecchio [Genoa], A. Messedaglia [Rome], A. Graziani [Naples], F. Maggiore-Perni [Palermo], and R. Benini [Pavia]) to fourteen in 1921–22, and seventeen in 1937–38, this number remaining the same up to 1942–43. We can describe the 1900–05 period, which immediately preceded the methodological turn described in the previous chapter, as the last season of the older statistica dominated by the generation that had come of age on the immediate aftermath of unification. Its towering figure, Messedaglia, died in 1901 (Augusto Bosco would succeed him, only to die prematurely in 1906); Graziani, who simultaneously held a chair in political economy, would relinquish that of statistics after 1902; Maggiore-Perni would retire in 1907; Del Vecchio would abandon teaching during the war, as would Salvioni – out of fashion by then – in the mid-1920s; N. Colajanni and G. Ferroglio can be considered part of this generation, since they rose to the position of professore ordinario just before the new generation arrived on the scene and retired respectively in 1916 and 1921.4 Table 2.1 presents the distribution of these chairs for the years 1921–22 and 1937–38, which were also those mentioned by R. Faucci in his work on the institutionalization of political economy (1990a and 1990b). It seems especially relevant for us to consider the same years as Faucci (who himself included chairs in statistics within the larger group of those pertaining to economic subjects), since it provides us with a comparison with the discipline with which statistics had a complex relationship that combined complementarity and rivalry. The relative weight of statistics chairs among all chairs pertaining to economic subjects during that period rises slightly at first, moving from six out of a total of thirty-six (17 per cent) in 1900–01 to fourteen out of fifty-four (26 per cent) in 1921–22 and then – decreasing even more slightly – seventeen out of seventy-six (22 per cent) in 1937–38. As for the absolute number of chairs (the same thing is true for economic subjects overall), the most important difference occurred during the first interval (i.e.,

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between 1900–01 and 1921–22), more or less at the end of what we have described in chapter 1 as the autonomization process undergone by Italian statistics. If we now add to these chairs the positions of professori straordinari (in the process of obtaining tenure), of incaricati and liberi docenti, we observe a comparable growth also during the second interval: indeed, we move, overall, from a total of twenty-three persons engaged in the teaching of statistics in 1921–22 to thirty-five in 1937–38. We also observe some fluidity between various economic subjects. Among the fourteen professors who held a chair in statistics in 1921–22, four of the eight who would still belong to the academy in 1937–38 (Bachi, Bresciani, Contento, Jannaccone) would by then hold a chair in “corporative political economy” – as political economy chairs were renamed during Fascism’s second decade. But we do not observe a single contrary case, i.e., someone moving from political economy to statistics: the seventeen who held chairs of statistics in 1937–38 were in fact a much more compact group than the fourteen of 1921–22, which seems a clear indication of a consolidation of the statistical field during that interval. This homogeneousness was a direct effect of the more technical character of statistics compared to political economy, which allowed for much tighter control of the field’s boundaries. It is difficult to imagine how, within the statistical field, scholars could have held unorthodox positions like those held within the field of political economy by corporatist theoreticians such as Gino Arias or Ugo Spirito (statisticians could of course adhere to such corporatist views, but they could do so precisely because their position within the field did not depend upon these ideas). It is even more difficult to imagine how political figures could have obtained positions as professors of statistics, as was the case with Giacomo Acerbo and, most of all, Giuseppe Bottai (the former was nominated to a chair in agrarian economy, the latter to a chair in corporative law, without any formal contest).5 If we wish to locate this generation with regard to the main periods of Italian history we may describe its members as reaching maturity on the eve of the Great War, to which, incidentally, they made a specific contribution. The importance of chairs in the structure of the field is due to the fact that they were very scarce: obtaining one was very difficult, involving taking part in the system of contests and promotions that led, through successive filters, to the selection of the candidate most

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Table 2.1: Chairs in statistics and kindred subjects, 1921–22 and 1937–38* 1921–22 Bari** Bologna Cagliari Camerino Catania Ferrara Florence Genoa Macerata Messina Milan Bocconi Milan Sacred Heart Milan State** Modena Naples Padua Palermo Pavia Perugia Pisa Rome

Sassari Siena Turin Trieste Urbino Venice

1937–38

Giovanni Battista Salvioni

Vincenzo Castrilli Raffaele D’Addario Felice Vinci

Aldo Contento

Giovanni Lasorsa**** Livio Livi

Costantino BrescianiTurroni Riccardo Bachi*** Franco Savorgnan Marcello Boldrini Giorgio Mortara Alfredo Niceforo Corrado Gini Fabrizio Natoli*** Francesco Coletti

Rodolfo Benini Giorgio Mortara

Filippo Virgilii Pasquale Jannaccone Livio Livi

Lanfranco Maroi***** Luigi Galvani**** Gaetano Pietra Paolo Fortunati

Corrado Gini Alfredo Niceforo**** Franco Savorgnan*****

Diego De Castro**** Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz**** Albino Uggè****

* In universities for which no name is provided, teaching of statistics was generally done by incaricati. It should be mentioned that another source (Giornale degli economisti 1922, 146–7) presented a list of “ordinary” and “extraordinary” professors holding chairs in economic subjects that added up to seventy names (rather than fifty-four), among which sixteen (rather than fourteen) held a chair in statistics. To the names appearing in the Annuario were thus added those of Livi (which we have chosen to include, given his position in the field), of Filadelfo Insolera (from Turin’s Superior Institute in Economic Science), and of Salvatore Ortu-Carboni (Genoa’s Superior Institute in Economic Science). The latter two, which we have chosen not to include, held chairs in financial mathematics (a subject located on the boundary of statistics and mathematics). ** The University of Bari was created in 1925; Milan’s Statale in 1924. *** Bachi and Natoli both held chairs in statistics and in political economy up to 1923–24. **** The chairs held by Lasorsa, Galvani, Niceforo, De Castro, Luzzatto Fegiz and Uggè were labeled as “methodological and economic statistics”. ***** The chairs held by Savorgnan and Maroi were labeled as “demography.”

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esteemed by his peers within a very restricted circle. The career of an Italian academic thus began by attempting to join first the ranks of the liberi docenti, who succeeded in achieving abilitazione and were therefore authorized to teach in a given discipline, then those of the incaricati, who, generally chosen from among the liberi docenti, were given a one-year teaching contract, and finally, those of professori di ruolo, who were considered worthy of the chair. They then spent three years at the rank of straordinario, and, after that waiting period and on the basis of a recommendation by a national commission of eminent professors, were finally given access to the status of ordinario (istat 1933, 45–59). The chair was thus the locus par excellence that provided a scholar with status, recognition, and a stable identity; in other words, it allowed the identification of an individual with a given discipline. But using the number of chairs or academic positions as the sole indicator of Italian statistics’ institutional development would mean neglecting its dynamic, which lay precisely in the creation or adaptation of a new model, that of the laboratory. One may conveniently choose 1910 as the starting point of the structuring process of Italian statistics, with the creation of a first laboratorio di statistica by Corrado Gini at the University of Cagliari, where, after having spent a year as incaricato, he had just been nominated to the chair of statistics. The teaching of statistics in the Italian university had up until then been an individualistic pursuit, an elegant humanistic and semi-literary venture, concerned with the problem of defining and locating oneself against the late nineteenth-century positivist challenge. By contrast, setting up a laboratory meant importing into the intellectual life of statistics the working methods and habits that were representative of the more established, harder sciences, driven by problem-solving rather than by foundational soul-searching. Thus, on the level of the organization and division of labour, it reproduced the technical-scientific turn that had been taken recently by the content of the discipline, with the appropriation of probability and correlation as well as the elaboration of a series of other methodological devices. With regard to Italian social science, there was a precedent: in 1893, the first Laboratorio di economia politica was set up by Salvatore Cognetti De Martiis in Turin, following a split within the Institute of Exercises in Juridical-Political Sciences; two students who were soon to become major figures of Italian political econ-

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omy, Pasquale Jannaccone and Luigi Einaudi, were introduced to scientific work in its womb. As mentioned by Faucci, “the fact of having chosen the denomination of laboratory for the new institute and of lodging it within the rooms given by Cesare Lombroso’s Pathology Laboratory and Legal Medicine Laboratory granted upon the whole enterprise a programmatic character” (Faucci 1982, 646). By comparison with individual effort, a laboratory where professors, assistants, and students were gathered allowed for a systematic division of labour, and could thus cope much more effectively with the labour-intensive character of empirical research, notably with the operations pertaining to the collection of data (even if they were secondary), their computation and their analysis. For instance, a number of studies conducted within the Cagliari laboratory of statistics, namely those of G. Dettori, F. Corridore, and E. Porru, were used by Gini as the testing grounds and empirical bases of his path-breaking early 1910s methodological contributions on variability and concentration (Variabilità e mutabilità [1912], Sulla misura della concentrazione e della variabilità dei caratteri [1914]) and of his pioneer work on national wealth (L’ammontare e la composizione della ricchezza delle nazioni [1914]). This conjunction of a now heavily quantitative, if not mathematical, content, typical of the sciences already enjoying a high degree of legitimacy, and an organization of labour that was also typical of these sciences, opened the way for the development of specific ways of doing things. The vision that statisticians who had already been won over to this new conception had of the advantages associated with the laboratory model is very plainly stated in a memorandum written by Francesco Coletti in 1915, with the purpose of promoting the creation of a “statistico-social” laboratory at Milan’s Bocconi University. At that time, Coletti held a statistics chair at the nearby University of Pavia. (As was the case for all professors at Bocconi, he was attached to that private institution on a contractual basis, whereas in the system of public [Royal or State] universities, professors were employed on a statutory basis and were therefore within a category of public servants.) He was well known for his research on agrarian economy and had significant fieldwork experience, having acted as general secretary of the commission of inquiry into the conditions of southern peasants (1907–11) and having also participated in the 1913 parliamentary inquiry on Northern Tripolitania

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(Magnarelli 1982). According to Coletti, the development of scientific research in Italy required that the teaching of statistics become “less verbal, less pedantic, more practical and more lively”. It had to be based upon a direct knowledge of sources and their criticism by students, as well as on the existence of seminars during which research results would be examined and debated, rather than taken on the professor’s word.6 Thus “second-hand mental habits”, which consisted, according to Coletti, in approaching facts only through the filter of what illustrious predecessors had said about them, could be eliminated. They would henceforth be replaced by new qualities, such as “the sense of observation” and “the statistical sense”. Once he had drawn the line vis-à-vis old-style professors of statistica, Coletti also established the boundary that would demarcate statistician from mathematician, if the former were to preserve his autonomy. Insisting on the statistician’s specificity in relation to the mathematician, who was not necessarily endowed with “statistical sense,” Coletti argued, on the basis of a logic that recalled the science/method opposition (statistics “being a method and not an end in itself,” its teaching could not be adequately dispensed by a mathematician), that the direction of the laboratory operations and of the teaching that was done there should always remain in the hands of the statistician, even if the mathematician could provide useful help. The fact that statistics as a discipline had gained its autonomy precisely by importing mathematical tools did not preclude that an opposition that would become a constitutive trait of the field – that between the statistician, who, however highly skilled he might be as a methodologist, always kept contact with concrete reality, and the mathematician, always suspected of preferring abstraction – would find its way into the division of practical labour within the laboratory.7 At more or less the same time, on the occasion of the contest held to replace Gini when he left Cagliari for Padua, Benini would convey this complex relation of statistics with mathematics in a simple manner. Weighing the candidacy of Pietra, who, as mentioned earlier, was a mathematician by training, he wrote in his personal notes: “To what degree should mathematical contributions be considered in a statistics contest? I would answer: they should be highly considered if the mathematician is at the same time a statistician. If not the case, they should not be considered. The mathematician who is not at the same time a statistician should expect what con-

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sideration he merits in mathematical contests and not in statistical contests” (acs 1912–16, b. 2).8 Finally, wrote Coletti, the existence of the laboratory and the nature of the work it would undertake were prone to interest rich industrial and commercial families and convince them to provide for the expenses incurred by maintaining up-to-date collections of primary sources, buying computing machines, etc. Given its modern character, the Università commerciale Luigi Bocconi, a “free” (i.e., privately owned) establishment created in 1902 and specializing in economic, commercial, and administrative subject matter, seemed the ideal place to host such a scientific endeavour. (The war would constrain Bocconi to refuse Coletti’s proposal for the time being, but a statistical laboratory would finally be set up there in 1921.) Taking up the celebrated chair in statistics at Padua University in 1914 (the first one to be created in Italy, it had been granted to Messedaglia in 1858), Gini brought with him the new laboratory model, setting up a Gabinetto di statistica, independent from that of geography, to which statistics had more or less been appended up to then.9 In 1921, the Gabinetto evolved into a more complex structure, a kind of expanded laboratory known as the Istituto di statistica, within which, besides Gini, Gaetano Pietra and Albino Uggè would play a leading part. The Institute, under Gini’s guidance, was provided with ample space, a well-stocked library, and a number of mechanical and electrical computing machines, “planimeters” and other devices: it became for a time “the innovating centre of statistics in Italy” (Pietra 1943, 316). Professors who already held a chair elsewhere, such as Marcello Boldrini, Vincenzo Castrilli, and Felice Vinci, would go there as liberi docenti (Colombo 2002, 114). The Institute would notably see the birth of two specialized periodicals: Metron, an international, multilingual journal (it ran articles in Italian, English, French, and German) whose object was statistical methodology, and Indici del Movimento Economico Italiano, devoted to economic statistics and the analysis of conjuncture. The Institute would receive, on a regular basis, financial support from the Confederazione generale dell’Industria Italiana (better known as Confindustria).10 The Padua Institute would also innovate with regard to the teaching of the discipline and its autonomization by setting up the Scuola di perfezionamento in statistica, where graduate students could devote an entire year to the study of statistics. Gaetano Pietra, who succeeded Gini as both

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holder of the Padua statistics chair and director of the Institute and the School, also taught at the University of Ferrara, where he established a Gabinetto di economia e statistica agraria during the second half of the 1920s. In 1935, the Padua Institute, in conjunction with the Statistics Institute that had just been created in Ferrara (under the leadership of Paolo Fortunati, a former pupil and assistant of Pietra and his successor at Ferrara), would also become the birthplace of a new periodical, the Supplemento Statistico to Nuovi Problemi di Politica Storia ed Economia. The Supplemento would evolve a few years later (1941) into Statistica, a fully autonomous journal placed under the editorship of Fortunati, who, after a few years in Palermo where he had set up a laboratory and then a statistical institute, had moved on to Bologna, where he became director of the university’s Statistics Institute (Melis 1997a; Bellettini 1980). Padua would also become, in 1939, the temporary seat of the all-new Società italiana di statistica (sis). After Gini’s departure for the University of Rome in 1925, entrepreneurial creativity, as well as Metron and the Indici, moved to the country’s capital. An Istituto di statistica e di politica economica was set up upon his arrival within the Faculty of Political Sciences, to be followed in 1927 by the creation of a Scuola di statistica, on the Padua model (istat 1931a). A Scuola di scienze statistiche ed attuariali having already been created in 1926 within the Faculty of Sciences under the leadership of mathematicians G. Castelnuovo and F. P. Cantelli and with the financial support of major Italian insurance firms, Gini’s Istituto became a meeting point for both schools until 1936, when they were merged into the new Faculty of statistical, demographical, and actuarial sciences, with Gini as president. Granting the status of a facoltà to such a recently emerged discipline undoubtedly came as an important symbolic acknowledgment. The Faculty’s capacity to mobilize resources is shown by the important “mecanographical” installation it received from ibm in 1938 – which, incidentally, would be requisitioned by the German armed forces during the occupation of Rome (Castellano 1956). The industrial (and authoritarian) character of the division of labour within this evolved form of the statistical laboratory is vividly conveyed by the following description, even if it belongs to a subsequent period (the early 1950s): “Gini’s assistants and other professors used to work in small glass boxes, fitted with a micro-

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phone that Gini could use to listen and talk, but the occupier of the box could only reply if spoken to” (Giorgi 1996, 8). The Institute and then the Faculty would host a variety of Gini’s ventures, most notably the Comitato italiano per gli studi dei problemi della popolazione (cisp), created in 1928, which would oversee a number of research projects in the areas of demography, ethnology, and biometry as well as an impressive editorial program, and would be acknowledged for a while as the Italian section of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (iussp). Gini’s advance from the periphery (Cagliari, then Padua) to the center (Rome) and the progressively complex structures of its various stages provide us with a general pattern that applies to the whole discipline. As a matter of fact, the laboratory/institute/school model was widely replicated in the immediate postwar period; the entrepreneurial attitude seems to have been typical of the whole generation of new statisticians rather than an individual trait. Livio Livi, who had moved from Cagliari (where he had been nominated in 1915 only to be drafted when Italy entered the war) to Modena in 1918, was offered the statistics chair at the University of Trieste in 1922, where he launched the Istituto statistico-economico. This institute, whose research had a primarily regional focus and described itself as an “observatory” of the northeastern Italian provinces that had remained under Austro-Hungarian domination until the postwar settlement, published a bimonthly Bollettino and enjoyed financial backing provided by various local businesses and organizations, such as the Istituto Federale di Credito per il Risorgimento delle Venezie and the Camere di Commercio Regionali, whose representatives sat on its council (Presidenza 1925, 2). Livi was also a founder and director of the journal Economia, whose existence lasted from 1923 to 1943. In 1926, Livi moved to Rome at Gini’s request. Gini, having just been chosen by Mussolini to head the new Istituto Centrale di Statistica (istat), wished for Livi to become the director of its research unit and created a position for him within the Faculty of Political Sciences. However, Livi soon entered into conflict with Gini and moved to Florence, where he became the director, from 1928 to 1936, of the Istituto Superiore di Scienze Sociali e Politiche “Cesare Alfieri”. Livi would play a leading part in Florence, where he acted as director of the statistics laboratory, and, soon after, of the Scuola di statistica. In 1933, the Florence School of Statistics became host to the Barometro

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Economico, a journal created in 1929 and in which Livi played a leading role. The transfer, in 1935–36, of the laboratory and school of statistics from the Law Faculty to that of Economy and Commerce allowed for a merger with the “statistical seminar” of professor Mario Marsili Libelli, a specialist on public finance (Parenti 1956, 219). In the following years, Livi set up a number of other research ventures, notably the Centro di consulenza e studio per la statistica aziendale (better known as the Centro di statistica aziendale [csa]), created in October 1935 and devoted to the study of business; the csa would regularly publish a number of statistical series on various aspects of the economy (wholesale prices, labour costs, etc.), as well as short-term economic forecasts and work dealing with the methodology of market research and, finally, from 1946 on, the monthly Index, devoted to business data (csa 1961). In 1937, Livi launched the Comitato di Consulenza per gli Studi Susla Popolazione (ccsp), which was meant as a counterweight to Gini’s own cisp in the area of population research, and would become the Italian section of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (iussp), which the cisp had left in 1931 over a political conflict (Livi Bacci 1974; Farcomeni 2005). In the aftermath of World War II, Livi was also among the founders of Doxa, the first Italian opinion survey institute, whose moving spirit was Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, who had become director of Trieste’s statistical institute after having been Livi’s assistant (acs 1924–54, b. 49; Rinauro 2002; Linda Rondini 2006). At Milan’s Bocconi University, the statistical laboratory was located for a while within the Istituto di economia politica, which had been created in 1920 under the provisional authority of Coletti, until Luigi Einaudi, who had by then become one of the most prominent Italian economists, took charge. When Einaudi retired in 1924, Giorgio Mortara succeeded him as head of the Institute, staying until 1933–34. A distinct statistical institute was then set up, of which he became director (acs 1940–70, b. 329; Borruso 1997, 213; Porta 1994, 431–3). Mortara, who had won the statistics chair at Messina in 1911 at the age of twenty-six before moving to Rome in 1915 and to Milan in 1924, had, since 1910, been the active force behind the Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica (the e rivista di statistica having been added to the journal’s title when he joined the editorial board, with the effect of enhancing statistics’ visibility and advertising this journal’s position at the junction of

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the fields of statistics and political economy), where he remained until 1938, when he was constrained to relinquish all his positions following the enactment of the anti-Jewish decrees. From 1921 to 1937, Mortara also published, under the auspices of the Institute of Political Economy and then of the Institute of Statistics, a celebrated yearbook on the state of international and Italian economy called Prospettive economiche, single-handedly filling a major gap in Italian official statistics. Mortara, who maintained very close links with industrial and banking circles (the Credito Italiano, for which Mortara acted as a consultant, gave the financial support necessary for the realization of the Prospettive), also coordinated, during the 1930s, a series of significant projects, among which were a history of the Italian electrical industry and various undertakings for the research units of the Banca d’Italia and the Banca Commerciale Italiana (Lenti 1967; Baffi 1967). At Milan’s Sacred Heart Catholic University, the statistics laboratory was set up by Marcello Boldrini, a former student of Coletti at the Bocconi and of Gini at Padua; a professor of statistics at the Catholic University from 1924 on (he was awarded the chair in 1928), Boldrini also taught demography at the Bocconi. From 1926 to 1939, his laboratory regularly published a number of monographs (six overall, among which three were by Boldrini himself) and collective undertakings (five series of the Contributi di laboratorio di statistica), devoted primarily to biometrical issues (acs 1940–70, b. 64; Locorotondo 1988). In 1932, a reorganization of the Catholic University resulted in the creation of a Faculty of Political, Economic, and Social Sciences, to which were attached a school and an institute of statistics, both under Boldrini’s authority (Porta 1994, 437–9). Felice Vinci, a former student of Costantino Bresciani in Palermo, was another significant scientific entrepreneur. After having been granted the statistics chair at the University of Bari, he moved to Ca’Foscari University in Venice in 1925, where for a while he headed the statistical laboratory (with Giovanni Lasorsa as assistant). In 1928 he went to Bologna, where he created the School of Statistics, and finally to Milan in 1940, where he took charge of the Statistical and Economic Sciences Institute. The author of highly praised textbooks (Statistica metodologica [1924], Manuale di statistica [2 vol.; 1934]), in 1929 Vinci launched, together with Alberto De Stefani, a new journal, the Rivista italiana di statistica (Lasorsa 1971; Buonpensiere 1990). Vincenzo Castrilli, who had

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also been trained in statistical research by Gini, moved from Padua to Ferrara, and from there to Palermo (where he was in charge of the Gabinetto di statistica) and then Bari, where, in 1927, he would create a statistical institute whose editorial output would reach no fewer than 22 volumes by 1943. In 1939, after working for a while at the Center for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris, Castrilli moved to Siena (where the chair in statistics had been held for many years by Filippo Virgilii, who, despite being the author of the most often reprinted statistical textbook, was not the entrepreneurial kind), where he also founded a statistics institute (Miani-Calabrese 1979). A final example: after having acted as Benini’s assistant in Rome for a while, and then teaching in Messina and Naples, Diego De Castro moved to Turin in 1932, where he set up a statistics institute in 1938. The success of the laboratory/institute model between 1910 and the fall of the Fascist regime was, overall, quite impressive. During that period, no fewer than fifteen universities hosted one or the other (or both). This was the case at Cagliari, Padua, Bocconi [Milan], Sacred Heart [Milan], Statale [Milan], Trieste, Venice, Rome, Bari, Genoa, Bologna, Siena, Ferrara, Palermo, and Turin. There were also, during the same time span, statistical schools set up in Padua, Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Milan. The epistemological status to which statistics had been elevated during the decade 1905–15 now lay on a sound institutional basis. The maps on the following page, which compare three states of the discipline’s development as regards teaching and research (for the same years we have already used for data concerning chairs), give us a fair idea of the field’s geographical-institutional expansion during that period.

an expanding field: statistics and its journals This greater visibility of statistics as a discipline and the mobilization of resources made possible by a division of labour based on the laboratory/institute model coincided, as can be expected, with an upheaval on the editorial scene. As regards academic statistics (by contrast with official statistics, which will be examined in the next chapter), the existence of a distinctive “statistical knowledge” became obvious indeed, from 1910 on, with an efflorescence of periodical publications, of statistical yearbooks (notably that edited

Figure 2.1: Chairs, laboratories, institutes and schools of statistics: 1900, 1922 and 1938 = Chair G = Laboratory or institute L = School

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from 1909 to 1921 by Riccardo Bachi under the title L’Italia economica. Annuario della vita commerciale, industriale, agraria, bancaria, finanziaria e della politica economica, which remains today a major source for the economic history of that era), of specialized series (for instance, those of the Comitato italiano per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione [cisp] or of Milan’s Sacred Heart University Laboratory of Statistics), of proceedings of scientific meetings (those of the Comitato di Consulenza per gli Studi sulla Popolazione [ccsp], of its successor body the Società italiana di demografia e statistica [sids], of the Società italiana di statistica [sis], …), etc. The following table enumerates all periodical statistical publications that were born during the period, together with the names of their editor(s), and, when relevant, of the laboratory, institute or learned society to which they were linked. Not included are those periodicals emanating from government statistics (which will be dealt with in the next chapter). Also not included – but deserving mention – are those journals that can be described as closely related to the field, somewhere at the crossroads of statistics and mathematics, such as the Giornale di matematica finanziaria, launched in 1920, under the editorship of F. Insolera and S. Ortu-Carboni and to which, among others, authors like Amoroso, Bresciani-Turroni, Cantelli, and Gini contributed, or the Giornale dell’Istituto italiano degli attuari, created in 1930 under the direction of Cantelli and to whose editorial board belonged notably Amoroso, Bonferroni, Castelnuovo, and Gini. As the sequence in table 2.2 shows, the field grew, over a span of some three decades, from nothing to more than a dozen periodical titles. In this process of ramification, however, one can detect a competitive logic, through which four distinct poles emerged around dominant personalities and distinctive institutional or geographical locations. Chronologically, the first pole to emerge was based in Milan, around Giorgio Mortara and the Giornale degli economisti, an organ endowed with a prestigious reputation. Indeed, the Giornale degli economisti (as well as the annual meetings of the sips’s section 14 to which it gave echo), while at the same time being a significant element in the specific institutionalization process of Italian political economy, had been a major locus for the discussion and dissemination of methodological developments such as the appropriation of probability and correlation or the definition of various concentration and variability indexes. Indeed, it was

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Table 2.2: Italian statistical periodicals, 1909–47 Periodical L’Italia economica, 1909 Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica, 1911* Metron, 1920

Editor(s)

C. Gini

Prospettive economiche, 1921 G. Mortara

Economia, 1923 Bollettino dell’Istituto statistico-economico, 1925 Contributi del Laboratorio di statistica, 1926

L. Livi P. Luzzatto Fegiz L. Livi M. Boldrini

Indici del movimento economico italiano, 1926**

C. Gini M. Saibante

Annali dell’Istituto di statistica, 1927 Il Barometro economico italiano, 1929 Rivista italiana di statistica, 1929***

V. Castrilli

Annali di statistica e di economia, 1933 Genus, 1934

Supplemento statistico a Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia, 1935 Statistica, 1941****

Index, 1946 Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica, 1947

Location and Parent body

R. Bachi G. Mortara

G. Colombo L. Livi F. Vinci L. Amoroso A. De Stefani F. Chessa C. Gini N. Federici

G. Pietra P. Fortunati P. Fortunati

L. Livi L. Livi A. Niceforo L. Maroi

Padua: Institute of Statistics, and later, Rome: Institute of Statistics and economic Policy Milan: Institute of Political Economy (later: Institute of Statistics) Trieste: Circle of Economic Studies Trieste: Statistical-Economic Institute Milan: Sacred Heart University’s Laboratory of Statistics Padua: Institute of Statistics, and later, Rome: Institute of Statistics and economic Policy Bari: Institute of statistics Florence: School of Statistics (from 1932) Bologna: School of Statistics

Genoa: Statistical-Economic Laboratory Rome: Institute of Statistics, and later Faculty of demographic, statistical and actuarial Sciences Padua and Ferrara: Institutes of Statistics Bologna, Padua, Ferrara, Palermo: Institutes of Statistics Società italiana di statistica Centre for Business Statistics Società italiana di demografia e statistica

* That year, the journal changed its name and claimed a statistical as well as economic character. The gders would become the Giornale degli economisti e Annali di economia in 1939. ** Title changed to La Vita economica italiana in 1931. *** Title changed to Rivista italiana di statistica, economia e finanza in 1932, and then to Rivista italiana di scienze economiche in 1934. **** Succeeded the previous title to become an autonomous journal.

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within its pages that, during the decade preceding the Great War, statistics had achieved disciplinary autonomy. From then on, the Giornale degli economisti presented itself also as a rivista di statistica and, with Mortara as direttore responsabile (a position he would hold for almost three decades and that gave him control over content), statistics now had more than its share of space within the journal’s pages. The index compiled on the occasion of the journal’s fiftieth anniversary listed around 10 per cent of its published material under the heading of theoretical and applied statistics. Besides, statistical figures and reasoning could be found in the bulk of papers classified under headings such as “demography” and “political economy” (Giornale degli economisti 1939). Mortara himself largely dominated the pages of his journal during that period with no fewer than 102 papers published between 1900 and 1938 (besides numerous reviews); he was followed by L. Amoroso (thirty-seven papers), C. Bresciani-Turroni (thirty-two), R. Benini (twenty-nine), A. Beneduce (fifteen), C. Gini (thirteen), M. Boldrini (twelve), and F. Vinci (eleven). With his Prospettive economiche, a yearbook devoted mainly to the survey of world markets in raw materials and food, and combining the presentation of statistical data with analytical commentary, Mortara located himself at the junction of statistics and political economy, with comparable peer recognition in both disciplines. No fewer than sixteen volumes of the Prospettive economiche were published between 1921 and 1937 (in 1935, publication was suspended because of economic sanctions). Yet, the Giornale remained the main forum for Italian economists, many of whom had unquestionable statistical skills. Many of those economists envisioned statistics as a specific tool that was strictly subordinate to a science whose theorems were independently and logically derived, but this was not the case with Mortara, whose frame of mind always remained primarily oriented towards induction. The primacy of economics over the Giornale was, however, practically and symbolically reasserted when, as a consequence of Mortara’s departure from Italy in 1938 following the enactment of anti-Jewish laws, the mention of statistics was dropped from the journal’s title, the journal itself was merged with Bocconi University’s Istituto di economia yearbook, which had existed since 1924, its name accordingly changed to the Giornale degli economisti e Annali di economia, and, finally, with Giovanni

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Demaria as its editor, it was transferred from the Institute of Statistics to that of economy (Romani 1999). A second pole may be identified with what may be called the Padua-Rome axis, with Gini as its central figure; around it revolves a whole family of periodicals (Metron [1920], Indici del movimento economico italiano [1926], Genus [1934], and Supplemento statistico/Statistica [1935/1941]) in which the panoptical and hegemonic ambition of methodological statistics is manifest. Endowed with a prestigious scientific board on which sat eminent foreign figures from government statistics (such as Lucien March [France], Armand Julin [Belgium], G. H. Knibbs [Australia], and Wilhelm Methorst [Netherlands]) as well as from academic statistics (such as Harald Westergaard [Denmark], Raymond Pearl [USA], and Major Greenwood [Britain], the sole Italian being mathematician F.P. Cantelli), Metron was from the start a truly international and therefore multilingual undertaking. In this, it was clearly distinct from other Italian economic or statistical journals. From 1920 to 1941, when publication was suspended due to the war, 41 per cent of the articles published were written in Italian, 28 per cent in English, 17 per cent in French, and 14 per cent in German; among the foreign authors, besides those who were members of the scientific board, were R.A. Fisher and A.L. Bowley from Britain, A.A. Tschuprow from Russia, and M. Fréchet from France, all luminaries in the discipline. Many Italian statisticians also contributed, of course, with variable frequency. During the same period, Gini came well ahead of the rest with thirty-two papers, followed by G. Pietra (nine), F. Savorgnan (eight), M. Boldrini (seven), L. Galvani (six), L. Livi (five), M. Saibante (four), B. de Finetti (four), and F. P. Cantelli (three); among eminent Italian figures were also C. BrescianiTurroni, A. de Pietri-Tonelli, P. Medolaghi, and F. Vinci. Conspicuous by their absence were Mortara and Amoroso, the dominant mathematical economist of that era. True to the journal’s program, the papers published covered an extensive range of subject matter, from pure statistical methodology to demography, biology, entomology, sociology, and economics, positing statistics as the fundamental grammar of living phenomena, a discipline that obviously transcended ordinary disciplinary boundaries. Indici del movimento economico italiano, which was published on a quarterly basis from 1926 to 1943 (in 1931, its title was

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changed to La Vita economica italiana, but the original one remained as a subtitle), was, by contrast, more narrowly focused on the problem of the quantitative description of economic phenomena. Published under the auspices of the Rome and Padua statistical institutes and thus under Gini’s and Pietra’s joint authority, the Indici were largely driven by Mario Saibante, a former student of both who also acted as editorial secretary for Metron. The development of index numbers was the journal’s main object and its pages were accordingly filled, for the most part, with tables and figures. The public aimed at, according to Gini’s explicit wish, besides statisticians and economists, included also those who might be designated the practitioners of the economy – that is, businessmen and public managers. The journal’s consulting board thus included representatives of the “political-bureaucratic-economic” world (National Council of Corporations, Ministry of Corporations, Bank of Italy) and of the private sector (Bank of Rome, National Fascist Confederation of Commerce). Compared with the Giornale degli economisti or Metron in which a diversity of authors contributed, Indici/La Vita was an homogeneous organ, prepared by a fairly small team. During the journal’s first five years, all papers were written by only six authors (Gini, Pietra, Saibante, A. Ancona, A. Degli Espinosa, and L. Meliadò); this circle was somewhat enlarged in the following years, but Saibante remained by far the most prolific contributor until 1940. Even if its scope was limited to Italy (and all papers were written in Italian), its editors presented their journal as one element within an international network of economic forecasters, whose foreign partners were the Harvard Economic Society, the Economic Service of London and Cambridge universities, and the Institut de statistique of the University of Paris. From 1931 on, articles on the international economic situation were regularly published, as well as communications from the economic services of various countries. Genus, launched in 1934 as the cisp’s official organ, was published twice a year, and it contained papers dealing with population problems, but with a clear statistical orientation. It was edited by Gini himself, assisted by Nora Federici, and its scientific council was built around a nucleus of Gini’s disciples: M. Boldrini from Milan, V. Castrilli, at that time in Siena, G. Ferrari from Modena, P. Fortunati from Bologna, and G. Pietra from Padua. Besides this hard core of statisticians, the council included a series of specialists

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from various biomedical disciplines: gynecology, physiology, pediatrics, pathology, etc. The extent of the territory covered by Genus, which incidentally coincided with that claimed by statistics, is well shown by its choice to publish reports about the cisp’s anthropological expeditions as well as the proceedings of the Società Italiana di Genetica ed Eugenica (1938) or of the Società Italiana di Sociologia (1942), both chaired by Gini and housed on the premises of the Rome Faculty of Demographic, Statistic and Actuarial Sciences. Statistica was another journal linked to the Gini pole. An avatar of the Supplemento statistico to Nuovi Problemi di Politica Storia ed Economia, its origins were overtly political. Nuovi Problemi, edited by journalist and historian Nello Quilici, was a journal written and read by a circle of Ferrara’s Fascist intellectuals close to Italo Balbo, among which were statisticians Paolo Fortunati and Gaetano Pietra, and it was dedicated to the study of problems related to corporatism and the Fascist state.11 Its statistical supplement was published four times a year from 1935 on, and represented, according to Fortunati, “the contribution of a group of scientists [for whom] quantitative methods were the most appropriate to deal with the new requirements, theoretical and non-theoretical”; it would thus seek to deal with “statistical methodology as well as applied statistics” (Fortunati 1935, 2). During the six years of its existence, the Supplemento had a small number of contributors: G. Pietra (eight articles) and P. Fortunati (five), who made up the nucleus in charge, M. Boldrini (three), G. Ferrari (six), B. de Finetti (eight), and, of course, Gini himself (three). When Nuovi Problemi ceased publication in 1940 following Quilici and Balbo’s deaths, “the autonomy and the scientific character” of the Supplemento evolved into a new journal, Statistica, whose editors, “open to the free collaboration of all those who carried on the study of scientific problems with the help of statistical logic”, claimed that they wished to “examine more deeply first and foremost the problems of corporative statistics, understood above all else as a new conception of science and of economic policy” (La Direzione 1940). Statistica would also inherit from the Supplemento its function as official organ of the Società italiana di statistica, whose links with the Gini group will be examined later. A third pole, along a Trieste-Florence axis, may be identified with Livio Livi, the dominant scientific figure of Economia, of the Trieste Statistical-Economic Institute’s Bollettino, of the Barometro

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economico italiano, and, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, of the Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica as well as of Index. Economia, which was depicted by its editors as a monthly journal in economic policy and social sciences, was launched by the Trieste Circolo di Studi Economici and was by far the least technical of all Italian statistical journals. Rather than a journal written by statisticians for statisticians or by economists for economists, as were Metron and the Giornale degli economisti, respectively, Economia was a channel through which, among authors from other disciplinary backgrounds, statisticians would express their views on various economic, demographic, and social policy matters. Around Livi, Economia regrouped as co-editors not only statisticians like Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, Livi’s successor at the University of Trieste, and Agostino Degli Espinosa (who was also, as we have seen, a regular contributor to the Indici), or corporatist theoretician Gino Arias, who taught economics at Genoa and then in Rome, but also individuals who were closely linked to the milieus of politics or bureaucracy, such as Fulvio Suvich and Enzo Casalini, both members of the Chamber of Deputies who held prominent political offices (they were respectively Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Finance and Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The mixed character of the journal’s board (by contrast with that, more scientific but at the same time more “monocratic,” of Gini’s or Mortara’s authority over their own journals) offers a clear indication of its function as a point of encounter between these different milieus. During the journal’s early years, for instance, one can find papers by Livi, Gini, Benini, and Ugo Giusti, dealing with emigration restriction and its effects, the Fascist regime’s policy of “ruralization,” optimum population, corporatist finance, housing policy, etc. To be sure, more theoretical or methodological articles were also regularly published. Thus, Benini wrote on index numbers, Amoroso on economic barometers or probability, Gini on the foundations of economic policy. Nevertheless, Economia’s towering figure was undoubtedly Livi who, between 1923 and 1940, published in its pages no fewer than 120 articles. The journal was also an important site for the discussion of demographic policy and a good many of the ideas contained in Livi’s major works on demography (to be published in the late 1930s and early 1940s) were first presented there. An examination of Economia’s subject index reveals that, in spite of its title, popula-

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tion and demography were the two themes to which the greater number of articles and research notes were dedicated.12 Economia’s role in the dissemination of statistical data was also important, as testified by Livi’s bimonthly review section of economic and demographic statistics. Il barometro economico italiano, a monthly publication launched in 1929 under the auspices of the Statistics School at the University of Florence, with Giorgio Colombo as its editor and L. Livi and A. Niceforo as scientific advisors, was, as its title suggests, a direct competitor of Gini and Saibante’s Indici. Gino Olivetti, a professor of corporative law at Turin and secretary general of Confindustria, also belonged to the scientific board, as did Enzo Casalini, who, as mentioned above, was also an editor of Economia. By comparison with the Indici, Barometro was from its beginnings open to all currents and practically all Italian statisticians of a certain status published in its pages at least once. It also contained numerous papers in French, written by eminent authors such as mathematicians Émile Borel and Maurice Fréchet or government statisticians Michel Huber and Lucien March. Like Economia and the Indici, Barometro was located at the junction between statistics, bureaucracy, politics, and business: besides those of statisticians, it welcomed papers from ministers (for instance, G. Jung [Finance] and G. Acerbo [Agriculture and Forests]), undersecretaries of state (including the above-mentioned Suvich), public managers (such as the heads of various industrial corporations), etc. As noted by G. Leti, closeness between Barometro and the regime was also evident, as with the presence of Mussolini quotations as epigraphs, the publication of a special issue dedicated to ‘Il Duce e la statistica’, etc. (Leti 1989, 35) The part played by Barometro in the structuring process of the statistical field is further enhanced by the fact that, in the first half of the 1930s, the debate about the constitution of a national society of statistics was conducted within its pages. However, Barometro was not the usual scholarly journal. It was in fact a whole set of publications. The main one was a two-part monthly, the first part being dedicated to the visual display of economic data (24 pages in 35 x 16.5 centimeters format, with large tables and figures in 70 x 100 format and captions in four languages: Italian, French, German, and English). The second part was devoted to regular articles (24 pages in 35 x 24.5 format). By comparison, once again with the Indici/La Vita, where figures remained

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sober and classical (they were essentially Cartesian diagrams), Barometro had a properly aesthetic dimension, which combined, in a spectacular fashion, graphical imagination with the austerity of numbers. Barometro also offered its subscribers Il barometro mondiale degli affari, twelve pages of tables and figures published on a monthly basis but with an international perspective, various series of periodical leaflets dealing with particular subjects (prices of goods, stock exchange), as well as the Guida per lo studio statistico dei fenomeni economici, prepared by Livi. In an enclosed publicity leaflet, Barometro promoted its own “technical bureau,” endowed with competent personnel, relevant documentation and computing machines, which offered its services to scholars, private or public enterprises who were in need of statistical-graphical material. Taken together, Barometro and the Indici offered a striking illustration – in the literal sense of the word – of the statisticians’ notion that economic phenomena could and should be understood in an inductive manner. In January 1946, the Centro per la statistica aziendale began publishing the new series of Index, a more modest venture described as an “information sheet” wishing to “put statistics at the service of the practical side of life” and aimed at the business community. In the context of reconstruction, Index developed a series of “barometric indexes of the economic market” and offered to enterprises that would support the Centre a service of “short-term forecasting” (publicity leaflet enclosed in the 10 March 1948 issue). The Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica would for its part be launched in 1947, as the official organ of the society with the same name (and whose creation will be described in the next section). With Livi, Niceforo, and Lanfranco Maroi as its editors, this journal located itself, as suggested by its encompassing title (three years later it would become the Rivista italiana di economia demografia e statistica), as an alternative, federating pole to Statistica, the organ of the “other” statistical society, identified with the Ginian group and its own conception of statistical methodology. Finally, a fourth, but much less potent, pole may be identified with Felice Vinci and Bologna. Presented by its editors as the sole journal “dedicated exclusively to statistics” and describing its competitors as “specialized in particular subfields of the discipline,” the Rivista italiana di statistica, launched in 1929, would, however, not intervene very much on the front of methodological statistics, in

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spite of its main editor’s unimpeachable record in this regard. The largely economic orientation of the journal would become rapidly manifest, with the publication of a quarterly update on the business cycle by Vinci (and later Silvio Vianelli), in the form of an economic barometer that brought together thirty-six series of data, from indexes of the volume of exchange to industrial wages to births and marriages. With the addition of Amoroso and Alberto De Stefani to the journal’s editorial board, the influence of economic orthodoxy became more evident, as testified by the evolution of its title: the journal “dedicated exclusively to statistics” would, in 1932, become the Rivista italiana di statistica, economia e finanza, and then again, two years later, the Rivista italiana di scienze economiche, the name it kept until it ceased publication in 1943. In 1938, on the occasion of the forced resignation of the co-editors of the Giornale degli economisti, Mortara and Gustavo Del Vecchio, Vinci proposed – without success – a merger of all scholarly economic journals within the latter, which would have come under the control of a society of economists chaired by De Stefani (Cattini et al. 1997, vol. II, 219–22; Zanni 1977). The Annali of the Bari Statistics Institute, initially launched by V. Castrilli and thus in Gini’s orbit, became more closely related to this fourth pole when Raffaele D’Addario took charge in 1936. While the seven initial volumes were mainly written by Castrilli himself with F.A. Rèpaci, a Padua economist specializing in public finance, and had strong empirical content (see Castrilli 1927, 1929, and 1932, as well as Rèpaci 1929, 1932, 1934a, and 1934b), D’Addario’s arrival indicated a turn to a much more analytical approach, with renewed interest in the famous Pareto curve (1936a, 1936b, 1936c, 1939, and 1940).

polarization and persecution At the end of the 1930s, two events were to have a major impact upon the history of the Italian statistical field. One was the enactment, on 15 November 1938, of the decree-law barring persons belonging to the “Jewish race” from employment in a series of professions, which constrained a certain number of statisticians to resign from their positions and, more often than not, to flee the country. The other was the creation, at nearly the same time (November 1938 and January 1939), of the Società italiana di demografia e statistica and the Società italiana di statistica, which

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would provide a formal institutional setting for some of the divisions and rivalries already present in the field, albeit only in an informal way. The first event represents the brutal intrusion into the field of completely exogenous criteria, while the second one was essentially a consequence of power relations internal to the field. However, in a context defined, on the one hand, by a deepening of the regime’s totalitarian character and, on the other, by a radical bipolarization of the statistical field, the chronological coincidence of these events invites a closer examination of the relations between them.

Two Bodies for a Single Science Debates about the creation of an Italian Society of Statistics can be traced back to the early 1930s. While in many countries comparable bodies had existed since the nineteenth century and had generally played an important role in the development of the discipline, Italian statisticians were gathered into the sips, which had been reanimated in 1907. The problems they were interested in could be addressed within two of its sections, that of “actuarial mathematics, mathematical statistics, and probability calculus” (section A2) or that of “economic and social sciences” (section 14). According to G. Leti, Gini’s resignation as president of istat and of the css in February 1932 may be “the contingent fact” that allowed for the start of a debate on this issue. Until then, the dominant position he had held within the field may have generated fears that such a learned society would become only one more of Gini’s multiple ventures (Leti 1989, 38–9). The first statistician who evoked the idea of creating an Italian Society of Statistics was indeed a member of the Gini circle, G. Pietra, and he did it in the context of a debate on the future of the International Institute of Statistics (iis). According to Pietra, the iis, which was then (and has essentially remained since) a private association composed of individuals chosen by their peers, should transform itself into a federation of national statistical societies, on the model of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (iussp) and its national committees. But this suggestion did not meet with much support and it was only three years later that a real debate took place. In 1935, Guglielmo Tagliacarne, writing in the Barometro economico, launched a formal appeal under the title “Per una Società Italiana di Statistica.”

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Tagliacarne, who had worked under Gini at istat during the second half of the 1920s, was now a libero docente at the University of Milan and acted as a scientific counsel for Milanese merchants’ associations. He argued that regular meetings of statisticians, on the model of the British Royal Statistical Society, would enhance the discipline’s development and prestige and help coordinate the efforts of its practitioners. Even though he was a bit vague on this issue, he also hoped that such a society, notwithstanding its “private character,” would maintain “close links” with government statistics (Tagliacarne 1935, 241). The journal’s editor, G. Colombo, wrote a personal letter to its most prestigious subscribers, asking for their opinion on Tagliacarne’s appeal.13 During the five following months, no fewer than eighty-eight of them made their views known within the columns of the Barometro. They included mostly professors of statistics, many economists, statisticians working in the private sector, top civil servants, a number of public or private managers, and a few deputies and senators.14 Taking note of this, the editors of the journal underlined the vast response Tagliacarne’s appeal had generated among “producers and consumers of statistics” and expressed their satisfaction at what they described as “the result of the referendum.” They concluded that, given the scarcity and weak character of the objections and doubts that were expressed, “this plebiscite of approbation would translate it, at the right moment, into a totalitarian adhesion” (Leti 1989, 49; using “totalitarian” here when “unanimous” would have been convenient is a conspicuous expression of the growing political conformity and its effect on ordinary language by the mid-1930s).” If, indeed, more than 75 per cent of participants in the debate had agreed explicitly with the idea of creating such a society, some of the objections were, however, very strongly expressed and came from people who held positions of authority within the field. Among them were Gini, Benini, and Cantelli, who all declared that such a project was premature and that the format of the annual sips meetings allowed for precisely the kind of scientific exchange Tagliacarne had called for. Interestingly, Gini mentioned that national societies of statistics were present in countries where scientific activity was largely concentrated in a metropolis, which was the case in Britain, France, and the United States. In Italy, scientific activity and statistical studies were on the contrary dispersed all along the peninsula and on the islands, a situation that had incon-

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veniences but also advantages (Barometro economico italiano, no. 72, June 1935, 295–6). There was a geographical configuration of the field that resulted from the country’s political, economic, and cultural history. With two large “capitals,” Rome and Milan, one political and one economic; with the division between north and south; and with the cultural weight of cities such as Turin, Venice, Florence, Bologna, Pisa or even Trieste before political unification, the persistence of polycentrism was in no way surprising. As a result of geographical dispersion, participation in meetings was costly, a problem from which the sips already suffered (economists had also chosen not to create their own scientific body precisely for that reason, wrote Gini). Furthermore, Gini expressed doubts about the nature of the links that such a scientific body should maintain with government statistics (which he had left in 1932, as we have seen.) This seemed to him contrary to the necessary independence of scientists, whose duty was precisely to “discuss freely about official inquiries.” But it was also possibly embarrassing for istat, if it had “to publish in its official documents … the discussions and eventual criticisms which it may be subjected to” (ibid.). Benini, who had by then become the dean of Italian statisticians, as well as mathematicians F. P. Cantelli and Bruno de Finetti, went along with this analysis. This attitude was understandable, since Gini was, among Italian statisticians, the one most involved in the organization of sips meetings. From 1907 to 1939, he acted six times as section chairman or member of the scientific committee, while Benini and Cantelli, two other opponents of Tagliacarne’s project, held these positions respectively four and three times.15 At the 1939 centennial meeting of the sips, Gini had total control over section A2 (actuarial mathematics, mathematical statistics, and probability calculus), in which only his allies and disciples would intervene, giving an image of the discipline that conformed to his own vision.16 From the interventions made by statisticians who were in favour of Tagliacarne’s proposal, however, emerges a very different image of the statistical field. Some did not hesitate to raise concerns about the “peculiarities” of certain persons, groups, or schools, and about the “monopoly” these might try to obtain. Valentino Dore, who was head of the International Agricultural Institute’s statistical service, deplored the tendency “to assemble into restricted chapels, suspicious and jealous of each other”; Diego De Castro, a professor in Turin, wrote for his part that statisticians were not so much

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divided into schools, which would suppose a certain number of “objective differences,” as into small groups based essentially upon subjective differences “that do not allow for the fruitful bringing together of ideas in the interest of science.”17 In order to avoid domination by some, Livi proposed that the president of the society be elected for two years, without the possibility of two consecutive mandates (Barometro economico italiano, no. 72, June 1935, 295–6, 301). Among the most negative and virulent reactions (and in which a political subtext can easily be detected), we should mention that of Epicarmo Corbino, already cited in the preceding chapter. According to the Neapolitan economist, “the public in general has never believed, does not believe and will never believe in the utility of statistics and all efforts to change this impression are doomed because the public thinks that the statistics presented to him are either false or incomplete, and in all cases unacceptable”; a statistical society “would not change this fact in any way and would therefore be useless” (ibid., 300–1). Beyond the division between those against or in favour of the creation of such a statistical society, one may, however, extract a series of dual positions regarding its eventual membership (should it be restricted to the scientific element or opened to all “practitioners” of statistics?), its goals (were they purely scientific or concerned with the resolution of practical problems?), and its autonomy (should such a body be rigorously independent or should it be closely linked to official statistics?). Even if the bipolarization that occurred in 1938–39 did not fit perfectly the positions taken by individuals in 1935, it would nevertheless exhibit a very clear continuity. It was Livio Livi who, in February 1937, took the initiative and created, in Florence, a Comitato di Consulenza per gli Studi sulla Popolazione (ccsp), which immediately took up the place left empty within the iussp by the earlier withdrawal of Gini’s cisp, and took part in the Paris International Conference that same year. The ccsp, whose work would deal mainly, as its name indicated, with problems related to demographic policy, brought together from the start more than thirty statisticians and economists. Eight of the ccsp’s members were colleagues of Livi at the University of Florence (among them C. E. Bonferroni, M. Marsili-Libelli, and G. Parenti18), but there were also people from the universities of Rome (L. Amoroso and A. Niceforo), Bari (R. D’Addario, who was at that time head of its Statistics Institute), and Bologna (F. Vinci and economist

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G. Del Vecchio), as well as the two leading officers of istat (its director general A. Molinari and its president F. Savorgnan). G. Tagliacarne, who had launched the debate in the Barometro, also joined, as did F. Coletti, L. Maroi, F. Virgilii, and G. Zingali. The ccsp thus enjoyed, from its beginnings, very strong legitimacy, with six (and very soon nine) out of the seventeen holders of chairs of statistics. In addition, seven of its founding members belonged to the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica, the advisory body that oversaw the activities of government statistics. After only three scientific meetings held over a short period of time (in Rome in January, in Florence in April, and in Bologna in November 1938), it was proposed that the bases of the group be enlarged in order to create a Società italiana di demografia e statistica (sids), whose object, according to article 1 of its statutes, was to contribute “to the progress of demographic and statistical studies, with special attention to the qualitative and quantitative progress of the Italian population” (Società italiana di demografia e statistica 1939).19 The sids was officially acknowledged by a royal decree dated 29 June 1939, and other eminent figures then chose to join, among whom were R. Benini, A. De Stefani, and P. Jannaccone; in fact, the initial membership of the sids was four times that of the original ccsp. Livi acted as president until 1941, to be succeeded by Vinci, who remained in this position until the regime’s fall (1943). The sids held two public meetings during its first year of official existence (in Rome in April and in Naples in December 1939); once Italy joined the war, other scientific meetings took place (in Rome in July and in Florence in December 1940, in Rome again in April 1941, and in Milan in January 1942); because of the military situation, another one that was due to take place in Rome in 1943 was cancelled. Activities of the sids, whose presidency was entrusted to F. Savorgnan from 1943 to 1945, did not cease altogether, since communications that had been prepared in view of the 1943 meeting were published the following year. As regards relations with official statistics, which was one of the issues of the 1935 debate, the sids and istat were indeed very close, as a result of Savorgnan’s and Molinari’s adhesion; moreover, in the aftermath of World War II, Maroi would almost simultaneously be nominated as president of both the sids and istat.20 The creation, on 15 January 1939 of the Società italiana di statistica (sis) – barely two months after that of the sids – was, for all intents and purposes, as noted by Leti, the response of statisti-

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cians gathered around Gini to Livi’s gesture (1989, 73).21 Even if the former’s name did not appear on the list of the sis’s initial promoters, it contained those of Pietra (who would act as the first sis president), Boldrini (vice-president), Castrilli (secretary general), Fortunati, Galvani, Medolaghi, de Finetti, de Polzer, Ferrari, Federici, Uggè, and Saibante, who were all directly or indirectly related to Gini. Once the sis was officially established, many others would join, among whom were mathematician F.P. Cantelli (initially opposed, as Gini was, to the creation of such a body). The sis, for which it was imperative, in a regime where organic unity was the proclaimed norm, to distinguish itself from its rival, specified in article 1 of its statutes that its object was “to develop scientific research in the field of statistical disciplines with special attention to methodological statistics.” Furthermore, article 7 provided that the president and vice-president were obliged to take the loyalty oath to the King and the Fascist regime (sis statutes were published as an appendix to Pietra 1939b). The keynote speech made on the occasion of the sis’s first meeting, held in Pisa in October 1939, would become a landmark in the history of Italian statistics and leave on the sis the symbolic imprint of Gini and his views (he would become its second president in 1941). Entitled “The Dangers of Statistics,” its stated intent was to re-examine the foundations of statistics in reaction to “Anglo-Saxon” mathematical statistics, a more “abstract” – and less political – program than that of its rival (Gini 1939c). The sis’s activities were more frequent than those of the sids. It held no fewer than seven scientific meetings between October 1939 and June 1943, but they would all take place, save for the first one, in the country’s capital. The sis also enjoyed from the start the presence of an official organ, with the Supplemento statistico, soon to become Statistica; by contrast, the sids did not launch its own journal, the Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica, until 1947. A comparative examination of the list of the ccsp’s founding members and of the sis’s initial promoters (table 2.3) strikingly shows the alignment that occurred at that time. While the ccsp gathered seven active chair holders (ordinari) in political economy (L. Amoroso and G. Arias from Rome; G. Del Vecchio from Bologna; G. Lorenzoni, M. Marsili-Libelli, and J. Mazzei, all three from Florence; G. Zingali, who had moved from his chair in statistics to one in public finance in 1936) against six chair holders in

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Table 2.3: Chair holders within the initial nuclei of the ccsp (1938) and the sis (1939) Discipline Statistics

Political economy

Mathematics

CCSP

SIS

Livi (Florence), Bachi (Genoa – Straordinario) Coletti (Pavia - Emerito), D’Addario (Bari – S), De Castro (Turin – S) Lasorsa (Catania – S) Luzzatto Fegiz (Trieste) Maroi (Naples) Niceforo (Rome) Savorgnan (Rome) Vinci (Bologna) Virgilii (Siena – E) Amoroso (Rome) Arias (Rome) Del Vecchio (Bologna) Lorenzoni (Florence) Marsili-Libelli (Florence) Mazzei (Florence) Dalla Volta (Florence – E) Zingali (Catania) Bonferroni (Florence)

Boldrini (Milan) Castrilli (Siena) Fortunati (Palermo) Galvani (Naples) Pietra (Padua) Uggè (Venice)

Papi (Rome) Rèpaci (Padua)

Medolaghi (Rome) Picone (Rome)

Note: The initial nuclei also included a number of incaricati or liberi docenti who already held significant positions in the field or were on their way to brilliant careers: U. Giusti, G. Tagliacarne, L. Lenti, G. Parenti, and S. Somogyi belonged to the ccps; B. de Finetti, A. de Polzer, N. Federici, G. Ferrari, and many others to the sis.

statistics or demography of the same rank and four straordinari just about to become ordinari, to which we may also add two “emeriti” (Coletti and Virgilii), the sis had only two professors of political economy (U. Papi and F. Rèpaci) but six professors of statistics (to which we should also add Gini, who remained quietly in the background). This stronger cohesion of the sis, which corresponded to its methodological orientation, may also be read as a sign of its lesser development compared to its rival, a weakness partly compensated by the inclusion within its founding nucleus of statisticians from extra-academic circles that were likely to provide resources. Links were thus established with Confindustria, through M. Saibante and G. Dettori; with the Associazione delle Società per Azioni, through Francesco Coppola d’Anna; with the Bank of Italy, where Paolo Baffi, Alberto Campolongo, and Agostino De Vita formed the core of the Ufficio studi; with the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche,

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represented by its vice-president Amedeo Giannini, etc. Even if rapid growth in membership would make this division less obvious, it is clear that the respective orientations of the sids and sis were in line with the views of their dominant personalities. In conformity with article 1 of its statutes, statistica metodologica was the main focus of the sis scientific meetings (fifty-five of the 145 communications read on the occasion of the seven meetings held between 1939 and 1943 were identified as falling within this compass), while those presented at the sids meetings had a far more applied character – for instance, the fifth meeting was largely devoted to labour statistics, the seventh to insurance statistics, the eighth to economic and demographic problems of the Mediterranean area (Società Italiana di Statistica 1964; Società Italiana di Demografia e Statistica 1947). In his own opus magnum, published at that time, Livi insisted, in opposition to Gini, on the autonomy of demography vis-à-vis demographic statistics, to which the former should not be reduced; political institutions, the law, historical events, the state, culture, etc. were also, besides statistical data on population, sources that could be used for the understanding of demographic phenomena (Livi 1941a, 2–3). In its own denomination, the sids symbolically asserted this autonomy of demography and its refusal to establish a hierarchy between statistics and other disciplines; in 1950 the sids would become, in conformity with its composition, the Società italiana di economia demografia e statistica (sieds) and its journal’s title would accordingly be changed to Rivista italiana di economia demografia e statistica. By contrast, demographic and economic statistics were only two subsections within the subjects dealt with at sis meetings. If we move back to the alternatives that had structured the debate conducted in the pages of the Barometro (selectiveness or openness as regards members of a statistical society, or “pure” statisticians vs. practitioners; its scientific objectives, methodological development vs. the resolution of practical problems; and its relations with its environment, i.e., rigorous independence vs. organic links with official statistics), it becomes quite clear that, on each of these aspects, the sis was more in line with the first alternative and the ccsp/sids with the second.

Racial Laws and The Statistical Field Although the initial studies devoted to Fascism’s racial policies (which included, besides the anti-Jewish laws, a number of

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measures regarding colonial populations) and, more specifically, to official anti-Semitism during the last years of the regime, have rightly insisted on their somewhat unexpected and opportunistic character, it is now quite clear that both could rely, at least in the scientific community, on a considerable body of work that extended to the turn of the twentieth century.22 Doctors, eugenicists, biologists, demographers, anthropologists, and above all statisticians were significantly involved in the development of research that could easily become instrumental to the legitimization of xenophobia, of fears relative to interbreeding or of imperialism towards so-called inferior peoples (Maiocchi 1999; Cassata 2006a). Alfredo Niceforo was undoubtedly a pioneer in this regard. His early studies on criminality rested upon the hypothesis of an Italian nation made up of two distinctive races (a southern one, of a Mediterranean or Latin type, and a Northern one, of an Aryan or Germanic ascendancy), the existence of which he “demonstrated” statistically, thanks to a huge array of tables and diagrams (1901). But the most complex theoretical construct in support of Fascism’s demographic policies and colonial expansion is to be found in Gini’s neoorganicism, which assimilated nations to living organisms and drew a distinction between “young” and “aging” peoples (see 1930b and 1931a, published at a time when Fascist demographic policy had been largely defined and Gini’s position within Italian statistics had reached its zenith).23 Yet, in spite of nuances as well as theoretical and methodological disagreements, comparable if not stronger support for Fascism’s population policies could be found in the contributions of Livi and Vinci, who both commented abundantly on Fascist demographic policy (in Economia alone, the former published dozens of papers on this subject; the latter’s writings on the same issue have been collected in Vinci 1939). Also highly significant in this regard were the biometrical studies of Boldrini, who was himself close to the Italian school of “constitutionalist” or “orthogenic” medicine, founded upon the hypothesis of a “biotypological” classification and closely identified with the person of Dr. Nicola Pende, one of the central figures of Italian eugenics. Constitutionalist medicine strove for “race betterment” through a better adjustment between the individual and his environment. Boldrini’s contribution was to give this hypothesis a statistical basis by examining, for instance, correlations between anthropometric characteristics and psychological tendencies (volume III of the

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Trattato elementare di statistica [Biometria e antropometria], written by Boldrini, which contained chapters devoted to races and human “types,” was a provisional synthesis of his work in this regard). As much can be said of the work conducted by statisticians Pietro Battara, Savorgnan, Maroi, Uggè, or Fortunati, and even in that of future victims of state anti-Semitism, such as Mortara and Roberto Bachi.24 The deployment of anti-Jewish provisions therefore seems consonant with a scientific culture in which racial categories, even if they did not always correspond to types defined by strictly biological criteria, were part of a familiar panorama. Yet the sudden and comprehensive character of persecution, from which even faithful supporters of the regime were not exempt if they fell under the official definition of a Jew, was a surprise. Thus, Livi’s ccsp, which had been set up about eighteen months before the enactment of anti-Jewish decrees and yearned to be acknowledged, in competition with Gini’s cisp, as the scientific authority on demographic policy, included five members of Jewish origin who were therefore constrained to renounce their positions. Gino Arias, a major theoretician of corporatism and a professor at the University of Rome, would leave for Argentina, where he died in 1940. Roberto Bachi, a professor of statistics at Genoa, left for Palestine, where he became, in 1948, the first director of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Riccardo Dalla Volta, an emeritus professor and former president of Florence University who had been active in the the sips meetings of the early 1900s, was deported during the war and died in Auschwitz on 10 April 1944 at the age of eighty-one (Giva 1986). Gustavo Del Vecchio, co-editor of the Giornale degli economisti, took refuge in Switzerland during the German occupation and, after having acted as director of the commission for the statistical assessment of war damages (1945), minister of Reconstruction (1945) and minister of the Treasury (1947–48), would recover an academic chair in Rome in 1948. Stefano Somogyi, a libero docente who had worked for istat, lost his position in December 1939 (he would obtain a chair in statistics in Florence in 1948). According to a list published in the Popolo d’Italia on 13 October 1938, among the ninety-seven full professors who were ousted from the university following the already-mentioned decree-law, one also finds the names of Giorgio Mortara, who left Italy for Brazil, where he remained for two decades before accepting a chair in Rome in

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1956–57, and Riccardo Bachi,25 Roberto’s father, who also went to Palestine but came back to Rome in 1946. Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, who was professor of statistics and director of the Statistics Institute at the University of Trieste, also ran into problems; he had sent a personal letter to Mussolini in which he denounced the antiJewish decrees, and was submitted to “checking” procedures because of his father’s Jewish origin, but he finally managed to keep his chair. (Luzzatto Fegiz was, however, expelled from the Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista on the basis of race; for a detailed account, Rinauro 2002, ch. 3). A certain number of economists and mathematicians whose trajectory had intersected with the statistical field were also victims of persecution. Such was the case of economist Achille Loria, of Marco Fanno, from the University of Padua, whose work dealt with the theory of international commerce and economic development, and of Guido Castelnuovo, the great probability theoretician, who had already retired in 1938 and yet was expelled from the academies and scientific bodies to which he belonged and barred from libraries, as were 537 other Italian scientists and intellectuals enumerated as Jews (Israel and Nastasi 1998; Capistro 2002; Finzi 1997). The sudden and brutal character of this academic purge can be vividly illustrated by the following story: on 10 May 1938, minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai approved Roberto Bachi’s nomination to the rank of ordinary professor; on 30 November of the same year, making use of the euphemistic and aseptic language of bureaucracy, he approved Bachi’s dismissal, because of “the conditions in which he is now, in conformity with the quoted decree R.D.L. 17 November 1938/xvii, n. 1728, art. 8, comma I, lett. a, as attested by the appended copy of the form signed by the involved.” Yet, gruesome irony apparently had no limits: on 8 August 1938, the chief of cabinet of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers ordered that a payment in the amount of 400 lit be sent to Roberto Bachi, as an allowance on the birth of his first child, in conformity with Fascism’s policy of encouragement of procreation. On 25 August, Minister Bottai gave the order to block any further such allowance to persons who did not belong to the “Italian race,” and accordingly, on 20 September, the cabinet of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers asked that the premium be sent back (acs 1940–70, b. 26).26 On the other hand, many statisticians from the ccsp, which had become in the meantime the sids, would lend their names and their

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pens to persecution, if not always willingly. F. Savorgnan was thus one of the ten signatories of the Manifesto of Racist Scientists (and the sole statistician among them). This document, whose publication was a turning point in the anti-Jewish press campaign that had gone on for a few months, was first published anonymously on page one of the 14 July 1938 issue of the Giornale d’Italia, under the title “ Il fascismo e i problemi della razza.” It summarily presented ten peculiarly radical theses: the existence of races was described therein as (1) a “material fact” (2) allowing for a hierarchical ordering of human groups, and (3) whose foundation was “purely biological.” The Italian population was described as (4) belonging to the “Aryan type” (5) since it was descended from families installed in Italy “for at least a millennium,” and (6) it now constituted a “pure race”; consequently, Italians should (7) proclaim themselves “racist,” and (8) draw a clear distinction between, “on the one hand, European Mediterraneans (Occidentals), and, on the other hand, Orientals and Africans,” and (9) acknowledge that “Jews do not belong to the Italian race,” and (10) oppose any interbreeding that could alter “the physical and psychological characteristics of Italians.” It seems that this text, whose content and biological leaning were much more radical than anything most Italian scientists engaged in demographic or “racial” research would have normally subscribed to, was largely due to Mussolini himself.27 On 25 July, ten days after the manifesto’s publication, a communiqué originating from the National Fascist Party’s secretariat gave the names of ten scientists who were described as its authors: the group was in itself a curious mixture. Savorgnan’s presence was probably due to his official position as president of istat; in fact, the manifesto’s “signatories … were not, on the whole, especially endowed with scientific prestige, nor could they be catalogued, from an ideological point of view, among the most convinced racists” (Maiocchi 1999, 229). Soon after that, Livi and Savorgnan were nominated to the Consiglio superiore della demografia e razza, a body that was created by a decree-law on 5 September 1938, with the object of advising the minister of the Interior on such matters (Regio Decreto Legge 1938). In addition, the ccsp/sids would collaborate with the Ufficio Demografico Centrale, soon to be renamed the Direzione generale della demografia e della razza (known mostly by the abbreviation Demorazza). On the occasion of the sids’s fourth

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meeting, held in Rome in May 1939, Livi mentioned, in his introductory address, that the Ministry of the Interior and the General Directorate for Demography and Race had not only “supported with sympathy” the creation of the new statistical society, but had also been willing to “entrust it with specific inquiries.” He added, “and today, we have the satisfaction of having completed a graphical and cartographical document that fully meets the ends of (these bodies’) practical activity.” (Società italiana di demografia e statistica, 1940, 11). According to A. Treves, while their work had up until then been conducted in a manner somewhat parallel to the regime’s demographic policies (approving them, defending them, but developing research that sometimes showed these policies’ limited success if not their inanity), for the first time scientists would assume “a role in the preparation, elaboration, and management of demographic policy” (2003, 188). It was in fact under the administrative authority of Demorazza and with the collaboration of istat that a census of Jews was hastily accomplished by the end of 1938 (Ipsen 1996, 191). And while most journals of statistics or of political economy proceeded discreetly with their “Aryanization,” this was not the case with Economia. It underwent a change of editors, Arias having to leave and Enzo Casalini becoming sole editor; the council of the publishing society Economia transferred the journal’s ownership to him until Livi was reinstated to the board of directors in January 1939. But, more significantly, it was also the scene of a remarkable editorial comment by Livi, in support of anti-Jewish policy. Livi, who himself had to account for the suspicious origin of his family name on the occasion of the census of members of scientific academies,28 declared in the introduction of his paper that he wished to answer the criticisms that were addressed by democratic countries, and especially from the United States, against “the Regime’s racist policy, which seeks to put consciousness of a common ethnic origin as the basis of our national unity” (1938a, 153). He started by delivering a severe attack on the restrictive character of American immigration policy that he – rightly – described as racist; by the same token, he also challenged the “racism” of those who opposed the xenophobic fears that had led to such a policy by invoking the successful emergence of a “new American racial type” (a position Livi ascribed to anthropologist Franz Boas), by “exalting the original characteristics of immigrant types and their inter-

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breeding” and by arguing for the selective character of emigration, which favoured those who were “strong,” “sane,” “enterprising,” and “bold” (153–4; Gini’s similar views seem to be an indirect target of these remarks). In spite of reservations he had expressed a short while before regarding biological racism (see 1937b where he expressed clear reluctance regarding what he called “racist ethics” and the “dogmatic character” of certain authors regarding the issue of race), Livi then recalled his own previous work in order to sustain the notion, against those who argued that Jews “had become very similar, from a racial point of view, to the populations in the midst of which they lived,” of the millennial existence of a “Jewish race”: according to his anthropometric calculations, “blond Jewish types” were more separate from “Christian types” than from “brown Jewish types” (1938a, 156–7; according to Treves, the target of these remarks was, once again, Gini [2001, 329]). The study on which Livi relied here was his 1918 Gli Ebrei alla luce della statistica, which was devoted to “the anthropological and pathological characteristics and the ethnic individuality of Jews” – although it had been written in a thoroughly different context and could in no way be described as anti-Semitic, it seems to have been used by anti-Semitic propagandists in the 1930s (Maiocchi 2004, 30). The final part of the 1938 paper focused on the danger posed by “the high influx of foreign Jews” that Italy had been subjected to in the immediate aftermath of the war (the number Livi gave was 7,000); now, given the rise of National Socialism and the 1938 Anschluss, these foreign Jews were for the most part “irreducible enemies of Fascism” and one may understand why, in this context, “extirpation measures” had to been taken against them (Livi 1938a, 157–9; he relied here on his own intervention on the occasion of the International Congress on Population, held in Rome in 1931). The peculiarly committed character of Livi’s intervention may have been due to the profile of the organ to which he had provided intellectual guidance to since 1923 – Economia had a more “political,” and thus less scientific, orientation than other statistical journals – but it surely stands as a significant case of statistics becoming an instrument for the most sinister purposes. Even if the sis may have seemed less exposed than the sids, given its more purely scientific inclination and its proclaimed independence from the bodies in charge of managing population policies, there is not a single instance of clear opposition to official anti-

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Semitism on the part of any of its members. Thus, Gini defended the regime’s demographic policy up until its fall, while never committing himself explicitly on the issue of anti-Semitism; in a conference he gave in Pisa in May 1942, he evoked the “excessive attitudes,” the “exaggerations,” and the “aberrations” that went hand in hand with any revolution, and had revealed themselves notably on the matter of “racism” (1942c, 223). As regards the “Aryanization” of Metron, Gini declared after the war that he had refused to eliminate Jewish members from the editorial committee and had thus decided to suppress the committee altogether.29 Others were much less cautious. For instance, Pietra wrote in 1939, “Today, with the affirmation of Fascism’s racist policy, racial problems impose themselves upon the statisticians’ speculation” (1939a, 84). On a more practical level, Pietra was elevated to the presidency of Padua’s Faculty of Political Sciences following the dismissal of his Jewish colleague Donato Donati, with whom he had recently co-edited a series of monographs on private wealth in the Venetian region. Pietra embraced, as did his colleague Giovanni Ferrari, the teaching of this new subject called “racial demography”; he also took part in the organization of a “racial exhibition” jointly sponsored by the university and by the Institute of Fascist Culture. He even contemplated the project of confiscating Jewish landed property in favour of poor peasants: “Certainly, the new situation of the province’s landed property following the racial measures adopted by the Fascist government – we can presume that 40 per cent of land and farms are in the hands of Jews – will provide the labouring classes with the most adequate forms for their necessary social rise” (Pietra 1938, xix; on Pietra’s role regarding the racial laws, see Ventura 1995). Nora Federici, who was assistant to Gini and chief editor of Genus, took charge of a course on “population development and racial policy” at the University of Rome, and in 1941 published a textbook, prefaced by Gini, in which she celebrated Fascism’s demographic policy, offering a precise and detailed account of its racist dimensions. The usefulness of racist measures was justified by Federici first and foremost on a political level (in terms close to those employed by Livi in his Economia paper) as the answer to the “spiritual disintegration” of the national community that resulted from the presence of “individualistic” elements that were incapable of “experiencing the national ideals” and were naturally driven

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towards “idealities of an internationalist color” (Federici 1941, 134). After having described the whole set of measures that made up Italian demographic policy and notably those bearing upon Jews, Federici also offered a short presentation of the situation in other countries, among which were Germany and France, whose anti-Semitic dispositions she noted. Her textbook was in fact rigorously up to date, as favourable mention was made, for instance, of the Statut des Juifs adopted by the Vichy government in October 1940 (339). P. Fortunati also delivered, in 1939, his own presentation of the theoretical and practical problems raised by the regime’s racial policy, locating them within the comprehensive demographic policy and explicitly connecting the implementation of anti-Semitic measures with the advent of greater social justice and the “revolutionarization” of mentalities (Fortunati 1939b; in a summary of the article published later in Statistica, Fortunati would qualify his tone, describing “the isolation of Semite elements” as “only one, and certainly not the most constructive, element of the (racial) policy” [1941a, 165]). Finally, Statistica, the official sis journal edited by Fortunati, would by the end of 1942 launch a scientific contest, the purpose of which was to reward (the prize amounted to 5,000 lit) an unpublished statistical paper: only candidates who “belonged to the Aryan race and were P.N.F. members” could take part (Statistica 1942, 207).30 Measuring the subjective intensity of what was de facto support or, at the very least, a refusal to openly oppose the regime’s racist policies and the persecutions that ensued, is not an easy task.31 Many factors are involved here, including Italy’s delicate diplomatic position that could not but comfort an already widely diffused nationalism, the presence of a biologistic discourse, and the growing conformity that was required from all and the concomitant rising costs of dissidence. After the 1931 loyalty oath, which all professors of statistics had taken (Bresciani-Turroni, who spent a good deal of the 1930s in Cairo, had succeeded in evading it up to March 1936, when he finally complied), those who were not yet party members were strongly induced to join in 1933–34: Mortara and Coletti, for instance, took up their cards at that moment (Bini 1992, 30; Cattini et al. 1997, vol. II, 201–6). Yet, joining the Fascist Party was not imposed as an obligation on those who already held a chair, and a few of them succeeded in resisting the pressure (on the discipline imposed on academics, see Turi 2002). Thus,

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Bresciani-Turroni was never a party member, and he manifested his dissidence once again when he refused to take the loyalty oath imposed upon members of learned academies; consequently, he was expelled from the prestigious Accademia dei Lincei and was not allowed to travel to Germany during the war (acs 1940–70, b. 79). Jannaccone also refused to join the party, something for which he was reproached in 1942, when it was proposed by his colleagues that he be granted the title of emeritus (Misiani 2004). From 1934 on, however, new candidates for a chair had to submit proof of party membership as well as a letter from the prefect of the commune where they resided, attesting to their good civic reputation and the absence of any objection to their candidacy. This is of course a clear indication of the intrusion of political criteria into a process in which only scientific merits had prevailed up to then – besides, of course, personal or contending schools’ rivalries. The contest held for the Bari statistics chair in 1936 was in fact the first one in which the commission explicitly mentioned in its report the precise moment at which each of the candidates had joined the party – a significant political matter indeed (acs 1924–54, b. 121). Furthermore, if one examines the notes of the racial demography lectures given at the University of Catania in 1938–39 by G. Zingali, who was himself fully committed to the regime, having acted as a deputy (“national counsel”) in the Chamber from 1929 to 1938, one cannot but be struck by the cold and mechanical manner in which he presented the motivations for the Fascist government’s adoption of anti-Jewish measures and described them in painstaking detail. Even if Zingali mentioned that among the motivations that led to the enactment of anti-Jewish policies, some were biological (though he did not give further details here), like Federici, he restricted himself to an exposition of those that were of a political or political-cultural character, which he summarized by evoking the national disaggregating effect of Jews, given the fact that they considered themselves the “chosen race,” their internationalist and subversive spirit, their anti-Catholicism, their appetite for money, and their links to capitalism (Zingali 1939, 236–52). As A. Treves writes, it may be possible to interpret certain attitudes as “a conscious and deliberate way of avoiding collaboration with racist choices” (2001, 191). She mentions persisting in working on the problem of births rather than moving onto racial studies

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more consonant with the political spirit of the time. One could add, on a more positive note, the publication by Metron, in 1938–39, after persecution had begun, of a paper written by a Jewish statistician from Palestine, H.V. Mühsam. It seems on the other hand more difficult to subscribe to Treves’s charitable reading of the 1938 Livi paper mentioned above. One can hardly see, for example, how the following sentence can be understood as a defence of Italian Jews and a sotto voce assertion of their identity with other Italians: “One may thus speak of a Jewish race in the same sense that we may use this word to describe various Italian stocks, who are legitimate representatives of populations that resided in the peninsula during the Roman era and are not too dissimilar from one another and linked together by a millennial tradition.” (Treves 2001, 330; Livi 1938a, 157). One hardly sees, moreover, how this sentence can be read as a “polemic” against the Manifesto’s thesis, according to which Jews had never assimilated to the “Italian race,” since it directly followed one in which Livi asserted that “nowadays Jews,” because of their common derivation from “people who lived in Palestine before the dispersion,” are linked together not only by religion and tradition, but also “by a pronounced ethnic individuality” (Livi 1938a, 157). However, as mentioned earlier, the exceptional character of Livi’s paper may depend less on its author’s own personal convictions than on the specific position held by the journal he edited: as a meeting point between political-bureaucratic and scientific elites (something its exoteric character confirms), Economia was more vulnerable to pressure to espouse the regime’s political and ideological turns than was for instance Metron, whose esoteric character limited its dissemination but also protected its autonomy. From the point of view of the field’s structuring, the passing of the racial laws was undoubtedly a watershed. Up to then, the intrusion of exogenous norms had been building up progressively (with intimidation, the loyalty oath, and compulsory membership in the party as successive stages) and still allowed for mental resistance. With the 1938 racial laws, theses that appeared vulgar even to those most involved in “racial” research were raised to the status of official doctrine; in addition, by brutally eliminating a certain number of practitioners, notwithstanding the individual zeal they may have shown towards the regime, the level of insecurity rose significantly for all. Thus, in a totalitarian country that was soon to enter a war,

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the situation was one in which pusillanimous criticism – such as that of Gini against “exaggerations” or of Livi against dogmatism on the matter of racism – was combined with veiled polemic, in a context where orthodoxy and heterodoxy on the issue of race could be directly translated into attitudes of loyalty or disloyalty.

3 The Politics of Expertise: Statisticians and the State

In January 1910, an official decree was enacted that provided for the addition to the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica (css) of a small body of “referents” (referendari) whose function would be to enhance the scientific requirements that should be met by government statistics. The fact that the four statisticians chosen for that office were Alberto Beneduce, Costantino Bresciani-Turroni, Corrado Gini, and Giorgio Mortara was obviously, on the part of political authorities, a testimony to the scientific capital these young professors had rapidly earned as well as an acknowledgment of the practical significance of the new statistics they had developed (Marucco 1996, 77).1 This decision was in neat contrast with the situation that had defined the relationship between academic and official statistics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. “The academic dignity of statistics had asserted itself – during the 1870s – against a practical conception of statistics,” and a widening gap between the two had, accordingly, developed (Favero 2001, 80). As a consequence, nomination to university chairs had become nearly impossible for those statisticians who came from professional and technical institutes and who, in many cases, had been active in official statistics, at the national or local levels. Wellknown cases were those of Alberto Errera, Gaetano Caporale, and more especially of Antonio Gabaglio, whose second edition of Teoria generale della statistica , published in 1888, was fiercely criticized for the technical and mathematical turn it was allegedly trying to impose on the discipline – however mild such a turn may appear in retrospect (Favero 2001, 81–3; and for a contemporary critique of Gabaglio’s treatise, see Virgilii 1889). This gap between

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professors and practitioners was closely connected to the more general problem of the hiatus which took a firm hold, during the last third of the nineteenth century, between the traditional legaladministrative training of Italian public servants and the distinctive technical abilities that were required to adequately supervise and manage many government departments, such as railways, civil engineering, and statistical services (see Varni and Melis 1999, 9–14). Thus, while statistics chairs were located within law schools, Luigi Bodio, as top manager of government statistics, had espoused the principle of hiring only engineers or graduates from business schools or technical institutes, since only they had received the mathematical training he deemed suited to a practitioner of statistics (Marucco 1999b, 213). Engineer Luigi Perozzo, whose paper on probability calculus was mentioned earlier, was the perfect case in point. To be sure, the Giunta Consultativa di Statistica (gcs), created in 1861 (it would be renamed the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica [css] in 1882), acted as a meeting point between the two statistical cultures, as showed by the long tenures of C.F. Ferraris (forty years) and A. Messedaglia (thirty-two years) and the fact that among the seventy-eight members that went through it between 1861 and 1925, no fewer than twenty-five were university professors (Marucco 1996, 111–2). This judgment calls, however, for serious caveats. First, css meetings came to a halt after 1884, and, if its activities were briefly revived in view of the 1901 census, it would not really come back to life before 1912 (ibid., 55). On the other hand, despite a few cases of migration from the academy to the civil service (Bodio himself originally came from a technical institute), the paths of government statistician and professor of statistics remained clearly distinct. Sustained and significant collaboration, of the kind Rodolfo Benini maintained, was rare, and, in this regard as in that of the discipline’s methodological turn, he anticipated the younger generation.

statistics and expertise from 1915 to 1925 Notwithstanding the symbolic importance of the 1910 decree, the relationship between the new generation of statisticians and the various bodies and entities whose amalgamation may be referred to as the state, was much more significantly defined and strengthened

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by the bureaucratic-scientific duties they were entrusted with during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. The war economy was, in Italy as in many other countries, the ground on which was built a large and powerful technical bureaucracy, whose mission was to mobilize all of the nation’s human and material resources, in a context where scarcity of raw materials justified – in fact, called for – government intervention. During that period, not only was government given full powers to achieve this aim, but ordinary administrative and financial controls were shelved (Melis 1996, 269). Thus, according to Francesco L. Galassi, “no fewer than 297 governmental bodies, staffed by different people and reporting to different undersecretaries in six different ministries, had enjoyed the power to allocate resources for the war effort” (2002, 6). In spite of the discontent such a degree of government intervention provoked in certain industrial circles or amid orthodox liberal economists such as Luigi Einaudi or Umberto Ricci, it remained, according to an economic historian, “a decisive experience, which many individuals, and above all managers – technical, industrial, but also from trade unions – will perceive as a true ‘school of the nation’ (of which) it is difficult not to recognize the mark in … the corporative reorganization of the economy from 1926 on” (Petri 2002, 51–2).2 One of main bodies in charge of the war effort was the Sottosegretariato Armi e Munizioni, which would be raised to the status of a full ministry in 1917. Under the authority of General Alfredo Dallolio, it employed about 6,000 people (Galassi 2002, 6; on Dallolio, see Minitti 1984 and Barsali 1986). By the end of 1918, this military-industrial agency coordinated the work of a total of 1,976 major private establishments that employed no fewer than 571,000 wage earners, to which should be added sixty public establishments that employed 331,000 persons and a whole lot of smaller subcontractors (Vial 2003, 73). By the end of the war, Corrado Gini acted as head of its Statistical Office, which was located within the General Tasks Office, one of the undersecretariat’s three components, the two others being the Industrial Mobilization Office, in charge of coordinating the industrial effort, and the Technical Services Office, in charge of defining standards relative to production and supplies (Galassi 2002, 15). Even though the exact activities of the statistical section seem to have been somewhat opaque (not much seems to remain of them in the archives), we

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know that it conducted, or at least sought to conduct, statistical work on a variety of issues such as industrial mobilization, ground and sea transportation, military losses, infant mortality during wartime, the value of Italian cattle, war finance, the characteristics of those who had been exonerated or revoked from military service, etc. (Galassi 2002, 16; Gini 1919b [1921b], 112 and 1919c [1921b], 253; acs, Corrado Gini, Documentazione, bD. 11). During the summer of 1916, an Ufficio Storiografico della mobilitazione was created within the undersecretariat under the command of Giovanni Borelli, a liberal-nationalist intellectual from Modena, with Gini as the Group Chief of its economic-statistical section; among those who also belonged for a while to this bureau were Marcello Boldrini, Alberto De Stefani, Gaetano Zingali, and Giovanni Dettori. The duties of this office were to collect and classify all documentary material relevant to the war effort in all its dimensions, from a perspective that envisioned the experience of mobilization as “a prodigious task in the construction of a new, compact and homogeneous Italy, in which identity between army and nation was permanent” (Degli Esposti 2001, 423; see also Bracco 2002). In the research program Gini expected to carry on, we find the names of a number of statisticians and economists he hoped to mobilize and the topics on which he sought their expertise. Among them were L. Amoroso, ground transportation; Ridolfo Livi, sanitary measures; C. Bresciani, the importance of smuggling; A. Beneduce, insurance; U. Giusti, local budgets; P. Medolaghi, contingency funds; A. Niceforo, civilian delinquency; A. Contento, suicides; F. Savorgnan, the cost of war; Riccardo Bachi, credit and prices; and F. Virgilii, deposits and payments (acs, Corrado Gini, Documentazione, bD. 11). Only a very small part of this program was completed, however: De Stefani’s work on economic and financial legislation and Zingali’s on cattle and the army’s logistical services, which appeared in two monographs later to be reprinted under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation (Ufficio storiografico della mobilitazione 1918 and 1920; De Stefani 1926; Zingali 1926b). The statistical dimension had an essential part in this documentary effort which largely overreached industrial mobilization per se and covered, according to Borelli’s initial project, “a world that only numbers made into science can subtract to posthumous verbosity and to the extravagances of late-coming exegetes” (Borelli, “Piano generale del Corpus della

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Mobilitazione e dell’ordinamento dell’Ufficio Storiografico,” quoted in Bracco 2002, 41). Gini was also in charge, for a while, of the Military Bureau entrusted with the compilation of losses, and he produced, on behalf of the General Direction of Military Health (Ministry of War), a document about the standards of surveys conducted on this subject (Gini 1917; acs, Corrado Gini, Documentazione, bD. 11). Statistician-mathematician Luigi Galvani, whom we have encountered with regard to his work on probability, joined the army “as an officer in the corps of engineers,” and also came to “assume important organizational functions” within the Sottosegretariato Armi e Munizioni. Galvani would later join the executive body of the Comitato interministeriale per la sistemazione delle industrie di guerra, whose mandate had to do with the liquidation of the war economy (Zambetti 1954; Millan Gasca 1998; Melis 1988, 197; Forsyth 1998, 104). Gaetano Pietra, who had been employed by government statistics before the war and had significantly contributed to the theoretical and methodological developments initiated by Gini, was for his part designated chief of the Ufficio distribuzione dei cereali and of the Ufficio studi e statistica as early as December 1914; in these capacities, he directly assisted Vincenzo Giuffrida, who was in charge of the food supply and of a series of services relevant to the management of the war economy, and would become one of the central figures of the new technocracy (on Pietra: acs 1940–70, b. 378; Melis 1997b, 18; on Giuffrida, see Marucco 1987).3 Pietra was sent to Spain by the Italian government, where from 1917 on he dealt with issues regarding oil stocks. Then he was sent to the United States and Canada, where he led the Italian delegation in charge of securing food supplies for the army and civilian population as well as agricultural and commercial supplies. Pietra also represented Italy in various meetings with a number of American bodies managing the war effort (Giuffrida and Pietra 1936, 190); he participated in a number of Inter-allied agencies, notably the Inter-Allied Scientific Food Commission, to which Gini and Felice Vinci also belonged, the latter acting as statistical secretary to the Commission (Vinci 1919 [1940a], esp. 216–20). After a series of conferences with military institutes, Giorgio Mortara was called up to General Headquarters to work as its statistician. There, he produced statistics on military crimes and justice, on the army’s personnel and losses, as well as studies on the psychological states of soldiers (Mortara 1985, 26–7).

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The work that was done by the Inter-Allied Scientific Food Commission (isfc; also known in French as the Commission scientifique interalliée du ravitaillement [csir]) offers a good example of what a properly statistical war effort could look like. Supplying food to the troops, as well as to workers and employees involved in industrial mobilization, and to the Italian population in general, became an acute problem as the war went on. During the war years, the cost of living saw an impressive rise: using the year 1914 as a reference and giving it a value of one hundred, we observe that in 1918, prices had reached values of 266 in Turin, 273 in Rome, 302 in Milan, and 316 in Florence; as a consequence, meat and bread consumption levels fell radically (Vial 2003, 65). In May 1918, a General Board for Food Supply and Consumption was created, under the direct authority of the Presidency of the Council. One of the isfc’s tasks was to establish on a scientific basis the amount of food supply that was adequate for an average man. According to G. Zingali, Gini – whose inaugural lecture at the University of Padua in 1913 was incidentally entitled, after Quetelet, “L’uomo medio” – played an especially important role in the refutation of the British point of view, according to which anthropometric and climatic differences implied that food rations destined for the average Italian or the average Frenchman should be smaller than those of the average Briton (Zingali 1926b, 550). In its first report, the isfc had determined that the daily needs in food intake of the Allied populations could be fixed at 3,300 heavy calories for an average man, defined as weighing seventy kilos, working eight hours a day, under a climate that consisted in a sort of mean of those of England, France, and Italy. The renowned physiologist Ernest Henry Starling prepared the British report, entitled “Report on the Influence of Anthropometric and Climatological Factors Upon the Requirements of the Allies.” It proposed instead that a distinction should be made between the three countries, given the differences in their inhabitants’ stature (Britons were taller) and in their climates (Britain’s was colder and rainy, compared with France and Italy). Therefore, the British should get their 3,300 calories, while the French could do as well with 3,220 and the Italians with 3,177 (on Starling, see C.J.M. 1928). The report of the Italian delegation was entrusted to Gini, who presented it to the isfc’s fifth session in December 1918.4

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Gini addressed the issue in the following manner. In the first place, in response to his British counterpart Ernest H. Starling, who had insisted on genetic factors, Gini imputed the Italians’ lower stature to the debilitating diet they had been subjected to for centuries (Gini 1921a [1921b], 159). (Incidentally, it is worth mentioning that Gini, who was generally keen on biological factors, argued here on the basis of a social factor.) With regard to the differences in climate, which were also part of Starling’s argument, and which could hardly be denied, Gini relied on two different strategies. On the one hand, in order to dispute the validity of the national mean temperatures computed by Starling on the basis of data originating from a sample of observatories in each country, Gini entered into a long technical discussion of the concept of mean temperature and of the procedures according to which it could be measured. First, he proposed an equation that allowed for the determination of a relation between the annual average temperatures established by a variety of observatories disseminated over the national territory by taking into account the latitude and altitude of each of these observatories, given that they were the two major variables liable to provoke variations in temperature, the variety of observation data allowing for the hypothesis that the respective influences of other variables (wind, duration of exposure to the sun, sea currents, etc.) would compensate (ibid., 161). The equation went as follows: t = x + (k – ϕ)y + hz, where, if x indicates the average temperature at latitude k and at sea level, one can determine temperature t at latitude ϕ and at altitude h, given that x, y, et z are constants that can be determined by the least squares method on the basis of data relative to annual average temperatures originating from many observatories. Then, computing a mean of latitudes and altitudes of the various towns and villages of a country and assigning to each a coefficient that was in proportion with its population, Gini went on to determine the average temperature of this centre of gravity by applying to it the equation mentioned above. Through this weighing procedure, Gini was able to significantly reduce the differences that had been computed by his British colleague. While Starling had computed average temperatures of 9.5°C for the United Kingdom, 11.3°C for France and 14.5°C for Italy, Gini’s method led to an average temperature of 13.9°C for Italy and a result that was identical to Starling’s (11.3°C) for France (ibid., 162–3). The absence of

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available data on the latitude and altitude of British commons prevented Gini from applying his formula to Britain, but he estimated that the narrowing of the gap between Italy and France (from 3.2°C to 2.6°C) suggested that a similar phenomenon could occur with regard to Britain. On the other hand, by introducing a distinction between “natural climate” and “artificial climate, in other words, the environment” (a given temperature t obviously has a different effect depending on whether or not one has a heating system), he once again had a social factor prevail (ibid., 164). This scientific-bureaucratic involvement of statisticians continued after 1918, of course, with many of them taking an active part in a number of official inquiries, foreign delegations, international meetings and supranational organizations. Among national commissions or delegations, we may mention: the Commissione per i problemi del dopoguerra (Commission on Postwar Problems), to which Gini and Benini were appointed in 1918–19 and whose statistical bureau was entrusted with inquiring into various issues concerning demobilization and with preparing a report on presumed war damages, to which statistician Lanfranco Maroi also lent a hand (acs, Corrado Gini, Documentazione, bD. 11; Gini 1919c);5 the Atlantic City International Economic Conference (1919), on the occasion of which Italy hoped to negotiate new loans, and to which Pietra was sent as a technical delegate (Fortunati 1961); the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which prepared the Versailles Treaty and where Riccardo Bachi acted as a consultant (Bonelli 1963);6 the Italian Technical Delegation for the Peace Treaty (1919) and the Italian Commission for War Reparations (1920), to both of which Bresciani-Turroni was appointed (this led in turn to Bresciani’s further appointment as financial consultant for the Agent-General for Reparations in Germany upon the coming into effect of the Dawes Plan [1924], developed in reaction to Germany’s declaration of bankruptcy in October 1923 and which extended the payment of the German debt; another Italian, Pasquale Jannaccone, by that time a professor of statistics in Turin, was also attached to this agency [Bini 1992, 16–7; Misiani 2004]); the Commissione per la istituzione della imposta patrimoniale (Commission for the Creation of a Tax on Patrimony), in 1919, and the Commissione per la riforma tributaria (Commission for Fiscal Reform), in 1920–21, to which Benini and Gini were again both appointed, the latter being designated as a member of the committee entrusted with translating the commission’s results into law (on the first one, Einaudi 1927,

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231–6); the Brussels International Financial Conference (1920), where Alberto Beneduce represented Italy and raised the problem of the distribution of raw materials (Kapp 1941, 18); the First International Labour Conference, held in Geneva in 1921, where Benini was a member of the Italian delegation (Dall’Aglio 1966); the 1922 Commissione di indagine sulle industrie (Commission of Inquiry on Industry), in which Mortara, Gini, and Beneduce took part (the latter had, however, resumed his “techno-bureaucratic” career a few years earlier and had even held the position of minister of Labour and Social Security from July 1921 to February 1922);7 the two commissions of inquiry set up to investigate the problems of major banking institutions, in which Mortara was involved (Mortara 1985, 30); the Genoa international economic conference (1922), whose object was the revitalization of the European economy and to which Gini was sent as an expert on raw materials (Rivista di politica economica 1957, 1014); the Italian delegation on the settlement of the war debt to the United States (1925), to which Gini was appointed as “chief of experts,” and to the preliminary documents of which Pietra, Mortara, Livi, Benini, Maroi, Boldrini, Zingali, Coppola d’Anna, Savorgnan, and many others would contribute.8 As regards statistical work done within international organizations, Boldrini and Gini both held expert positions with the League of Nations. The former went to Geneva in 1919 and dedicated himself, for three years, to setting up the League’s Monthly Bulletin of Statistics (Marucco 2000b, 120); the latter was in overall charge of the 1921 inquiry on raw materials, for which he was assisted notably by Felice Vinci,9 and was then entrusted with the estimation of the national wealth of member states in 1922 (Gini 1923a). Gini was also present on various statistical commissions, dealing with hygiene and the economy, on the League of Nations/International Statistical Institute joint committee, as well as on the International Labour Organization’s committee on the application of article nineteen of the Versailles Treaty, which dealt with the possibility of re-examining treaties that were no longer applicable and with the appreciation of international conditions that were possible threats to peace (Rivista di politica economica 1957, 1,014). Riccardo Bachi also prepared a report on the Italian economic situation in 1920–21, at the League’s request (Bonelli 1963). The decade that goes from Italy’s entry into the war to the stabilization of the Fascist regime in 1925–26 was undoubtedly the most turbulent of the post-Risorgimento era. Italy’s involvement in the

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Table 3.1: Primitive accumulation of bureaucratic capital (i): Italian statisticians and the war effort Bureau Under-Secretariat Arms and munitions (Bureau of Statistics) Historiographic Bureau of Mobilization (statistical-economic section)

Inter-ministerial committee for the restructuring of war industry Ministry of War (General directorate of military health – Bureau of health statistics) Provital (Office for the distribution of cereals, Studies and Statistics Office) Interallied Scientific Food Commission Army – Supreme command

Statisticians

Subject matter

Gini (chief) Galvani

Industrial mobilization

Gini (chief) De Stefani

Cattle Financial and economic legislation Logistic services of the army Mortality Industrial demobilization

Zingali Livi/Boldrini Galvani

Gini

Norms for inquiries on health statistics

Pietra

Commercial and food supplies

Gini, Vinci, Pietra, Livi, Boldrini Mortara

Food supplies Crimes and military justice Psychological state of soldiers Military losses

war and the planning effort it required, the intense diplomatic activity of the 1919–25 period, economic recovery and the settlement of war debts, the wave of strikes and factory occupations known as the “two red years” (biennio rosso) all appear in retrospect as opportunities that were eagerly seized by the emerging generation of statisticians. By enthusiastically putting their abilities at the service of the state, they clearly succeeded in establishing themselves as a group of experts endowed with specific skills. This decade may therefore be described as one of “primitive accumulation of bureaucratic capital,” during which the ad hoc accomplishments of these new statisticians brought them in close contact with the milieus of politics and public administration. When contrasted with the impotence that paralyzed the official Central Bureau of Statistics during the same period, their dynamic and inventive character was obvious to all. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 summarize how this phenomenon evolved during and after the war. Italy’s peculiar situation at the end of the war, i.e., that of a victorious power whose territorial claims remained unsatisfied and

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Table 3.2: Primitive accumulation of bureaucratic capital (ii): Italian statisticians in the aftermath of the war Commission/conference, etc. Commission on postwar problems (1918–1919) Commission on the extraordinary tax on patrimonies (1919) Commission on fiscal reform (1920–1921) Italian technical delegation for the Peace Treaty (1919) Italian delegation near the Reparations Commission (1920) Commission for the settlement of the Austrian public debt (1921) Commission of inquiry on industry (1922) Commission of inquiry on the problems of great banks (c. 1922) Delegations to international conferences: Atlantic City (financial/commercial [1919]) Paris (peace [1919]) Brussels (financial [1920]) Geneva (labour [1921]) Genoa (economic [1922]) Italian delegation for the settlement of the war debts to the United States (1925)

Statisticians Gini Benini Maroi Benini Gini Gini Benini Bresciani-Turroni Bresciani-Turroni Savorgnan Gini Mortara Beneduce Mortara

Pietra Bachi Beneduce Benini Gini Gini (chief of experts) Pietra, Mortara, Livi, Benini, Maroi, Boldrini, Zingali, Coppola d’Anna, Savorgnan

whose economic situation was disastrous, gave most of these scientific-bureaucratic endeavours a political dimension that was obviously emphasized by their authors’ nationalist leanings. In order to convince the Italian government to intervene militarily on their side, Britain, France, and Russia had promised in a secret treaty signed in London on 26 April 1915 that a number of territories, notably Trentino, Alto Adige, portions of the Dalmatian coast, and Istria would be transferred to Italy after the war. The later failure of the Allied powers (now including the United States, intent on defending the principle of nationalities) to comply with this promise regarding the Dalmatian coast and the city of Fiume put the Italian government in a very delicate situation, and would have a significant effect on the country’s political balance. For Mortara, Pietra, Savorgnan, and a number of other statisticians, intervention in the war, the defence of territorial claims, and, more generally, of

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Italian patriotic positions appeared as reasonable choices. The work they produced in this context may be described as a combination of scientific and technical knowledge, the norms of which they had partly defined, of a political-administrative praxis that allowed for the transformation of this knowledge into an argument used as a basis for action, and of their own political convictions. The analysis of military losses that was prepared by Mortara on behalf of the army’s Supreme Command, for instance, can be described as the statistical version of the “mutilated victory” argument, which was central to the postwar nationalist discourse. In this report, which was presented at an Interallied meeting held in Versailles at the end of 1918, he sought to establish and measure precisely the scope of the Italian war effort as compared with that of other countries.10 Comparing the numbers of soldiers and military losses with regard to age, sex composition, and the proportion of economically inactive persons for the population in each country, Mortara concluded that the Italian contribution was undoubtedly superior, given the weight of the latter variable (for 1,000 male adults, the number of children under fifteen was 331 in Italy compared with 238 in France and 175 in the United Kingdom), and given Italy’s poverty and lack of colonies, from which the two other countries were able to mobilize an “army” of workers (“Dati comparativi sullo sforzo militare dell’Italia, della Francia e del Regno Unito,” appendix to Mortara 1921 and reprinted in Mortara 1925a). The “mutilated victory” was a topic to which other statisticians have contributed: F. Savorgnan, who was born in Trieste, a city that remained under Austrian domination until the war and was the mecca of irredentism, also published a string of papers comparing military losses (1919a, 1919b, and 1919c); in a newspaper article originally published in April 1917 and later collected, Savorgnan publicly denounced the Italian ambassador in Vienna for having declared, against the views of Italian irredentists, that Fiume was a predominantly Croat city (1921, 63–5). In a paper he wrote in French for Scientia, also in early 1917, Savorgnan used results of the 1900 and 1910 Austrian censuses in order to prove the clear numerical superiority of the Italian over the Slavic element in the contentious districts of Trieste, Gorizia, Parenzo, and Pola, against arguments to the contrary that were put forward during a meeting of the Société de Sociologie de Paris (1917, 4).11 In 1918, F. Coletti also resorted to the analysis of census results in order to

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establish Italy’s claims over Trentino, Gorizia, and Dalmatia: where Italians were a majority, the irredentist case was closed; where they were a minority, the author relied on data about language to assert the Italians’ “superior civilization,” as evidenced by the fact that many Serbs, Croats, or Slovenes had learned Italian, while Italians ignored these people’s “crude dialects” (Coletti 1918, 22). A. Niceforo also prepared a report on Les revendications, les droits et les sacrifices de l’Italie (The Claims, Rights, and Sacrifices of Italy) for the Italian Peace Delegation (Niceforo 1919b). Gini’s inquiry on raw materials, even though it was conducted under the auspices of the League of Nations, is another good example. This inquiry was launched upon the request of the countries that were most devoid of raw materials and had especially suffered from this situation during the war (Italy was an obvious case in point), and against the will of Anglo-Saxon countries. Its object was to provide an overall examination of issues related to the initial distribution of raw materials and foodstuffs, as well as of various obstacles (commercial restrictions, monopolies, instability of exchange rates, etc.) impairing their allocation (Kapp 1941, esp. 9–31). The main problem that was raised by Gini had to do with the difficulty of insuring peaceful and free economic exchange – notably with regard to raw materials, which had a strategic character given their position in the production process – in the absence of an international authority endowed with powers of enforcement. He presented the constitution of cartels and monopolies (with their effect on prices), the raising of tariffs and duties, nationalist reactions, even armed conflict as the most probable consequences of this state of affairs. Despite its author’s claim that he had “excluded (from his work) all political concerns” and remained faithful to that “liberty of thought that was indispensable to any expert in order to accomplish his task,” the report rested upon an analysis of the situation that supported Italian positions on this issue (Gini 1922, 12). Making use of the familiar distinction between “poor countries” (first and foremost Italy and Germany) and those who were “rich” (first and foremost France and Britain), it proposed a euphemistic version of the dichotomy between “proletarian and plutocratic countries” that had by then become a commonplace of Italian nationalist and fascist discourse. Gini’s view of territories under mandate (colonies), notably the issue of whether the countries designated as proxies should administer these territories so as to insure

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“other members of the League equal conditions for exchange and commerce” (Gini’s wording referred to article twenty-two of the League’s Covenant), did indeed provoke, on the part of the League’s Council, some dithering about the publication of the report in its entirety. What was at stake here was the problem of deciding if those equal conditions, explicitly mentioned with regard to the administration of Central African territories (designated as type B), also held for type A (formerly of the Ottoman Empire) and C territories (Southwest Africa and Austral Pacific Islands) (Gini 1922, 71–7). Since the League’s Council considered these views contrary to its official policy and felt that Gini had gone beyond the strict mandate he had been given, it was hesitant to give the report its imprimatur and, somewhat awkwardly, authorized the release of its full version in Metron, which was edited and privately owned by Gini himself. In the face of strong Italian reactions against what was perceived as a form of censorship, the Council decided however to rescind its initial decision and publish the report also under its own auspices (Gini 1922, iii–iv; Kapp 1941, 71–7). Another central economic issue at that time was that of war debts, “which, by the mid-1920s, had reached dramatic levels because of interest rates and were experienced once again as a humiliating form of dependency upon foreign countries, essentially due to the iniquitous distribution of natural and economic resources among ‘civilized’ countries” (Petri 2002, 54). The documents that were prepared at the request of the Ministry of Finance for the technical delegation led by Gini, which was entrusted with defending Italian interests before the World War Foreign Debt Funding Commission, can be seen in this regard as an impressive collective effort in which most of the prominent members of the field took part. The titles of monographs written on this occasion indicate that the ground to be covered reached significantly beyond the strictly financial dimension; it ranged from human and material losses due to the war to the fiscal burden, external commerce, and emigration.12 Relying frequently on work published by their authors during the previous decade, the whole set of monographs offered a very coherent image of the field. With regard to form and style, the language used was simple, the technical dimension was minimal and arguments were always supported by tables and diagrams. The whole document included more than forty telling illustrations, of which

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Figure 3.1: The misfortunes of Postwar Italy

those reproduced in figure 3.1, dealing respectively with military death caused by the war and the ratio of taxation to income after deduction of subsistence minimum, offer an example. Confidence in the persuasive power of this iconography seems to have inspired the gathering of these illustrations in a separate brochure published as Graphics Showing Several Aspects of Italian Conditions and of the International Economic Situation (1925) – meant, we can imagine, for those who lacked time or competence to read the monographs themselves. As to the monographs’ content, the arguments all converge to establish Italy’s extremely difficult situation, with regard to resources, standard of living, and fiscal constraints, and the injustice imposed on it by the postwar settlement – with regard to the sharing of territories and that of the German merchant marine among the victors – in spite of its more than proportional contribution to the Allied war effort, as evidenced by industrial and military mobilization as well as by civilian and military losses (a synthesis of the documents was published as Italy’s capacity to pay: a recapitulation of statistical documents submitted by the Italian delegation to the World War Foreign Debt Funding Commission [1925]). This rhetoric appears to have been convincing, since Italy’s move was highly successful; according to an historian of that period, “with the

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agreement signed in December 1925, Italy was, among all those indebted to America, the country to which was given the most favourable conditions” (Forsyth 1998, 306; for a thorough presentation of the problem and a detailed narrative of the negotiations, see Migone 1980, 99–151). With regard to the consolidation of the statistical field, the episode was also significant: the examination of authorship reveals that no fewer than ten of the brochures were written by professors of statistics, while eight came from civil servants and only two from an author belonging to another discipline (Gino Borgatta, a specialist in public finance). More generally, the statisticians’ participation in the organization of the war economy and in the various postwar inquiries or administrative bodies was consistent with the favourable view they took regarding government intervention in the economy, as well as the significant role statistics could play in decision-making. Among them, only Bresciani-Turroni – who was also one of the very few opposed to Italy’s entry into the war and who had sought to avoid military service before finally joining his regiment – maintained a position that was in line with the liberal orthodoxy, and thus close to that held by Luigi Einaudi, Umberto Ricci, and the other economists who criticized the technocratic management of the war effort as wasteful and inefficient (Bini 1992, 6). Overall, however, it remains difficult, for the first half of the 1920s, to neatly distinguish between nazionalisti and liberisti, since both groups shared the same disappointment with regard to Italy’s fate in the aftermath of the Great War, a similar pessimism with regard to the possibility of international commercial relations that could be shielded from cartels and monopolies, an identical hostility to anything smacking of socialism, as well as comparable satisfaction with the restoration of order achieved by Fascism.13 The article published by Gini in 1923 under the title “La revisione del processo contro il protezionismo,” which amounted to a critique of liberal economic orthodoxy from the perspective of political realism (“the economic interdependency that results from free trade is not accompanied by the political interdependency that could guarantee its continuity”), was a kind of manifesto in favour of a national economic policy. It combined, as was often the case with this author, reference to a solid documentary basis – notably the inquiry on raw materials and work done for the Commission on Industry – and an unorthodox theoretical position (Gini 1923b, 43). (Other statisticians like Rodolfo Benini and

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Francesco Coletti had also declared themselves, in a different context way back at the turn of the century, favourable to a nuanced judgment on protectionism and had criticized free trade orthodoxy, giving way to a sustained polemic in that era’s economic journals.) After having “greeted with joy and hope the advent of a strong government,” Mortara also issued a call “for Italy’s economic independence” in his 1926 inaugural lecture. This stand was made precisely in the aftermath of the abandonment, by the regime, of the “Manchesterian” economic policy it had followed from 1922 to 1925 and the transition to open dictatorship (Mortara 1926).14 The supreme consummation of these scientific and political interests occurred in 1925, with Gini’s nomination as a full member of the Commission of xviii, presided over by philosopher and former Minister of Public Instruction Giovanni Gentile and entrusted by Mussolini with the task of revising the Italian constitution.15 Gini’s enthusiasm with the new regime had already been made evident by his presenting a report on “the diffusion of Italian scientific results abroad” at the Convegno per le istituzioni fasciste di cultura, which was held in Bologna on 21 April 1925 under the leadership of Gentile, and on the occasion of which Gentile (with Mussolini himself) prepared the Manifesto degli intellettuali del fascismo.16 Being held just a few months after the murder of the reformist socialist member of the Chamber Giacomo Matteotti, who had openly contested the validity of the 1924 Fascist electoral victory, this event played a significant role in the political alignment of many intellectuals, even though, in a number of cases, one’s stance in 1925 could not predict those one would take in the future. Among those who signed the Fascist Manifesto and who were closely related to the statistical field we find, besides Gini, Arrigo Serpieri, who was a member of the chamber and a professor of agrarian economy in Florence, and Pietro Sitta, a senator who was also a professor emeritus in economics in Ferrara; both would act as members of the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica from 1926 to 1943. The Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti, written by liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce as a response to Gentile’s and published on 1 May 1925, would rally the support, among those academics close to the statistical field, of Costantino Bresciani-Turroni, Francesco Coletti, and Riccardo Bachi, as well as that of mathematician Guido Castelnuovo and of many economists. Among them was Luigi Einaudi, who, like Croce himself, was a member of the Senate and had,

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like him, become an opponent of Fascism only after having initially declared his support for it, and his relief at its having restored order.17

reorganizing official statistics The reforms undergone by Italian official statistics in 1923, but mostly in 1926 and 1929, must be understood against the more general context of the struggle “between two models of administration, between the culture of legality and form and that of efficiency and productivity.” These had become salient following the wartime experience of specialized administrations in charge of coordinating industrial mobilization, impelled by “modernizing bureaucratic elites” who called for the setting up of parastatal agencies to be run outside the traditional administrative hierarchy, and thus endowed with a significant degree of autonomy (Melis 1988, 199). The creation of the Istituto centrale di statistica (istat) and the simultaneous reorganization of the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica (css) under the chairmanship of Corrado Gini followed such guidelines, since official statistics thus moved from the status of a General Directorate attached to the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce to that of an Autonomously Managed State Institute placed under the direct authority of the president of the Council of Ministers (pcm).18 With regard to the structuring and consolidation of the statistical field, the status of istat and its collocation within the overall governmental apparatus had a number of decisive consequences. First of all, it is quite obvious that the context in which this reorganization occurred was that of the consolidation of a Fascist regime that was now free from any liberal-democratic constraints: the collocation of official statistics under the direct authority of the Duce could not but increase the risk of conflicts between the ethics to which statisticians were committed qua scientists, and an authoritarian regime’s political priorities. With regard to the combination of scientific and bureaucratic capital he had accumulated over the two previous decades, the man who was picked by Mussolini to preside over government statistics can be described as the embodiment of such a contradiction. Gini’s accomplishments in the domains of methodology, economic statistics, and demography had been acknowledged well beyond Italy, as evidenced by his being chosen

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as a member of the International Statistical Institute, the international standing of Metron, and the invitation to lecture before the Royal Statistical Society in 1926.19 As a “scientific bureaucrat,” Gini was probably, among the statisticians of that era, the one whose expertise was most often requested, and on a wide range of topics. With regard to politics, he had shown ample proof of his commitment to the new regime and had also provided it with his own ideological contribution.20 In the address he delivered before the css one year after the inception of istat, Gini made an emotive pledge to the ethics of truth all statisticians were accountable to. He exhorted them to contain the “optimism” that the Duce’s “potent figure” and all “the government’s action” could unwittingly imprint on their work and thus to “fulfill the not very sympathetic yet indispensable function that consisted in bringing back to their true proportion the results … of exaggeratedly optimistic inquiries.” Alluding to the case of German statisticians’ blind patriotism during the Great War, Gini underlined the risks that were incurred “when statistics were subordinated to a real or presumed collective interest” (1929a, 70–1). Yet, this profession of faith in favour of truth and objectivity was also an echo of what Mussolini himself had told the audience in the address he had delivered just before Gini’s: “Statistics are neither pessimistic nor optimistic. They cannot be made to serve preconceived theses. Their distinctive mark must be that of complete truthfulness, may that please us or not” (Mussolini 1929, 45–6). The relative legal autonomy that was given to the new parastatal body and the decision to entrust it with coordination of all official statistical activities combined to enhance the scientific and technical, rather than administrative, character of government statistical activities, therefore enabling istat to satisfy many statisticians regarding the desirable status and scope of a modern statistical apparatus.21 The former css chairman Rodolfo Benini, for instance, had evoked in 1923 “the absolute necessity of creating a grand observatory of the nation’s whole life, which can fulfill the needs of government and scientists” (quoted in Leti 1996, 73). In a report that was submitted to Mussolini the very same year, A. Aschieri, who was then at the head of the Central Bureau of Statistics, had called for a “grand laboratory that combines technical processes with scientific research” (quoted in D’Autilia and Melis 2000, 5). Both words, which belonged to the set of commonplaces that were

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disseminated then by statisticians in Italy and elsewhere, vividly illustrate the panoptical ambition they all shared (Beaud and Prévost 1997 and 2005). Moreover, the collocation of istat under the authority of the pcm – Mussolini himself – symbolically positioned official statistics within the direct orbit of executive power, right at the center of the government’s information system. There is in fact a strict homology between the concentration of executive power in the hands of the pcm during the consolidation of the Fascist regime in the period 1924–29, and the coordination/centralization of statistical activities – even though it remained far from complete – under the authority of istat. The coordination of all statistical activities was the solution favoured in the 1926 law, and represented a compromise position between centralization – described by its proponents as a guarantee of true cohesion and uniformity – and decentralization, which allowed the specific needs of administrations to be taken into account, according to its defenders; it soon showed the limits of istat’s capacity to maintain real control over the statistical activities of other government agencies. In Italy, as in many other countries, differences with regard to the nature and purpose of the information to be collected were often summarized by protagonists along two ideal-typical positions: should statistics be produced for scientific purposes, i.e., with a view to giving the government a general picture of the situation and thus enlightening the decision-making process, or should they be tailor-made to support specific management needs? In 1929, in conformity with Gini’s wishes, the new reform would be based on the principle of centralization, even though its implementation was meant to be gradual because of the resistance many departments opposed to this enlargement of istat’s authority (Leti 1996, 93–9). Notwithstanding all this, Italian official statistics underwent a truly spectacular recovery in a remarkably short while. This renaissance can be measured in a number of ways. First of all, there was a rapid and significant growth in staff. Whereas, in 1923, the Central Bureau of Statistics had no more than thirty employees (compared to the 120 of the Bodio “golden era”), istat grew from an all-time low of twenty-seven on the date of its inception (July 1926) to 145 the next year, 338 in 1929, 526 in 1931, and 1,400 in 1932 – a number that includes temporary appointments in view of compiling the 1931 census results (report by Aschieri, quoted in Melis 1988, 195; reports by Gini, quoted in D’Autilia and Melis, 62, 74, and

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86). There was also a significant growth in overall printed material, moving from an average of twenty-one volumes and 8,000 pages per year for the 1927–31 period, to one of seventy-five volumes and 14,000 pages per year for the period 1932–40 (Leti 1996, 117 and 239).22 A whole series of new periodicals were issued, such as the Foglio di informazioni quindicinale sull’andamento della stagione, the Notizario Demografico, the Bollettino mensile di Statistica, the Bollettino mensile di Statistica Agraria e Forestale, the Bollettino mensile dei Prezzi, the Annuario statistico Italiano, and the Compendio Statistico, all with “editorial punctuality.”23 The boost given to Italian official statistics by the creation of istat also resulted in an extension of domains that were surveyed. The demographic policy that was launched almost contemporaneously (in 1927) by a Duce convinced that population growth was a condition of a country’s might would obviously have a strong imprint upon statistical priorities, all the more since Gini’s scientific outlook also put demography in the “command position.” Mussolini’s Italy offers a remarkable example of a global and significant effort – even though it failed in the end – to manipulate various aspects of demographic behaviour, from stimulating fertility through material support for large families or financial penalties against bachelors to controlling internal and external migration, as well as isolating or purifying the “Italian race” from elements that were deemed foreign or inferior (Jews and Africans). All this required the setting up of administrative bodies specialized in population management (Opera nazionale per la protezione della maternità e dell’infanzia [onmi], Comitato permanente per le migrazioni interne [cpmi], Direzione generale della demografia e della razza [Demorazza]) as well as that of a social-scientific apparatus that could illuminate their actions and eventually measure their results (Ipsen 1996; Treves 2001; Maiocchi 1999; Quine 1990 and 1996; Horn 1994). With regard to the structuring of the statistical field, the Duce’s “demographic obsession” resulted in stimulating, if not fertility itself, at least a considerable body of scientific work devoted to its study (Leti 1996, 479; according to Treves, it was Mussolini himself who gave the main impetus to Fascism’s pro-birth policies [2001, 136–9]). This resulted in demography taking up a disproportionate amount of space within the more general sphere of social-scientific research. Labour statistics, for instance, notably those dealing with unemployment and wages, were consequently neglected – all the

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more given their sensitive political character. Favero and Trivellato thus evoke a polemic on agricultural wage statistics produced by the Istituto di economia e statistica agraria, on the occasion of which Gini criticized the mistakes they allegedly included and “the pessimistic conclusions regarding the transformations of working class conditions since the advent of Fascism” to which they could lead (Favero and Trivellato 2000, 260–1).24 The fact that such statistics were not directly compiled by istat but by specialized institutions such as the Ministry of Corporations or the Fascist Confederation of Agricultural Unions also meant that not only was there the risk that they could taint or even contradict the regime’s image but that conflicts could arise between central statistics, which argued its superior scientific competence, and these specific bodies, who could invoke better knowledge of conditions on the ground. Agricultural statistics were an instance of jurisdictional conflict between istat and the Istituto di economia e statistica agraria, headed by A. Serpieri (who was himself a member of the css) and whose mandate combined survey research and the management of some of the regime’s largest ventures, notably the policy of “integral bonification,” which was bent on developing barren land and drying up insalubrious swamps (D’Autilia 1992). In both cases (labour and agricultural statistics), the situation led to real debates about the norms that defined the field (notions of truth, exactness, error and its adjustment); politics proper to the field also played a role, having to do first and foremost with the distribution of power between the central bureau and other entities involved in statistical work. (Regarding the example given by D’Autilia [1992, 113] of data on the 1931 grain harvest, which Mussolini asked Gini not to publish, Leti quotes a letter previously written by Gini, in which he expressed his worries as to the bad quality of these data [1996, 521].) The priority enjoyed by demographic concerns would become manifest when economic sanctions imposed on Italy in 1935 led to the suppression of many economic series: bulletins dedicated to external commerce, prices, as well as agricultural and forest statistics were sacrificed, while those about demography were maintained (Leti 1996, 239). Besides the 1931 and 1936 censuses (to which we may add the exploitation of the 1921 census results) and the systematic compilation of population registers (that remained under the control of local authorities), a number of special surveys

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were carried out, for instance on large families and on communes whose populations were decreasing (ibid., 120). Significant effort was also devoted to the increase of data quality – with limited success, as errors from the 1931 census show (Ipsen 1996, 196–204). Finally, some important methodological work was achieved: for example the Atlante statistico italiano, which was prepared under the guidance of Luigi Galvani; Gini and Galvani’s monograph on the representative method; and the work of Gini and de Finetti on the forecasting of Italian population (Galvani and Gini 1929; De Finetti and Gini 1931). With regard to the organization of labour, finally, istat was developed along a model that, according to its second president, Franco Savorgnan, had an industrial rather than a bureaucratic character. “Ordinary and recurrent” work was divided into “the simplest possible” tasks (something that Boldrini described as “intelligent Taylorism”), and the stock of machines used for mechanical processing and computation grew significantly, resulting in increased productivity and decreasing error (Savorgnan and Boldrini are quoted in D’Autilia and Melis 2000, 80–1 and 86–8; see also D’Autilia 1997]). Besides all these improvements in the quantity and quality of official statistics, a second major consequence of istat’s creation and of the reorganization of the css was a significant integration of academic and government statistics, in a way that allowed for a continuous transfer of resources between the two, and resulted in further general consolidation of the statistical field. In this regard, the situation of interwar Italy seems to differ not only from that which characterized the previous period, but also from that of other countries where, at the same time, division and suspicion between scientific and government statisticians proved somewhat more lasting (Britain providing probably the clearest case, where the former and the latter identified strongly with the respective cultures of the academy and the civil service [Beaud and Prévost 2005; and, for a general perspective on the division of labour between types of statisticians and their typical professional paths, Desrosières 1997]). Already in 1910, the nomination of Beneduce, Bresciani, Gini, and Mortara as “referents” (but not yet full members) of the css, and then, in 1920, Benini’s rise to its presidency, were indications of this integration. Yet, given the state of impotence in which Italian official statistics remained before 1926, the presence of professors

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within the css could not translate into any real effect. From 1926 on, though, the presence within the css of a significant number of “technicians of statistics” could now provide a meeting ground between the scientific and the bureaucratic elements. From 1926 to 1929, the law required that five of the Council’s eleven members be university professors, while three should represent public administration and three others, the “syndicates” or parastatal agencies (i.e., organizations such as Confindustria, the Confederazione Nazionale Fascista delle Aziende del Credito e dell’Assicurazione, the Confederazione Nazionale Agricoltori Fascisti, the Confederazione delle Corporazioni Fasciste, etc.). The css president and istat general director both sat on the Council ex officio. In 1929, the number of members to be nominated was raised to fourteen, among which eight were to come from the university. It should be added that some professors sat as representatives of parastatal agencies, thereby ensuring their group a permanent majority over civil servants and other representatives. For instance, Pietro Sitta, an economist from the University of Ferrara (who was also a senator) sat as representative of the Confederazione delle Corporazioni Fasciste from 1926 to 1929, and moved to the seat of representative of the academy from 1929 to 1943; mathematical economist Luigi Amoroso followed the contrary path, moving from his position as representative of the academy from 1926 to 1929 to that of representative of parastatal agencies, on the basis that he was a member of the board of directors of the Istituto nazionale delle assicurazioni (Leti 1996, 302–4). The css was a very stable institution during the period 1926–43, as shown by the long tenure of its academic members (representatives of public administration were much more subject to change): with the exception of Gini, whose mandate ended abruptly when he resigned in 1932, academic members of the css were: Luigi Amoroso (1926–43), Rodolfo Benini (1926–43), Marcello Boldrini (1929–43), Francesco Coletti (1926–40), Livio Livi (1926–29 and 1931–43), Alfredo Niceforo (1929–43), Gaetano Pietra (1929–43), Franco Savorgnan (member from 1926 to 1932, and then president until 1943), Pietro Sitta (1926–43), Felice Vinci (1939–43), and Gaetano Zingali (1929–43). Other members of the css, such as Arrigo Serpieri (1926–43) and Alberto De Stefani (1939–43), had a more complex profile, since they had moved between the university, high politics, and public administration. Serpieri (1877–1960) was

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a professor of agricultural economics who also sat in the Italian Parliament from 1924 to 1939, when he became senator; in 1923–24, he served as undersecretary in the Ministry of National Economy, and from 1924 to 1935 he held the same position in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, while pursuing his scientific work as head of the Istituto di economia e statistica agraria (Magnarelli 1984; Tolaini 2005). De Stefani (1879–1969) had for his part resumed his career as a professor of political economy after his term as minister of Finance from 1922 to 1925. Both he and Serpieri sat on the css as representatives of parastatal agencies. The study commissions that were set up on an ad hoc basis to deal with specific problems were another instance of consultation, in which chosen members of the css would join outside experts, most of them coming from the academy. Within these commissions, academics were generally much more active than other members. Among the professors who sat on these commissions and did not belong to the css were statisticians and economists such as (Riccardo) Bachi, Mortara, Maroi, Cantelli, (Gustavo) Del Vecchio, Medolaghi, and Bresciani-Turroni (Leti 1996, 403). To be sure, the new css structure led to a strengthening of its president’s position with regard to the Council’s professed collegiate character, since the president was a member ex officio of the technical and administrative committees whose function it was to prepare the decisions to be submitted for the Council’s approval and to make proposals regarding the composition of study commissions. This resembled the pcm’s own increasing power over the Council of Ministers during the same period (as evidenced by the fact that Gini himself acted as chairman for no fewer than twenty-two of the thirty-five committees that were active in 1929). Yet, official and academic statistics were no longer two worlds apart. The creation of a research division, with Livio Livi at its head and with the intent precisely of organizing cooperation between academics and istat, was clearly an illustration of this integration, as was Gini’s decision to maintain his own academic position and personal scientific activity while investing himself fully in the management of government statistics.25 The presence of academics within the css and at the head of istat would act as a powerful lever for the promotion of statistics as an academic discipline. Arguing that there was an acute need for increased technical competence in government statistics, the css proposed to set up a network of autonomous schools specialized in

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the teaching of statistics, to be appended to existing universities. The first two, created in 1927, were located in Rome and Padua (where it replaced the already-mentioned Scuola di perfezionamento); very rapidly, three others were set up, in Florence, Bologna, and Milan. According to M.L. D’Autilia, this project may be interpreted as a response to the problems encountered by statistical coordination/centralization and that were due to the fact that a number of administrations involved in statistical work enjoyed, like istat, a significant degree of autonomy. If we put aside central ministries in order to examine “local” statistics, we can observe, for instance, that in 1935, the Provincial Councils of Corporative Economy, of which there were ninety-four, all had statistical offices, as did all communes of more than 100,000 inhabitants.26 Training all that personnel along a specific technical profile would facilitate “communication between the agents in charge of data production and istat,” and, given the difficulty of imposing norms that were defined by the centre, coordination would proceed from a common methodological culture (D’Autilia 1999, 225). For two years, students attending these schools were expected to follow a program that significantly reflected the statistical field’s topography. Compulsory subjects were statistical methodology, demography, economic statistics, political and economic geography, and anthropology, while there were five optional courses, which could deal with economics, finance, mathematics, biology, history, or law (istat 1931a, 240–1). Obviously, the establishment of statistical schools would lead to a direct increase in the number of teachers in the discipline. Predictably, the Ministry of Finance expressed its reservations, given the expense involved (Leti 1996, 375). What was at stake here was also the further consolidation of statistics as a discipline distinct from political economy, as was eloquently shown by the open dissidence of Luigi Amoroso, who had just been named to a chair in political economy at the University of Rome. The basic question was whether these statistical schools would obtain a monopoly over the awarding of the title of statistician and whether, when applying for certain positions, graduates from these schools would benefit from some advantage over graduates from law or economy and commerce faculties, whose curricula also included courses in statistics. Thus, when Gini proposed that the css take a vote in order to counter the objection put forward by the Ministry of Finance, Amoroso declared that he saw no need for

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such schools and that he shared the Ministry’s reservations (istat 1930a, 205). For Gini and his colleagues, however, the approach and methodology of statistics was quite different from that of political economy and could support some claim to monopoly. In his lectures, Gaetano Pietra, who was head of the Padua School of Statistics, defined statistical training as “the formation of a mental habitus suitable to quantitative analysis and the analysis of mass problems” and left no doubt as to his view of the hierarchy among the kinds of knowledge that were required for the administration of the state, since “in a structured economic system, economic theory as well as economic policy resolve themselves into economic statistics” (Pietra 1942b, 27). In 1929, a css proposal to increase the number of students in statistical schools by enlarging the pool of institutions from which they could be drawn provoked friction with the Ministry of National Education, once again because of the costs involved. At issue was the question of whether graduates from technical institutes could be admitted, or if admittance would remain restricted to those graduating from classical and scientific colleges; finally, the Ministry succeeded in blocking the proposal (Leti 1996, 376–7; istat 1930b, 7–10). According to Gini, graduating from a statistical school was but the first step towards earning “the title of statistician.” Scientific and top management positions at istat and in the various statistical offices within the national administration should be awarded only to those who also succeeded in the Esame di Stato di abilitazione nelle discipline statistiche, a requirement that should then be extended to the local level, as prescribed by the decree-law on this subject (istat 1931b, 249–51). There was however a chasm between ideal and reality: in 1936, fewer than half of the statistical offices of the Consigli e Uffici Provinciali dell’Economia Corporativa (forty-six out of ninety-four) were headed by a director who had obtained that qualification; the number had, however, risen to seventy-five the following year (Mazzilli 1939, 355). As mentioned by Leti, such a development could never have occurred if professors of statistics had remained dispersed among their respective faculties and institutes rather than acted as a critical mass, something that only their relatively large proportion within the css had made possible (Leti 1996, 378). Other resources that were capable of stimulating interest in statistics and therefore strengthening the discipline’s institutional

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position were granted through the channel of official statistics. It was, for instance, decided that prizes up to 25,000 lit would be awarded to the best dissertations on statistical subjects. The Trieste Statistical-Economic Institute, whence came the new (but soon to leave) director of the istat research unit, Livio Livi, also received a grant for the purpose of studying the demographic and economic characteristics of the territories that were transferred to Italy at the end of the war. A number of private or parastatal bodies also entrusted istat with the task of supervising the allocation of grants rewarding statistical research in specific areas: for instance, the Fondazione Reale Mutua Assicurazioni, for the best monograph on insurance statistics, the Associazione Nazionale Enti Mutui di Assicurazione per gli infortuni industriali ed agricoli, for the best work done on industrial accidents throughout the world, and the Confederazione Generale Fascista dell’Industria, for research on price dynamics (Leti 1996, 126).

the state of the statistical field by the late 1930s The structuring of the Italian statistical field was thus characterized, with regard to what may be called its material and institutional infrastructure, by a complex dynamic that brought together the following strands: the setting of frameworks that allowed for collective work, the concomitant growth of research and teaching activities, increased cohesion on the level of skills and methods, the public presence of statistics as a culture of numeracy, and internal differentiation with regard to the distribution of resources and prestige. Indeed, even though the quantitative aspect was of paramount importance for maintaining the autonomy of the statistical field and of its relative position vis-à-vis contenders whose own territorial claims could be threatening (the field built around political economy and other administrative agencies, notably), the setting up of more and more complex collaborative structures in the academy (laboratories, institutes, schools, faculties), the impressive growth in the number of statistical journals, and the increasing integration of academic and official statistics should not be considered only as developments producing more people, more journals, and more resources. Indeed, given the harmonization of training and competence that resulted from collective work and the legitimacy that came from the filtering procedures that regulated admittance to the

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field, these developments allowed for the repeated and continuous assimilation of behaviour consonant with the field’s specific ethos. Finally, they also induced a proliferation of hierarchies and, at the same time, a differentiated distribution of symbolic capital. Compared with the flat structure that characterized the old statistica, the new topography of the field was much more complex. While before 1905 an academic chair was the highest form of peer acknowledgment and therefore the ultimate achievement, the spectacular expansion of the field and the bridging of academic and government statistics opened new perspectives. Besides teaching, one could (or should, if he sought to enhance his influence within the field) head a laboratory, oversee a research centre, edit a journal, act as an officer of a learned society, hold a position at istat or in a local bureau of statistics, etc. The case of Gini is here, as in many other respects, emblematic: during the whole period he presided over the destinies of istat and the css (1926–32), he held his academic chair and other positions within the university, published no fewer than six books and many dozens of articles (that is besides those papers that derived from research done on behalf of istat), and launched the cisp as well as the Indici del movimento economico, thereby embracing and dominating, at least for those years, both academic and official dimensions of the field. But this was, all things being equal, not an uncommon profile for a statistician at that time. Thus, Lanfranco Maroi, who held a chair of statistics in Camerino and later in Palermo, was also in charge of the Roman local bureau of statistics and of its own Rivista mensile di statistica; Diego De Castro, who taught in Turin, was also the head of the Technical Economic Service of the Fascist Confederation of Industrial Workers; Francesco Coppola D’Anna held the position of chief of the Economic Studies and Surveys Bureau for both the Associazione fra le società italiane per azioni (Italian Association of Joint Stock Companies) and Confindustria (Fascist Confederation of Industrials), besides serving on the boards of many journals; Guglielmo Tagliacarne combined statistical teaching at the university with that of market survey techniques at Milan’s Polytechnic Institute (a course offered to private managers) and also acted as secretary to Milan’s Provincial Fascist Trade Federation and as director of the Fascist Trade Confederation. Confindustria offers an interesting case for the examination of the complex interactions between academic statistics, official statistics and private business. It had its own representative within the

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css in the person of secretary general Gino Olivetti, who was also on the Barometro economico scientific committee (until 1938, when, being of Jewish origin, he had to relinquish all his official positions). It also funded, as we have seen, activities of the Padua Institute of Statistics; in 1936, the organization of Confindustria’s statistical services was entrusted to Mario Saibante, a graduate of Padua (1925) who was a former pupil of Gini and his assistant for the creation of the Rome Institute of Statistics in 1925–26, the editor-in-chief of the Indici del movimento economico italiano/Vita economica italiana from 1926 to 1943, the former head of the statistical bureau at the Associazione fra le società italiane per azioni (1927–36), and who had recently been designated an incaricato in economic statistics for the Roman Faculty of Statistical Sciences that had just been created under Gini’s influence (on Saibante’s career, see Gini 1959b). As the Italian statistical field expanded, ramified, and consolidated through the creation of laboratories, institutes, and other research structures (generally within or around the academy, but also within institutions such as Confindustria or the Bank of Italy), the creation of specialized journals and the reorganization of the state’s statistical activities, a certain number of dominant individuals would emerge, around which students and collaborators gathered. The most cohesive of these groups was undoubtedly the one around Gini, thanks to the master’s impressive combination of scientific titles and bureaucratic power: it included Pietra (1879), Galvani (1878), and Castrilli (1885), who belonged to the same generation and yet remained subordinate to Gini in various ways and to various degrees, as well as Boldrini, a few years younger (1890), Saibante (1902), de Polzer (1905), and Fortunati (1906), the last three belonging to the generation that reached adulthood after the Great War and for whom passing through Padua had been a defining moment of their careers. (It should be mentioned that Pietra, Castrilli, and Galvani were awarded their chairs at relatively advanced ages – respectively forty-six, forty-one, and fifty-three – by comparison with the precocious Bresciani, Gini, Mortara, and Livi who had all reached that position before thirty.) For more than a quarter of a century, this group would provide the leading core of the sis, which attests to the fact that by the end of the 1930s, the Italian statistical field had reached a degree of stability and solidity that would enable it not only to easily survive the fall of Fascism,

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but also to remain intact despite the different political paths taken by its members during World War II. Thus, the presidency of the sis was assumed first by Pietra (1939–41), then by Gini (1941–45), by Galvani (1945–49), and again by Gini (from 1949 to his death in 1965, when Fortunati would succeed him); the office of vice-president was held by Boldrini (1939–45) and then Pietra (from 1949 to his death in 1961); Castrilli acted as counsel from 1939 until his death in 1952; finally, Saibante and de Polzer were also entrusted with various administrative duties (Leti and Gastaldi 1989, 116–7). The influence of the Gini group is also clearly shown by the presence of many of its members in scientific bodies that were very closely related to the statistical field, such as the Società Italiana di Genetica ed Eugenica, which was created in 1919 with Gini as vice president, and the Società Italiana di Sociologia, which was launched in 1937, with Gini as its president. Gini’s weight within the field can also be measured by his practically uninterrupted presence on the national scientific commissions that selected candidates for academic positions. Of the fourteen commissions that were formed between 1916 and 1951 (that is, after Gini had reached the rank of professore di ruolo in 1913) to provide for chairs in statistics and for which reports were kept in the archives, Gini sat on no fewer than twelve; by comparison, Mortara’s name occurs seven times (though we must keep in mind that he left Italy in 1938), Niceforo’s and Livi’s five times each (out of a possible ten in the latter’s case), while Bresciani, Vinci, and Savorgnan sat only three times each. Only Benini had a presence comparable to that of Gini: he sat eleven times between 1900 and 1936, the year of his retirement.27 Gini’s overarching position had, of course, much to do with his impressive productivity, his entrepreneurial talent, or his “genius,” which had been acknowledged by elders early on. (In 1913, on the occasion of the contest for the Padua statistics chair, the commission, which included Benini, Einaudi, Jannaccone, Pantaleoni, and Ferroglio, had ranked Gini first – among the other candidates, only Mortara was a potential rival – and declared in its report that Gini’s methodological work contained “pages of genius” and that their qualities “formed a whole that was rarely reached by a researcher of his age” [acs 1912–16, b. 6].) But it also resulted from the effect that was exerted upon the field by rules or norms that were defined independently of it. There are at least two telling examples of this.

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First, in the Italian academic system, chairs were, as a rule, awarded by national commissions whose members were the most eminent practitioners of a discipline: this would obviously have differing consequences depending on the total number of professors in a given discipline. If we consider that these contests, with their solemn rituals, were decisive events (they were in fact dramatic for individuals, given the very limited number of chairs available) that determined one’s admittance to a narrow circle, the permanent presence of the same individuals on these commissions – which can be seen as a microcosmic reproduction of power relations within the discipline – would have a tremendous effect on the reproduction of the field’s ethos as they defined it. Another rule in Italian public administration, stating that one could not be at the same time a professor and a civil servant – professors being themselves a category of civil servants – also played an important role in our story. If, like the former Direzione Generale della Statistica, istat had been organized so as to be under the authority of a director general whose work was overseen by a consultative body, Gini would have been forced to choose between his professorship and his position as head of government statistics, or else content himself with a traditional honorary chairmanship that would have left real managing power in the hands of a public servant (as had been the case with Benini and Aschieri in the early 1920s). The decision to concentrate the effective guidance of the statistical apparatus as well as that of the advisory body in the hands of a single individual while maintaining a separate position of director general whose mandate was defined as more narrowly administrative – a decision that was made in practice in 1926 and was explicitly confirmed by the 1929 law – would allow Gini to keep his chair and all his academic positions and thus accumulate scientific credit and bureaucratic power without any hindrance. (In fact, as soon as he was designated president of the css, Gini began using, orally and in his written correspondence, the title of president of istat, even though this designation was not officially created until 1929 [Leti 1996, 108].) As such, this decision synthesized the scientific imprint that was meant to be given to government statistics, the authoritarian political culture that was being put in place, as well as a remarkably flexible interpretation of the rule impeding concurrent office-holding. One of the consequences of Gini’s resignation, in 1932, was to re-establish a certain equilibrium within the field, given the fact that his successor

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Savorgnan was a rather pale and surely not very entrepreneurial figure, whose reputation was quite modest by comparison with that of a Gini, a Livi, or a Mortara; in this context, for all practical purposes, real leadership in istat passed into the hands of director general Alessandro Molinari, whose talents as manager and statistician were unquestionable, but who was not allowed, as a civil servant, to combine his duties with an academic chair and thus could not pretend to scientific eminence. If no group of statisticians was on a par with the one that gathered around Gini, a number of other major figures nevertheless enjoyed an enviable accumulation of positions. Mortara was a central figure of the Milanese academy. He taught statistics at the Bocconi as well as in the Statale, came from an academic dynasty that was close to political and higher judicial circles, and had benefited from Benini’s prestigious patronage. (Benini had encouraged the young Mortara to go to Berlin in order to study under Bortkiewicz [Lenti 1967, 199–200].) Thanks to his position as editor of the Giornale, he was right at the crossroads of statistics and economics. Yet, he remained largely foreign to the world of government statistics. His absence from the css after 1926 probably had to do with his persistent rivalry with Gini (Borruso 1997, 218);28 having voluntarily settled in the country’s economic capital, he maintained privileged relations with the milieus of industry and banking. Among the economists/statisticians who were trained under his guidance, the two best-known were Libero Lenti, who had completed a thesis under the supervision of F. Coletti in 1927 and then worked for the Banca commerciale italiana research unit before being chosen for the Bari statistics chair in 1939, and Paolo Baffi, who would assist Mortara in his academic and research activities, notably for the Edison Society and the Bank of Italy (Baffi 1967; Misiani 2005). Livio Livi, whose own father, Ridolfo, was regarded as an authority in anthropometry and medical statistics,29 as well as Felice Vinci, were also in a position to emerge as influential figures, given the number of bodies and journals in which they played leading parts and the various alliances they contracted. Thus, Livi had close links with the Ente italiano per l’organizzazione scientifica del lavoro, which patronized the creation of the Centro per la statistica aziendale in 1935; as head of the latter, he had privileged access to business circles. Vinci would, for his part, remain on close working

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terms with economists such as Amoroso and De Stefani, a powerful figure himself in many respects. Livi and Vinci’s alliance to create the sids would also help preserve the stability of the field’s configuration. As disciples and allies of those two, we can mention the names of Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, one of Economia’s two editorsin-chief and Livi’s successor in Trieste, Silvio Golzio, Pietro Battara, and Giuseppe Parenti, all with a Florence-Livi connection, as well as those of Raffaele D’Addario, Silvio Vianelli, and Giovanni Lasorsa, all three close to Vinci. Given that Livi had become the towering figure of Italian demographic research in the second half of the 1930s, one can only conjecture how the field would have evolved if an entrepreneur of that stature had been chosen to succeed Gini in 1932. Table 3.3 illustrates the multipolar structure of the Italian statistical field by the mid-1930s, as it was organized around the central figures of Gini, Livi, Vinci, and Mortara. In each case, we identify statisticians in each group, as well as economists (E) and mathematicians (M) who were closest to them, the journals and major editorial ventures that were under the authority of each of the “big four,” the research units and learned societies they headed, as well as the main extra-academic institutions from which they drew resources. Names of statisticians who, by 1936, belonged to the International Statistical Institute are in bold type.30 In line with the distribution of prestige and resources that defined the field, a certain number of epistemological and theoretical issues regarding the specific character of statistics and the extent of its dominion would emerge and also contribute to polarization (see the next chapter). It is, however, important to observe that the field’s cohesion was maintained first and foremost by constant reference to statistics rather than demography, despite the attention that has been given by historians (with good reason) to the Fascist regime’s population policies. The academic chairs that were held by practitioners in the field were labelled as belonging to statistics: only Maroi’s and Savorgnan’s chairs were designated, in 1937–38, as belonging to demography, and it must be recalled that both of them had previously and for long periods held chairs in statistics (Maroi in Macerata from 1926, the date of his elevation to the status of professore di ruolo, to 1932; Savorgnan in Cagliari, Messina, and Modena, before he took up the demography chair in Rome in 1929) and also maintained prominent positions as public statisticians.

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Table 3.3: A multi-polar field: Italian statistics in the 1930s C. Gini

L. Livi

F. Vinci

G. Mortara

G. Pietra L. Galvani V. Castrilli M. Boldrini A. Uggè M. Saibante A. de Polzer P. Fortunati F.A. Rèpaci (E) F. P. Cantelli (M) P. Medolaghi (M) Metron La vita economica italiana Genus Statistica

P. Luzzatto Fegiz S. Golzio P. Battara G. Parenti L. Maroi A. Niceforo F. Savorgnan

S. Vianelli G. Lasorsa R. D’Addario L. Amoroso (E) A. De Stefani (E)

F. Coletti L. Lenti P. Baffi G. Del Vecchio (E)

Trattato elementare di statistica Società Italiana di Genetica ed Eugenetica (1919) Comitato Italiano per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione (1928) Società Italiana di Sociologia (1937) Società italiana di Statistica (1939) istat/css (1926–1932) Confindustria

Rivista italiana di Bollettino statistica dell’Istituto stat.-economico Economia Barometro economico Index Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica

Giornale degli economisti

Prospettive economiche Centro di statistica aziendale (1935) Comitato di Consulenza per i problemi della popolazione (1937) Società italiana di demografia e statistica (1939)

istat/css (1932– …) Ente italiano per l’organizzazione scientifica del lavoro

Banca d’Italia Credito Italiano Banca Commerciale Italiana

The journals in which all these statisticians published were also overtly identified with statistics, as were the laboratories, institutes or schools within which they worked. The habitus to which they referred, sometimes in explicit terms, was designated as that of the statistician. There were specific courses devoted to demography (they usually went under the name of demographic statistics), as well as numerous references to demography as a discipline; yet, as

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was shown a contrario by Livi’s claim to the autonomy of demography with regard to statistics, it was thanks to the use of statistical methods and to the prestige statistics had acquired that a body of properly demographic theory and knowledge was recognized. The reason statistics provided what may be called a professional identity focus to members of the field can be stated as follows: as an organic body of methods and techniques, statistics enabled those who mastered its arcana to intervene simultaneously on a variety of grounds, notably those of population and the economy, as shown by the frequently combined courses in demographic and economic statistics that led to a large output of textbooks,31 the impressive contingent of statisticians who joined the Econometric Society (among the seventeen holders of a chair of statistics in 1937–38, eleven were members),32 the significant share of their time they dedicated to the issues of economic forecasting and of economic barometers, when it was not, of course, to matters having to do with statistical methodology.

4 Form and Substance: A Science of Architectonics

The expansion and structuring of the Italian statistical field can be measured by adding up the number of university chairs at different times and, much more significantly, by assessing the development of laboratories, institutes, and statistical schools, and the increase in the number of researchers and teachers (liberi docenti and incaricati) attached to them; the growth of scientific positions within the central statistical apparatus, public administration in general, and the private sector; as well as the emergence of norms regulating access to these positions and furthering the dissemination of a common methodological culture. Another aspect of the field’s structuring consisted in the progressive extension of quantitative logic and methods to a whole variety of objects, problems, issues, and even disciplines; in other words, in the avowed ambition of raising statistics, if not to the status of a “total” science, at least to that of primum inter pares among social sciences. As a distinctive set of theories, hypotheses, methods, and techniques, or to use a label that was common by then, as a “logic,” statistics, and especially the core of it that became known as statistica metodologica, was promoted as the sole conceptual corpus capable of providing a number of social scientific disciplines usually defined by reference to a specific object with a robust epistemological foundation. Indeed, even though it was presented by its practitioners as a method and a set of cognitive tools rather than as a conventional science, statistics held a strategic position with regard to these disciplines. The theoretical offensive that was launched with the intent of establishing statistics’ epistemological dominance and of imposing it as the appropriate methodology for studying all natural and

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social phenomena went hand in hand with intense proselytizing “on the ground”: the collection and analysis of economic, demographic, biological, historical, social, etc., statistics was presented as the prerequisite to any understanding of the theoretical problems that confronted economics, demography, biology, history, sociology, etc. As long as there remained a significant gap between academic and government statisticians and as long as statistica did not enjoy strong scientific legitimacy, there was some space for the emergence of an autonomous social science, as shown by the publication, in 1905, of a Dizionario di sociologia. Yet, from the moment it became acknowledged that in order to be considered truly scientific, any social theorization had to rely firmly on numerical data and on the mastery of a series of formal devices, and given the fact that statisticians could easily enough assimilate the somewhat limited theoretical content of other social scientific disciplines and redefine in their own terms the problems and objects with which these disciplines were concerned, those practitioners of social science who were not statisticians found themselves, by contrast, in a clearly disadvantaged position. Indeed, debating on equal terms with well-trained statisticians required, as of the 1910s, a considerable intellectual investment in the acquisition of technical and mathematical skills. At the very beginning of the multi-volume Trattato elementare di statistica that was published from 1936 to 1943 under the auspices of istat, Mario Saibante clearly stated what was at issue. “Experience has shown that … statistics being a complex enough technique, it was easier for those who were trained in it to succeed into assimilating from various sciences the notions that were necessary to the application of statistics to these sciences’ respective domains than it was for specialists from these same sciences to succeed, when necessary, in appropriating the statistical method” (Saibante 1936, 5). It was a natural corollary of the empirical orientation professed by many Italian statisticians that, far from contenting themselves with offering disinterested methodological assistance, they did not hesitate to elaborate substantial theoretical propositions. The respective careers of Gini, Livi, Mortara, Boldrini, Vinci, or Niceforo, to mention only the most prolific among them, corroborate this assertion. All these authors made significant contributions to political economy, demography, sociology, eventually to biometry, anthropology, or criminology; yet, since they held as an article of faith that there could be no science

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without measurement, they all defined themselves first and foremost as statisticians. To be sure, this hegemonic ambition would be met with some opposition. If Italian sociology, whose position was especially weak, emerged as the designated victim in this story, political economy, on the other hand, was in a much better position to resist. It could claim a prestigious theoretical pedigree, it relied on a robust institutional foundation and it had already integrated statistical techniques into its own toolbox. Political economy was easily capable of maintaining itself as a distinctive field and, since it partially overlapped with statistics, it could also stand as a serious rival for hegemony over other social scientific concerns. At the turn of the twentieth century, as we have seen, Italian statistics had defined itself through demarcation from both mathematics and political economy. Statisticians had joined the revived sips as a kind of subgroup among economists, and at that time (1907), no Italian statistician was in a position to compete, with regard to mathematical skills, not to mention fame, with economists of the stature of a Maffeo Pantaleoni or a Vilfredo Pareto. During the 1910s, however, thanks to the spectacular breakthrough in statistical methodology that resulted from “indigenous” contributions such as those of Gini (on variability and concentration) or Mortara (on index numbers) as well as from the assimilation of Anglo-Saxon innovations (relayed notably by Benini and Bresciani), conditions were established that would determine, for the next two or three decades, the relations between mathematics and statistics, as well as those between statistics and political economy. With regard to mathematicians, the statisticians’ position was defined by a fairly clear set of dichotomies (theoretical vs. practical, abstract vs. concrete) and a consequent delimitation of their respective territories. This situation allowed for a coexistence that could sometimes lead to formal institutional alliances (for instance, in the Faculty of Statistical, Demographic, and Actuarial Sciences, to which belonged, notably, mathematicians F.P. Cantelli and P. Medolaghi) and even to the permanent integration of trained mathematicians into the statistical field (as was the case with Pietra and Galvani). With regard to economists, relations were defined primarily by competition. Statisticians considered statistics the methodological sesame that opened the door to the understanding of all phenomena, and thereby confined political economy to a specific domain of

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human experience. Political economists considered that their discipline disclosed the fundamental logic of human conduct, statistics being but a tool, albeit an important one, which economists could put to use in order to establish the validity of their hypotheses. To these alternative viewpoints may be linked a whole series of episodes whose implications ranged from the theoretical and methodological to the institutional dimensions. However, the distinction between economics and statistics was not that easy to draw, especially on the institutional plane, since a number of statistics chairs were located within faculties of political economy or higher institutes of economy and commerce, and a number of individuals did move, in the course of their careers, from one discipline to the other. The two most remarkable cases in this regard were those of two major figures in the emergence of modern Italian statistics. Rodolfo Benini, after having held a chair in statistics at the universities of Pavia (1897–1907) and Rome (1907–28), moved, within the same university, to a chair in political economy, which he held until his retirement in 1935. Costantino BrescianiTurroni followed a similar path when, having held a chair in statistics at the universities of Palermo (1909–10) and Genoa (1920–25), he moved to a chair in political economy in Bologna (1925), Milan (1926), Cairo (1927–37), and, finally, Milan again. Riccardo Bachi, Aldo Contento, Pasquale Jannaccone, and Filippo Virgilii also followed similar paths, as did Umberto Ricci who, after having held the position of director of the Statistical Bureau of the International Agricultural Institute, was chosen for the statistics chair in Cagliari (it had become vacant following Gini’s move to Padua), but finally preferred a chair in political economy. The explicitly stated proposition that the study of economic life and phenomena rested on their statistical apprehension and thus on an inductive research program, as well as a considerable intellectual investment into the domain of statistical methodology, thus appears as a dividing line between the two fields. The period under consideration – roughly 1915–45 – is characterized by a gradual polarization as well as an enduring division between those who described themselves as “economists-cumstatisticians” and thus the inheritors of a tradition identified with the names of Pareto and Pantaleoni, and those who defined themselves first and foremost as statisticians, upheld statistica metodologica as the privileged path to scientific knowledge, and could have

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chosen as their motto a variation on Mussolini’s formula about the state: “Everything in statistics, and nothing outside statistics.”

the central and unique character of statistics According to Vilfredo Pareto, Corrado Gini was convinced of the necessity of a journal that would be exclusively devoted to statistical methodology as early as 1908 (Pareto 1975b: 638). This project would become a reality in 1920, with the launch of a journal exclusively devoted to statistical methodology, Metron, which remained under Gini’s ownership and editorship until his death in 1965. In the program he presented in the opening pages of the inaugural issue, Gini put a singular emphasis on statistics’ position as a meeting point for a growing number of disciplines – he mentioned more than twenty of them – and as the focus of all scientific observation. This motif of statistics as central had already been dwelt upon in Gini’s 1913 inaugural lecture at Padua, significantly entitled L’uomo medio (The Average Man). On this occasion, he insisted on the unity of science in general (“the whole of science is a single organism whose elements can of course, for the sake of convenience, be studied separately, but they are, in reality, linked together by a thousand indissoluble knots”) and concluded from this that it was necessary to develop a “much more comprehensive” conception of statistics “than the one that is taught today.” Statistics had to draw its material from all the sciences, natural and social; on the other hand, statistics could not be subordinated to “verifying the consequences of the other sciences’ theoretical constructs,” but should also strive to “control the primary bases of reasoning and submit any deduction to the trial of facts” (Gini 1914a, 1–2). Sciences to which Gini made explicit reference on this occasion were biology, zoology, botany, anthropology, physiology, hygienics, experimental psychology, astronomy, geodesy, and physics. The 1920 list published in Metron’s first issue also included genetics, eugenics, political economy, chemistry, finance, law, medicine, technology, actuarial sciences, demography, pathology, pure mathematics, zootechnics, agronomy, and history. The overlapping character of these disciplines could only confirm the unitary and “organic” view of science promoted by Gini. (The absence of sociology from

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either list may be duly noted.) Against principles that originated from “bold intuitions” or “deductions from a priori postulates” (which was a good enough description of some economists’ views), Gini insisted on the superiority of the “new scientific constructs that were based upon statistics”; thus, demography had “partially replaced the antiquarian sociology,” anthropometry, biometry, and psychometry had grown alongside anthropology, general biology, and psychology; hygienics and eugenics were rapidly gaining a statistical foundation; and soon enough “a complete system of inductive economics and a storiometria” would emerge (ibid., 4). In his Metron program, Gini also discussed the practical problem of knowledge coordination that was raised by his ambitious view of statistics. Issues of general methodological interest were sometimes examined and resolved within the framework of specific disciplinary inquiries. For instance, he wrote, statistical results that were gathered in the course of anthropological, biological, medical, actuarial, economic, or historical research might have a paramount importance for the demographer. But, obviously, no individual scientist had the capacity to review this truly kaleidoscopic body of work. There was therefore a need for an “organ of scientific coordination,” that remained “open to all methodological tendencies,” and yet could act as a focal point for any result of potentially general interest in the field of methodology and statistical applications. That was the mission Gini assigned to Metron (1920, 8–12). The old debate about the exact status of statistics – was it first and foremost a method or a full-fledged science? – had been, as we have seen, a commonplace of almost all inaugural lectures and textbooks for nearly half a century. Many authors had tried to have it both ways until Benini brought the matter to a close in his 1901 Principii di demografia, where he characterized statistics as “a branch of Logic and, more precisely, a method,” of which “all the sciences of observation, natural and social” should make use (1901a, 10; author’s emphasis). The same author’s Principii di statistica metodologica defined statistics as a “form of observation and induction that was appropriate to the quantitative study of those phenomena that present themselves as pluralities or masses of cases susceptible of variations to which no rule can be logically ascribed” (Benini 1906, 1). This view would instantly become the new gospel for statisticians of the younger generation, and the capacity to comprehend the most recent developments in statistical

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methodology and contribute to them would heretofore draw the line between those who were in and those who were out. Yet this redefinition of statistics as a method or technique rather than as a distinctive science, far from containing its practitioners’ appetites, rapidly led them to entertain a double-pronged ambition that was well conveyed in Gini’s inaugural lecture. As a bundle of devices that could be used to put order into the masses of facts, statistics should be understood as a vector for the horizontal integration of all fields of knowledge. At the same time, it allowed for a vertical integration of all phases of research, since it provided the fundamental logic of empiricism (Gini 1914a, 2–4). In his own inaugural lecture of 1909, Bresciani, who called on J. S. Mill’s empiricism as well as on Karl Pearson’s positivism, had also insisted on these “new sciences” that the statistical method had brought forth: after demography came climatology, anthropometry, biometry, and now psychometrics. Bresciani had also made a pledge in favour of methodological monism: the “regularities” to which the “social organism” was subjected made it susceptible to “scientific processing” and laid “a bridge between social phenomena and those of nature” (Bresciani 1910a, 280). It was in equally ambitious terms that Marcello Boldrini would present his own defence of statistics, in an especially dense epistemological paper that was published in 1920. For Boldrini, classificatory adjudication was the logical kernel of any mental act (be it of an ordinary or scientific character); he thus established an identification of scientific concept with statistical decision (both belonged to the more general category of classificatory actions) and, from there, a more general identification of statistics and science (1920, 240). In language that recalled Coletti’s 1915 proposal for the creation of a statistical laboratory at Milan’s Bocconi, Boldrini described statistica metodologica as a “new applied mathematics” that required, on the part of statisticians, a “peculiar mentality, that was more concrete than abstract, and that can be acquired only through assiduous contact with the classificatory process” (ibid., 247). Boldrini would go on to develop these views first in textbooks (for instance 1934b, chapter 1), and, once he had become himself an authority in the field, in the massive 1942 treatise (it added up to more than 1,100 pages!) he published under the title Statistica, teoria e metodi. Using language that was permeated by the desire to harmonize his Catholic beliefs with his faith in

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science, he presented Statistica (always with a capital S) as a “universal and eternal instrument that reduces to unity all scientific disciplines, be they physical or social,” and, “since it acknowledged some sort of resemblance between things and their ideal ascendancy,” allowed for “walking backwards the path of divine Creation” (Boldrini 1942a, vii). As a branch of knowledge that was at the same time abstract and formal (“its structure [is] purely logicalmathematical”), and yet not estranged from the reality of facts (as compared with mathematics), statistics was the method convenient to all natural and social sciences. Notwithstanding the specific content of each, statistics played an important part in their inductive as well as deductive phases (ibid., 27 and 11–2). It was true, said Boldrini, that statistics was “the methodological aspect or inductive moment” of natural sciences, while the “deductive moment” was “the true nucleus of scientific knowledge.” Yet, if one could “theoretically separate Statistics and Science,” induction and deduction could never be severed completely on the ground of “concrete research.” When confronted with “chaotic reality,” not only must induction rely on the basis of logical principles, but deduction also could not, on its own, penetrate “the living reality of pre-classified phenomena” (ibid., 16–7). Characteristically, Boldrini’s reply to Livio Livi’s argument about the necessary methodological pluralism that should guide demographers (i.e., that they should not limit themselves to statistics, but make use all kinds of methods) was nothing short of dogmatic: “I have meditated on this argument for years without being able to understand what existed besides Statistics in the method of natural sciences” (Boldrini 1942b, 341; for Livi’s original argument, see 1941a, 2–3). In the introduction of his 1934 Manuale di statistica, Felice Vinci insisted for his part on the significant progress statistics, as “a body of methods,” had brought to biology, demography, political economy, as well as meteorology; and he justified the general orientation he had chosen for his textbook (it was subtitled Introduzione allo studio quantitativo dei fatti sociali) by insisting precisely on the “modest mathematical preparation” of the majority of social science practitioners (Vinci 1934, vi). The development of statistical methodology as the vital center of the discipline throughout the interwar years would lead to intense editorial activity. The regular appearance of statistical methodology textbooks, to which all major figures of the field contributed,

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Table 4.1: A sample of statistical methodology textbooks (1913–42) Author

Title

R. Benini

Elementi di statistica metodologica Lezioni di statistica metodologica Elementi di statistica metodologica demografica ed economica

M. Boldrini C. Gini

Statistica. Appunti per gli studenti Statistica, teoria e metodi Appunti di statistica

L. Livi

Appunti di statistica metodologica Elementi di statistica

G.Mortara

A. Niceforo

G. Pietra F. Vinci

Year(s) of publication* 1913–14 1917–18 1922–23, 1924–25, 1925–26, 1926–27, 1927–28 1934 1942 1913–14,1914–15, 1919–20, 1921 1930–31 1926 (1929, 1932, 1935, 1939, 1942, 1945 …) 1928 (1937, 1940 …) 1917 1921–22 1931 (1933) 1919

Principi di statistica Elementi di statistica Lezioni di statistica metodologica Sommario di statistica La misura della vita; applicazioni del metodo statistico alle scienze naturali, alle scienze sociali, all’arte Il metodo statistico 1923 (1931, 1940, 1942, 1945, 1950) Lezioni di statistica 1928–29 (1934–35) 1921–22 Appunti di statistica metodologica 1923–24 Statistica metodologica 1930 Introduzione al metodo statistico 1934 Manuale di statistica (2 vol.)

* For each title, I have given either the years of teaching to which it corresponded, or, in the case of textbooks that were more than the mere edition of lecture notes, the year of publication. Years in parentheses indicate further editions.

played a crucial part in the standardization of the discipline and the strengthening of the field’s specific ethos, despite all these authors’ differences. Table 4.1 presents a partial list of these textbooks (it excludes all those whose titles referred to a specific subfield: statistica demografica, economica, etc.). In their first editions these textbooks were often reproductions, with minimal changes, of the author’s lectures. They were often prepared with the help of promising students (for instance, Fortunati for Pietra’s 1927–28 edition of his Lezioni, and G. Ferrari for the 1934–35 edition, de PietriTonelli for Gini’s 1914–15 Appunti, P. Baffi for Mortara’s 1931 Statistica economica, S. Vianelli for Vinci’s 1931 Lezioni di statistica demografica ed economica, etc.), which provided a typical mechanism of entry into the field.

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As in the cases of Niceforo’s Il metodo statistico, Vinci’s Manuale di statistica, and clearly of Boldrini’s Statistica, teoria e metodi, some of these textbooks were extremely sophisticated. They could have been presented as treatises and were indeed regarded as such. Mortara’s reviews of some of them in the Giornale degli economisti are especially interesting with regard to the perception of the state of the field by one of its most important participants at a given moment. Mortara had acquired, as we have seen, a very strategic position within the field. Very early on, he had made his mark with a number of empirical as well as methodological contributions. His first monograph, Le popolazioni delle grandi città italiane (1908), had appeared in the prestigious Biblioteca dell’Economista (the author being only twenty-three years old at the time), and he had published a string of pioneering papers on index numbers in the Giornale degli economisti from 1913 to 1916. In the journal he edited, Mortara held a section in which all publications dealing with statistical methodology were reviewed. According to him, the very real diversity among Italian statistical methodology textbooks did not imperil the fundamental coherence of the discipline – in comparison, he described American textbooks as “coming from an assembly line, just like Ford automobiles.” In what amounted to a definition of the famous “statistical sense” his colleague Coletti had evoked, Mortara saw “the mathematical basis of our discipline’s technical part, the common sense basis of its logical part, and continuous contact with reality” as the triad that protected statistics from “the deplorable spectacle offered by other fields of knowledge,” and from “these violent disputes that oppose the defenders of one abstraction to those of another, the fanatics of one idea to the worshippers of another” (Mortara 1935, 363). If the Niceforo and Vinci textbooks were highly praised by Mortara – in spite of the minor criticisms he levelled against them, that were an example of the “unity within diversity” that characterized Italian statistics – other contributions were firmly rejected and their authors charged with aggravated incompetence. This was the case, for instance, with M. Marsili Libelli, a Florence economist specializing in public finance. Even though he had praised Mortara highly in the introduction of his Metodologia statistica, Marsili Libelli was reproached for his insufficient preparation, many inaccuracies and errors, as well as confusion with regard to fundamental statistical concepts. Even more severe were Mortara’s admonitions against V.

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Tosi’s Statistica metodologica ed applicata, which he described, given the major errors it contained, as no less than “a trap for the readers’ good faith” (Mortara 1925b).

methodological coordinates Theoretical discussions about the epistemological status of statistical methodology occurred very early on in the history of the field. A set of positions was defined, corresponding to a series of propositions. One regarded the place of induction and deduction in the investigation of economic and social facts (roughly: the discovery of laws proceeds through generalizations made on the basis of masses of observations; the purpose of observation is to verify the truth of laws that are deducted from first principles). Another considered the relationship between statistics and political economy (roughly: statistics is but a tool for political economists; political economy is but a domain of reality to which statisticians can apply their trade). A third applied to obviously distinctive research practices and their institutional and material embodiments. In addition to the tradition that was inaugurated by Pareto and defended, notably, by Luigi Amoroso and Alfonso de Pietri-Tonelli, according to which the resources of mathematics are to be put to use in order to establish the validity of political economy’s fundamental theorems, there existed a radically inductively-oriented tradition identified with economic statistics. Here as elsewhere, Gini’s work on the estimation of private wealth, an issue to which other Italian authors such as Pantaleoni, Bodio, Benini, Nitti, Einaudi, and Coletti (as well as, outside of Italy, Alfred de Foville [France] or Robert Giffen [England]) had given much thought, offers us a point of departure. In L’Ammontare e la composizione della richezza delle nazioni, published in 1914, Gini offered an extensive treatment of the problem (at 700 pages, it was much lengthier than any of its forerunners). As G. Ferrari and A. de Polzer wrote on the occasion of the centenary meeting of the sips, data relative to wealth were especially interesting for statisticians, since they “represented the final result of all economic phenomena related to production, flow and consumption” and were thus the “synthetic expression of all the elements of economic activity” (Ferrari and de Polzer 1939, 397). In his book, Gini presented, in particular, a critical review of the various

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methods used to realize such an estimate (he identified seven of them) and concluded that, in this regard, pluralism was praiseworthy, because of the difficulties encountered by this or that method before objective phenomena such as tax evasion or the lacunae of official statistics as well as because of the control that their combination allowed (Gini 1914b, 141–3). Yet, while his predecessors had relied on the “devolutive interval” method, which had been devised by de Foville and had remained up until then the most widely used, Gini submitted it to a very minute analysis. This method, of which a number of variants could be distinguished, was an indirect measure of national wealth: it consisted in estimating the latter on the basis of the amount represented by the patrimonies transmitted each year (the devolutive yearly recurrence) and relating these to the mean interval between two patrimony transfers. It implied hypotheses regarding the scope of tax evasion and the multiplier (the devolutive interval) to be applied to the devolutive yearly recurrence. Yet it had to be recognized, wrote Gini, that this devolutive interval changed according to categories of persons defined by their respective holdings. To take into account the whole set of factors in order to compute a weighted average and thus to rely on realistic hypotheses was “in general, desirable” but was not “in general, possible” (ibid., 73). Up to the eve of World War II, Gini’s monograph remained a reference and steered research towards the use of the direct method of inventory (that consisted in estimating the various categories of capital goods [land, buildings, movable values, etc.] and adding them), which he deemed preferable overall, in spite of its limits.1 The space between two poles along which can be located the various epistemological positions held by the most important statisticians and economists at that time is defined by the opposition between induction and deduction; in other words, between methodological statistics and mathematical economy. At the same time, these epistemological coordinates, which we may designate as A, B, C, and D, also coincide with the institutional position those statisticians and economists maintained in their respective fields. Figure 4.1 illustrates this distribution: For statisticians holding position A, which dominated the statistical field, methodological statistics was the fundamental basis of any empirical science. The haughtiest defence of this conception of statistica metodologica was presented on the occasion of the sips

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B C D Mortara Bresciani de Pietri-Tonelli Niceforo Amoroso Benini Vinci

Figure 4.1: Positions regarding the status of methodological statistics

centenary meeting in 1939. In the address he delivered on the opening of the session dedicated to statistics, Gini celebrated the figure of the “pure” or “integral” statistician who, instead of using statistics as a tool for research whose purpose came under other disciplines, has chosen statistics and its methodology as the main object of his scientific work while being at the same time able to master the developments and innovations originating from those other disciplines. According to Gini, science found its unity in statistical methodology, since statistics allowed for the coordination of physical, biological, and social sciences, statistical institutes and schools providing the institutional and material framework within which this coordination could be realized (1939a, 246). The program of this 1939 session and the content of the papers read on this occasion illustrate vividly the hegemonic pretensions of Italian statistics with regard to social sciences (and non-Italian statistics) as well as that of position A defenders regarding Italian statistics. Following Gini’s presentation on “the international position of Italian statistics,” three other papers dealt with methodological concerns. Two of them were presented by University of Rome mathematician Paolo Medolaghi on actuarial statistics and on probability calculus, and one by Pietra bearing specifically on methodological statistics, in the course of which he reviewed developments pertaining to means, variability, concentration, index numbers, applications of probability, etc. The next three papers dealt respectively with biometry, whose object F. Paglino defined as the “measurement of life,” and about which he declared that the contributions of statisticians had been more decisive than those of biologists; with population theory, which Paolo Fortunati presented as the meeting point of the study of social factors bearing on demographic behaviour and of the demographic analysis of the structure and conditions of a country, and thus able to encompass and posit

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in scientific terms the problems of sociology; and, finally, with economic statistics, which Giovanni Ferrari and Alfredo de Polzer defined as the “investigation of inductive laws” (Paglino 1939, 313; Fortunati 1939a, 388; Ferrari and de Polzer 1939, 397). The examination of citation practices is especially revealing of the group’s hegemonic vision of the field. In Pietra’s presentation of the most recent contributions to statistical methodology, Gini’s name was mentioned no fewer than thirty-eight times, followed by that of Pietra himself (seventeen times), and those of Benini (six), Galvani (five), Cantelli (three), etc., of whom Benini alone did not belong to Gini’s following. Above all, the survey offered by Pietra was exclusively limited to methodological topics on which Gini had written, thereby neglecting contributions made by other statisticians. Bresciani and Mortara, who had both played important roles in the emergence of modern Italian statistics, were each mentioned twice, but only for criticisms they had addressed to Gini’s own views and the refutations of these criticisms, rather than for their individual methodological contributions. Niceforo’s name was mentioned once, but somewhat indirectly, when Pietra evoked Gini’s criticism of the graphical or “profiles” method developed by this author (1939c, 302). This “total” conception of statistics, which put the “pure” statistician in a strategic position with regard to the production of knowledge, was supported in an even more radical fashion by Boldrini: … any man of science always knows and will use Statistics to a more or less high degree, more or less well, consciously or without noticing it. In that sense, physicists and economists, meteorologists and demographers, botanists and linguists, astronomers and geodesists, in other words all practitioners of natural Sciences, besides being specialists in the brand of knowledge they cultivate, are, or at least should be, statisticians. And, on the other hand, professional statisticians, those who deal with the inductive side of scientific research, never resent, practically, concrete scientific problems, and, more often than not, they are specialized in a few particular fields: that is why we find, more often than not, pure methodologists concerned with economic, demographic, biological, physical, psycho-experimental, and so on, Statistics (1942a, 17).

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Position D was, by contrast, the furthest from A. Founded upon a hypothetico-deductive view of political economy, it put forward the mathematical analysis of social facts as an alternative to methodological statistics. The emblematic defender of this position was Luigi Amoroso, a mathematician by training and a former pupil of Volterra and Castelnuovo, who held, from 1926 on, a chair in political economy at the University of Rome and was a member, as we have seen, of the css. Amoroso was also a member of the Consiglio Superiore dell’Educazione Nazionale, where he could play a role in the struggle between disciplines over their place within the university. The strength of his position relied also on his relations with economic milieus, private and public; he was vice-president of the Istituto italiano degli attuari, an officer of the board of the Assicurazioni d’Italia, of the Naples Bank, and of the Istituto nazionale delle assicurazioni (Giva 1980). As early as 1911, Amoroso had published a paper on the application of mathematics to the analysis of economic and social facts; his first monograph, published in 1921, was entitled Lezioni di Economia Matematica. As a whole, Amoroso’s intellectual construction relied on a complex analogy between political economy and physical mechanics: in the ambitious meccanica economica he proposed, the forces that determined economic behaviour were described as a kind of movement and the obstacles they met were assimilated to inertia (Amoroso 1924; Giva 1996). The contrast between the inductive approach of statistical methodologists and Amoroso’s deductive approach becomes neater when we examine the respective manners in which they approached model building or the forecasting of population growth. While Gini’s work was characterized by the search for empirical regularities from which realistic hypotheses about demographic dynamics could be developed, Amoroso, who wished to give a rational foundation to empirical observation, adopted a logical-mathematical perspective and thereby developed his “population movement differential equation.” Each of these positions corresponded to those developed on an international level, respectively, by supporters of the so-called components method such as British statistician Arthur Bowley, and those of the logistic law, like American biologist Raymond Pearl (see De Gans 2002). According to Amoroso, the ratio between population and subsistence was determined by two simultaneous equations, one of which represented the limitation effect on

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population growth of the amount of available subsistence, and the other, the stimulation effect exerted by manpower growth over subsistence growth. The resulting ratio could then be expressed in the form of a so-called logistic curve, which gave an accurate enough picture of empirical data (Amoroso 1929). In the political context of the late 1920s, which was defined by the launch of Mussolini’s population policy, Amoroso’s equation had the advantage of suggesting a (theoretical) solution to the Malthusian objection, i.e., that there is an inevitable discrepancy between an increasing population and available resources. In his 1939 review of population theories, Fortunati was forced to admit the logical coherence of Amoroso’s approach and could not offer much more than an a priori rejection of any population theory “built as an economic theory, in a deductive manner, with rationalist hypotheses” (1939a, 369). The opposition of statistical methodologists to deduction also had an eminently political dimension. To “principles that were universally valid in time as in space,” they opposed an “inductiveexperimental” or “historical-experimental” approach that linked characteristics of the economic system to a set of measurable traits; in other words, they counterpoised homo statisticus to homo oeconomicus (Fortunati 1943c, 393–4). We may consider as close to position D the work of Alfonso de Pietri-Tonelli, who, in a scathing review of Boldrini’s Statistica, wrote ironically of the latter’s scientific mysticism and reproached him for reducing mathematics and scientific logic to statistics (de Pietri-Tonelli 1943b). Also close was mathematician Pietro Martinotti, who, after having published a volume of Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica in 1932, published a series of methodological textbooks in which mathematicians such as Amoroso, Cantelli, Castelnuovo, Galvani, and Volterra, provided the main references. Outside this mathematical circle, the sole statisticians mentioned by Martinotti were Mortara and Vinci, something that illustrates the relative extent of D’s attraction (Martinotti 1936 and 1938). Between those two opposite poles, we may identify two intermediate positions. Authors located around position B, like Mortara, Benini, and Niceforo, may be described as statisticians whose methodological production was abundant; the range of subjects their work covered confirmed their panoptical ambition. Even though, in conformity with the theoretical views as well as the institutional

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positions they held, Niceforo, Benini, and Mortara never posited methodological issues in terms of an explicit epistemological rivalry between statistics and economics or of a necessary subordination of one to the other. On a practical level, their empirical work testifies to the fundamental status they ascribed to statistics and induction in the investigation of social phenomena, and to the distance they kept with regard to the deductive and rationalist model put forward by Amoroso. The three of them were positioned right at the junction of both fields, as confirmed by their respective institutional locations: having held a statistics chair for many years, Benini spent the last years of his long career as a political economist; Niceforo’s statistics chair was located within the Faculty of Political Economy at the University of Rome; in Milan, Mortara taught economics as well as statistics, and his political economy lectures were published under the significant title of ‘La Realtà economica,’ which evoked the continuous contact with reality that defined the statistician, according to him (1934a). These authors may be also identified with the more global project of an “economic semiology” (we may recall here the medical origin of the word – Niceforo also used the term “social symptomatology” [1921, 7]). In the early 1890s, Benini had been one of the first to write on this topic and, according to Mortara who would come back to it by the mid-1910s, Coletti was also among the few who had then shown a sustained interest in “the description of the state of the economy and of its variations through the use of synthetic quantitative indexes” (Mortara 1937a, x; Benini 1892; Coletti 1903; Mortara 1914b, 1914c, and 1914d). For Benini, as he wrote in his seminal Principii di statistica metodologica, not only were methodical observation and induction the appropriate way to study collective phenomena, but “deductive processes were more often than not dissimulated inductions, and, in any case, did not seem to constitute the characteristic of our discipline” (Benini 1906, 36). In his 1908 inaugural lecture, Benini, who had very early on expressed his reservations regarding marginalism (which had been introduced to Italy by Pantaleoni), had presented “inductive political economy” as “a possible creation of the statistical method” (Benini 1908). His defence of protectionism, which he developed by the end of the 1880s, relied on the contrast he drew between the principles that were held by free traders and the facts that were revealed by statistical analysis (Benini 1890). In his paper ‘La semiologia

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economica a base statistica,’ Benini put forward the idea of a statistical observatory, for which he set three preconditions: the development of statistical investigations in domains that had been heretofore neglected, a correct definition of semiological processes, and the formation of an elite of “observers-computers” (Benini 1909). This ambition may be linked to Mortara’s work on index numbers as well as to his Prospettive economiche. Niceforo, who was a disciple of Cesare Lombroso, originally taught criminology and social anthropology, and then, from 1905 on, statistics. After having held academic positions in Lausanne, Brussels, and Turin, and having spent a few years in the bureaucracy (in the Ministry of Public Instruction and then in the General Directorate for Statistics), Niceforo was nominated to a statistics chair in Turin (1914), from which he moved to Messina (1919), Naples (1921), and finally Rome (1929). His main methodological work, Il Metodo statistico, (815 pages long in its 1931 edition), was the crowning of an edifice erected over decades of work (acs 1940–70, b. 340).2 Even though Niceforo did not possess the mathematical skills of certain of his colleagues, he distinguished himself by his interest in graphical representations. Notwithstanding the central position he held at the junction of both fields because of his role as editor of the Giornale, Mortara held an inductive conception of social science and classified both statistics and economics among “the sciences of observation” (Borruso 1997, 210). In his 1931 Sommario di statistica, he achieved the rare feat of presenting a textbook that was almost devoid of any mathematical formulae. The literary character of the book, which, a quarter of a century earlier, would have conveyed an opposition to the mathematical turn taken by the discipline, must on the contrary be interpreted as a sign of supreme mastery, a proof of the complete and definitive integration of the mathematical dimension and of the certainty with which Mortara considered statistics first and foremost as a logic of the observation, description and interpretation of phenomena, around which he organized the book’s tripartite scheme. (His 1922 Lezioni di statistica metodologica were already structured in three parts: the observation of phenomena [kinds of data, of inquiries, data grouping, collection errors, etc.], their description [ratios, series, averages, interpolation, etc.], and the search for regularities [statistical stability, comparisons, causal investigation, etc.].) Originality, personal style, and the capacity to move from arid columns of numbers

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to a form of discourse where they almost completely vanished while never being very far away, were the qualities that made him the true grand master. Of Benini and Coletti, Mortara wrote that their work had maintained “this exact equilibrium between technique and logic, between the theory of methods and the practice of applications” (1937a, vii); of Niceforo, he wrote that “in contrast with many of his colleagues, (he) was never boring” (1925b, 333). In the same vein, Gini, who was quite able to maintain his rank before mathematicians, could also write that statisticians should never adopt as their motto “statistics with mathematics,” but rather “statistics with the least possible mathematics.” Rather than the respect of fixed rules, he compared the “synthetic aptitudes” statisticians should develop to “the clinician’s instinct” or even to “the artist’s flair” (Gini 1926, 707–8). The opposition between life and mechanism (as in the abovementioned comment by Mortara about assembly-line-produced American statistical textbooks being like “Ford automobiles”) was in any case a recurrent trope in the era’s political language as well in that of statisticians. We find echoes of it in Gini’s contrast between democracy as an “aggregate of individualities” and the nation as a “living organism,” in Vinci’s criticism of Bertrand Russell’s views on the control of reproductive processes (“the realization of this scientific vision would transform humanity in a kind of Ford factory”), or in Mortara’s comments regarding the superiority of oral teaching over the textbook, which existed as a complement to the former but could not replace it (Gini 1927a, Vinci 1939, 31; Mortara 1920, ‘Prefazione’). The views entertained by authors such as Bresciani-Turroni and Vinci were close to yet another position, C, which was located not very far from B, yet fell more clearly within the orbit of political economy and was characterized by an original epistemological reflection. Trained as both an economist and a statistician, Bresciani-Turroni was concerned with the problems encountered by the application of the hypothetico-deductive approach to the study of social phenomena, and saw in the statistical method, even though it was less rigorous than the former, a solution to these problems. As P. Bini wrote, Bresciani-Turroni was “conscious of a trade-off between the coherence of a scientific proposition and its relevance in terms of empirical adequacy” (1992, 45). For Bresciani, deduction and induction, logical coherence and adequacy

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art, numbers and the art of numbers The capacity to combine the scientific austerity of numbers with the humanistic tradition of the Renaissance was strikingly illustrated by the numerous papers Benini dedicated to Dante and in which he used statistical techniques for the purpose of literary investigation – an iconoclastic posture with regard to the idealism then dominant – or in Niceforo’s research on “numbers and style” (of the 282 items in Benini’s bibliography, twenty-nine (10%) deal with one or the other aspect of Dante’s œuvre [see bibliography in Mazzei 1993], on Niceforo, see 1953, 202–96, where all the books and papers in which he sought to “translate quality into quantity” and represent the style of classical authors with numbers and diagrams are summarized). On the occasion of the contest held for the statistics chair at Milan’s Catholic University, the commission stressed Boldrini’s interest in the work of Calvin when he sojourned in Geneva, a merit at first sight foreign to the nature of the chair (acs 1924–54, b. 2). The reference to humanities is present in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics short entry on Gini: “Gini was in the 20th century a true renaissance man” (Dagum 1987). Finally, we may recall that Felice Vinci was a poet in his spare time and went on to send a collection of short stories he had written to all subscribers of the Rivista italiana di statistica, for free (according to the memoirs of statistician Libero Lenti, who adds: ‘This shows that in order to be a scientist and a brave one such as Vinci, common sense was not an indispensable quality [1983, 155]’).

to observed data had to be combined and mutually controlled. In accordance with these views, which were in line with Karl Pearson’s positivism and that he had defined early on, Bresciani-Turroni was engaged throughout his career in a type of economic research in which statistical investigation played an important part. Discussing his work on currency, historian of economics H. Bartoli summarized Bresciani-Turroni’s epistemological position as one that “does not interpret the observations made as ‘verifying’ the quantity theory of money but as revealing the reality of facts” (2003, 353). Bresciani’s student Felice Vinci, in a paper he published in 1915 on quantitative induction in economics, took up the idea of a necessary

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unity between the interest in facts that was the trademark of the statistician and the economist’s rigorous logic; he reproached the latter for having more or less abandoned quantitative induction to the professional statistician, but he added right away that “the rare notions that are sure or less imperfect” in this domain were “the work of economists” ([1915] 1940a, 132). On the relations between statistics and political economy, Vinci held at that time, however, a position that insisted on the imperative character of statistical verification and acknowledged some merit to quantitative induction, but he also maintained the necessity of examining complex phenomena by taking deductive reasoning as a starting point. Vinci gave as an appropriate example of this methodology the work that was done by American economist Irving Fisher on the purchasing power of money. Having established by way of deduction his hypothesis of a prominent influence of the quantity of money over the volume of transactions and prices, Fisher proceeded to a statistical demonstration of this relation, a procedure to which one was inevitably constrained, given “the enormous complexity of relations between economic facts and the impossibility of getting our hands on all necessary data” (ibid., 146). In the 1930s, Vinci would move to a theoretical position that was more favourable to empiricism and statistics. He now declared himself against “a priori reasoning, conducted along a line of maximum economicity, that excludes errors and waste, political, moral, and juridical relations, all of which are, on the contrary, in various manners, the fabric and conditions of real economic life” (Vinci 1932, 245–6). He claimed also that “modern economic science [was] of an essentially statistical nature” (1937, 439) and insisted on the absolute necessity of large statistical inquiries, which alone can throw light on a number of issues dealing with economic as well as population dynamics (“there is no evolved state that has not set up a committee dedicated to what we call the study of conjuncture” [1932, 246–7]). By the end of the 1930s, Vinci would present himself the defender of a “theoretical and deductive demography,” based on mathematical analysis, which should be extended to practical demographic problems (1939). The opinion he expressed in 1940 on the texts of Statistica Economica had a clearly critical intent (capital letters and the use of the singular here indicate that he refers to economic statistics as a specialized subfield of statistics – rather than to data series, for which he would have used the plural

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statistiche economiche). Statistica Economica , as it presently exists, he wrote, consists of “no more than descriptions of the main sources of economic data” and offers no serious treatment of them (Vinci 1940a, 5).3 This position can be fairly distinguished from that held by Gini, and, to a lesser degree, from that of Amoroso; Vinci’s views may be located somewhere between Bresciani-Turroni’s and Amoroso’s, but he remained a full-fledged statistician, as shown by his position in the university and his own methodological contributions. He sought to define a kind of dialectical complementarity between statistical method and economic logic, which would provide a high degree of legitimacy in both fields, as attested by the close collaboration Vinci and Amoroso maintained as editors of the Rivista italiana di scienze economiche, and by the attention Gini gave to Vinci’s work, often of a critical, if not polemical character.4 Despite the range of degrees of legitimacy accorded to positions held by authors such as Bresciani, Vinci, or Mortara, it was Gini, given his “imperialistic” attitude and the considerable institutional means he controlled, who emerged as the most dynamic and the most capable of exerting effects within the field and on its confines, which were always liable to expand. And even if holders of all four positions shared the project of an organic and unified social science, its most ambitious form would be that given by the supporters of statistica metodologica. There was a direct institutional repercussion to this rivalry between induction and deduction, pure statisticians and pure economists, as shown by the discussions over the teaching of statistics held on the occasion of the css meetings. Given the css’s composition, where statistics professors made up a critical mass, opposition to their views inevitably fell on Amoroso’s shoulders. As mentioned in chapter 2, when Gini called for a vote of the css to support the creation of statistical schools in 1927, Amoroso, who had just been elected to the political economy chair in Rome, raised questions about “the finalities of such schools” and declared himself in agreement with the objections that had been raised by the Ministry of Finance (istat 1930a, 205). On the occasion of the debate regarding the enlargement of the pool of applicants to statistical schools, Niceforo, after having deplored the fact that statistics was not among the compulsory subjects for public administration recruitment examinations, interpreted this fact as an indication of a gap in

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public awareness regarding relations between statistics and political economy. People still believed, he said, that the former was a servant (“l’ancella”) of the latter (istat, 1930b, 9). In 1932, when Livi submitted a report on universities and superior institutes in which he deplored the fact that chairs in statistical methodology were sometimes given to professors from a different discipline (he mentioned actuarial mathematics, economics and law), Amoroso replied by once again expressing his distance from a view of statistics that he described as “a chapter of natural philosophy tainted by determinism,” which was an open allusion to Gini and his disciples (istat 1934, 18–22; the report states that, at Amoroso’s insistence, Livi mentioned a number of names, but these were omitted from the printed report). The question of teaching surfaced once again in 1936, when Boldrini and Niceforo denounced the fact that, in spite of the creation of a statistics faculty in Rome, the number of courses in the discipline had decreased overall in recent years. In fact, statistics had for all intents and purposes vanished from law faculties (previously a compulsory subject, it was now complementary) and demography had met with more or less the same fate in economics and political science faculties. Boldrini proposed that the css adopt a motion asking the Ministry of National Education to reconsider the whole situation and establish statistics and demography as compulsory subjects for all students contemplating the laurea in law, political science, economics, and commerce. As had become customary, Amoroso took a contrary position. He defended the measures that had been taken in the recent past by the Ministry and abstained from voting, arguing that being also a member of the Consiglio Superiore dell’Educazione Nazionale (csen), which was the body that had recommended such decisions, put him in a delicate position (istat 1937, 7). Amoroso read an excerpt of the csen’s resolution, which stated that “the statistical consciousness of the country should not and could not be considered as the heritage of a single class of schools.” He added – using words that indicated the intellectual status he granted to statistics – that a raise in “the country’s statistical consciousness” would be better served by the integration of elements of statistics into the programs of junior high schools (“scuole medie di grado inferiore”), if not in those of elementary schools, than by a move back to compulsory teaching of statistics in law faculties (ibid.). Stakes were high here also, since law faculties, which were still the most attended, and those of

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economy and commerce, which had known the most rapid growth, were an important “market” for statisticians. Indeed, even though, from 1913–14 to 1926–27, enrolment in law faculties had dropped from a third to a fifth of overall registration in universities (which rose from 28,026 to 42,570), it remained fairly stable from one year to the next, with about 8,000 to 10,000 students; enrolment in economic and commercial sciences, on the other hand, had grown, for the same period, from 1,379 to 5,886, or 5 per cent to 14 per cent of all university students (istat 1933, 135).

the “italianization” of statistics The proponents of statistica metodologica also maintained that, notwithstanding the universal character that is automatically assumed to apply to a discipline using numbers and figures, and despite the fact that one cannot speak of a French or even a German statistics except in the administrative sense of the word, there existed a truly Italian brand of statistics, which had its peculiar definition of the discipline, its distinctive concerns as well as its own language. The originality of this Italian statistical school (to which not all Italian statisticians claimed membership, to be sure) was, during the interwar years and even up until the early 1960s, the object of many articles and interventions on the part of its proponents (notably Gini 1926, [1965] 1968 and Pietra 1939c, 1939d). A strenuous defence and illustration of this school was offered in the lecture Gini gave at the London School of Economics on 11 June 1926 (almost exactly a month before he was officially nominated as head of government statistics). According to Gini, the originality and merits of Italian statistics had to do with its general orientation, which was defined by its interest in empirical facts over mathematical elegance, by the attention it gave to qualitative variables and by its specific contributions to various aspects of the discipline, such as means and averages, transvariation, indexes of concentration, dependence, or similarity (Gini 1926). As a matter of fact, the motto that was launched on this occasion (“statistics with the least mathematics possible”), on which Gini would never renege, looked like the symmetrical opposite of the Anglo-Saxon definition of statistics that had just been put forward by Ronald A. Fisher, in his Statistical Methods for Research Workers, which had just been published and that Gini probably knew: “The science of statistics is

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essentially a branch of applied mathematics and can be considered as mathematics applied to observation data” (Fisher 1925a, 1). Ultimately, by taking a stance that may be interpreted as a symbolic equivalent of the economic independence that Italy sought, the Italian school yearned to compete with its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, even though the latter was already, at that time, difficult to disentangle from mainstream statistics. The already-mentioned meeting held in 1939 on the occasion of the sips centennial was a significant moment for the assertion of this specificity of Italian statistics. In his opening address, Gini presented a comparative assessment of various national statistical schools. The Italian school held “a clearly predominant position” with regard to demographic statistics; given “the range, variety, and originality of its contributions” to statistical methodology, it could be compared “honourably” to the English school, and left “all others way behind.” Italian contributions to biometry were notable, yet inferior to those of the English and Americans; with regard to economic statistics, Italy’s contributions “were not inferior to those of any other nation” with regard to the narrowly scientific domain, even though, quantitatively, they remained far behind those of the Americans (Gini 1939a, 245–52). Yet, despite the obvious homology this comparison suggests (that between a “proletarian” and a “plutocratic” nation, the true competitor being always the English school – it should be remembered that Gini’s address was given in the context of Italy’s political isolation following its aggression against Ethiopia and its alignment with Nazi Germany), despite its undeniably chauvinistic character (according to members of the Italian school, descriptive statistics as well as probability were Italian inventions [see Medolaghi 1939a, 267], who presents Galileo as the true inventor of probability calculus; see also Gini [1965] 1968, 418–9]), and despite the undeniable part played here by self-promotion, this claim of originality was not devoid of substance. We do find independent, and thus more probative, testimony on behalf of this claim, for instance, in the addition of a particular appendix on Italian methodological statistics in a number of editions of the classic Introduction to the Theory of Statistics by G.U. Yule and M.G. Kendall (1940, 526).5 Even more significant is the inclusion of more than sixty asterisked entries prepared by Gini in the first four editions of the authoritative Dictionary of Statistical Terms by Kendall and W.R. Buckland.6 According to Gini, the dictionary’s editors

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had offered some resistance to the insertion of these entries; the sixty-four that were finally included were but a subset of Gini’s list of suggestions ([1965] 1968, 417). These terms, of which many had appeared in Gini’s 1908–14 methodological contributions, were translations of Italian concepts that had no equivalent in AngloSaxon statistics and could be attached to three areas of the discipline: the theory of means and averages, the study of variability and concentration, and that of relations among variables, with, in each case, significant importance being given to the analysis of qualitative variables. Some Italian contributions were directly integrated into the Dictionary, on a par with other entries, which testified to their diffusion outside Italy. This was the case with Gini’s index (1909) and coefficient (1913–14) of concentration, as well as of the mean difference (1912a). The nature of Gini’s additions to the Dictionary was quite revealing as to the Italians’ considerable investment in the description of frequency distributions (thus the proliferation of means and indexes), in sharp contrast with the Anglo-Saxon orientation towards sampling, significance, and the management of error. Inferential statistics was, however, the territory on which Gini launched a frontal assault against Anglo-Saxon mathematical statistics, by which he meant “the school that dominated the field, almost unrivalled: that of Fisher and Neyman-Pearson” (Herzel and Leti 1977, 6). The address Gini presented on the occasion of the Società Italiana di Statistica’s first scientific meeting, held in October 1939, and that was, significantly, entitled “The Dangers of Statistics,” was the initial salvo of this onslaught; the other meetings held by the sis between 1940 and 1943 – in the context where relations with scientific milieus of enemy countries were interrupted – would be the main forum in which this “critical review of statistics’ foundations” would be conducted. Gini’s central targets were the recent developments that had led to the definition of probabilistic sampling methods, notably the notions of confidence interval and significance tests, largely developed by British statistician Ronald Fisher. In the early 1920s, Fisher had published a number of papers in Metron that dealt with sampling and testing (Fisher 1921, 1924, 1925a, 1925b). Gini and Fisher met at the 1924 International Congress of Mathematics held in Toronto and they maintained a correspondence from 1926 on. In 1936, both Fisher and Gini attended the research conference of the Cowles Commission held in

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Colorado, where the former presented his paper, “The Significance of Regression Coefficients” (Fisher 1936). The task to which Gini then dedicated himself led to fifteen or so interventions on his part and may be described as a theoretical sublimation of his war effort – that included also many writings and conferences dealing with the much more concrete problems of economic autarky and demographic policy. This highly theoretical discussion, which focused on the logical bases and the “gnosiological importance” of the statistical method (1945–46), had its origin in a very practical problem Gini had faced some fifteen years earlier, when he was at the head of istat. By the end of 1926, because of a lack of storage space, Gini had to get rid of the original 1921 census forms, of which there were over 8 million. Whereas before, these forms were simply destroyed, he attempted, with the help of Luigi Galvani, to develop a methodology for selecting from them a representative subset that could be kept for the purpose of conducting further detailed studies (Galvani and Gini 1929, 1). A short while before, Gini had been a member of an isi commission entrusted with presenting a report on the issue of the “representative method” in statistics. This commission, the President of which was Adolf Jensen from Denmark, was also composed of Arthur Bowley, Lucien March, Verrijn Stuart (from the Netherlands), and Franz Zizek (from Czechoslovakia). Its report suggested that two different representative methods were equally valid: that of random selection, which it defined as that according to which units of a sample should be chosen following a process that insured that all units of the population under study had an equal chance of being selected; and that of purposive selection, according to which a sample should be defined as a subset composed of units that presented characteristics that were similar to those of the population from which they were extracted. Representativity of such a sample could be determined by comparing its dispersion with that of the population (Jensen 1925). For practical and psychological reasons, the random method was not adapted to Gini and Galvani’s intent: census forms could not be assimilated to a list of names of individuals to which a randomized procedure could be applied; they were in fact bundles in which members of families of variable size were gathered; on the other hand, the random method did not allow statisticians to make use of the information they already had about the population under study. Gini and

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Galvani thus chose to devise a purposive method and therefore selected, among the 216 Italian census districts (circondari), twenty-nine for which the averages of seven major variables coincided with (or, more precisely, did not differ unreasonably from) those of those same variables for the whole country. The chosen variables were: fertility, mortality, and marriage rates, the proportion of male agricultural population, the proportion of people living in agglomerations, mean income, and mean altitude of the district with regard to sea level (Galvani and Gini 1929, 6–7). In order to be considered “very representative,” a sample’s value on a given variable should not differ from that of the population by more than 1.5 per cent; a “satisfactorily representative” sample should present a difference ranging between 1.5 per cent and 5 per cent; a difference from 5 per cent to 10 per cent meant that representativity was “sufficient,” while a difference over 10 per cent signalled that the representativity of such a sample was “insufficient” (ibid., 2). Units other than districts were of course available; there were sixty-nine provinces, 8,354 communes and 8,347,995 census forms. Gini and Galvani rejected provinces because they were too large a unit and there were too few of them. Communes were rejected because they presented variations that were deemed too large. The idea of using census forms was also rejected because it implied renouncing territorial comparisons (ibid., 3–5). The authors soon found, however, that when they examined variables other than those they had retained, or when, for the variables they had chosen, they examined values other than the mean, differences between sample and population could become very significant. From this they concluded that a sample that was representative with regard to the average value of certain variables was not necessarily representative with regard to other variables or with regard to variance, to the distribution or to the mutual relations of those variables for which the mean coincided with that of the population (ibid., 20). From this negative experiment, Gini and Galvani drew a peculiarly radical distinction between “relative” and “absolute” representativity: while one may talk of relative representativity when sample and population coincided in one or more aspects of one or many variables, absolute representativity, which meant representativity for all aspects of all variables, could not exist – and it could not, in any case, be subjected to checking procedures, as the number of variables, of their dimensions, of the mutual relations,

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etc., were infinite (ibid., 22–25). The idea that the study of a sample could legitimately replace that of a population and that the costs entailed by exhaustive studies could therefore be cut seemed seriously compromised. This pessimistic conclusion would be rapidly put in question by an address given by Polish statistician Jerzy Neyman before the Royal Statistical Society in 1934. On this occasion, Neyman would immortalize Gini and Galvani’s experiment, showing that the method they had chosen could not but lead to unsatisfactory results: however, the right conclusion that should be drawn from this was that only the purposive selection method, but not the representative method as such, was to be abandoned. On a more positive note, Neyman demonstrated that the method of stratified random sampling could be submitted to a satisfactory mathematical treatment and that it also allowed statisticians to make use of the a priori knowledge they had about the population they surveyed (Neyman 1934). During a conference in April 1937, Neyman came back to the Gini-Galvani experiment, hitting the nail somewhat harder and presenting it as “a good example of how not to sample human populations” (Neyman 1952, 105; emphasis added). The 1939–43 Italian discussion on inferential statistics may be read as a theoretical generalization of issues involved in the spectacular development, mainly in the United States, of probabilistic sampling, which was based on the notion of confidence interval, a foundation quickly accepted by many statisticians as robust. In Italy, the idea of surveys based on samples had not been widely discussed. In 1941, Benedetto Barberi, who was then employed by istat, had made a plea for sampling as opposed to the project of establishing a national register of industries, which had been put forward by Livio Livi. According to Barberi, who would become istat’s director general following the Second World War and the main disseminator of sampling methods in Italian official statistics, “The point is not to make … a continuous inquiry of all production and of all entreprises, but only an inquiry into the basic production of a determined number of representative firms whose production amounts to a determined percentage of total national production” (istat 1943, 278). But this proposal had no practical consequences. According to Baffigi, the Italian preference for purposive sampling (or, conversely, the opposition to probabilistic sampling methods) was in line with the monographic tradition and its interest in the

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typical, which drew its inspiration from the social inquiries conducted in France by Frédéric Le Play in the mid-nineteenth century and vigorously promoted by Luigi Bodio, Augusto Bosco, and Francesco Coletti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Baffigi 2007, 55; see also, on the monographic method and its influence in Italy, Tolaini 2005, esp. 74–112). Given the fact that such opposition was far from being limited to Italy’s government statisticians, the defence of exhaustive inquiries, the search for concrete typical subunits as well as distrust of abstract probabilistic samples – characteristic of the Italian statistical tradition – may also be interpreted as a result of the territorial character of national statistical institutions and the kind of methodological imagination it fosters (Beaud and Prévost 1998b, 709). In Gini’s view, the approach that was based on the notion of confidence interval rested on a logical mistake: one could not deduce from the probability that random error exceeded twice or thrice the mean quadratic error, the respective probabilities according to which this error resulted from chance or on the contrary from a bias – in other words, whether it was random or systematic. In order to illustrate the type of error he denounced, Gini used a number of quotations from Yule and Kendall’s An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (11th ed., 1937) and from Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers (4th ed., 1932). Gini described as follows the position he considered mistaken: This is what is generally done. There is one probability against twenty-two that the intensity of the accidental error exceeds the double, and one against 370 that it exceeds the triple of the mean square error. It is hence concluded that: an error exceeding twice the mean square error has probability one over twenty-two to be accidental and twenty-one against one to be significant, and an error exceeding three times the mean square error has one over 370 probabilities to be accidental and, hence, 369 against one to be significant (Gini 1939c, 15; I follow here the translation provided in Gini 2001). Casting doubt upon the general validity of “random error compensation” (such compensation occurred only in very precise circumstances), Gini suggested instead the “prevalence principle of constant causes” and denounced the confusion that existed between

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the probability of a given value and the probability that such a value resulted from chance rather than from systematic causes (1941a, 1945–46). Developing these views in a subsequent article, Gini conceded that the theory of confidence interval could hold in the case of what he designated as intensive quantities, that is, values varying between zero and one and whose distribution was continuous (proportion of male births, mortality rates, etc.), but he doubted that extensive quantities, whose limits were not defined by convention (a person’s height, income, etc.), could be dealt with in the same manner ([1943] 1968, 377–8). Even though the discussion was conducted on purely theoretical grounds, it attested to Gini’s profound skepticism regarding the possibility of a predictable distribution of data that did not conform to strict conditions and, as a consequence, regarding the possibility of estimating, within welldefined limits, the representativity of a randomly selected sample. This skepticism did not lead to a thorough negation of the causality principle, but rather to an insistence on the unpredictability of social phenomena, given the limits of our knowledge.7 This criticism was in line with the views Gini had developed about probability in his early writings. These views were founded notably on a distinction between the objective character of an event’s probability for a determined class of phenomena and the subjective character of the process according to which this class of phenomena was determined. As a matter of fact, the study of any phenomenon (for instance, the distribution of births according to gender) rested on the constitution of a class that was defined by the selection of a given number of characteristics of the said phenomenon (for instance, male children who were born in Italian urban areas, who ranked first in the family, whose mother came from a family in which there where many female births, etc.), but one could not exclude the possibility that there could exist a stable relationship between other characteristics of the same phenomenon (both parents’ age, quality of the mother’s nourishment before and during pregnancy, …) (Gini [1908d] 1968, 152–5). One can thus draw a formal homology between (1) the distinction Gini made between objective chance, which had to do with the relationship between generic and collective phenomena defined according to certain characteristics and phenomena we may suppose independent from them, and subjective chance, which had to do with singular events (1941b), (2) the distinction he made between relative

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representativity, which may exist for certain characteristics of certain phenomena, and absolute representativity, which he deemed impossible (Galvani and Gini, 1929), and, finally, (3) the distinction he made between the probability that measurement error would reach a given threshold, and “the reliability level that must be given to a statistical result or to a difference between two statistical results” (Gini 1939c, 16). Finally, this homology, which drew together three propositions that belonged to the formal level of statistical methodology and gave a theoretical foundation to Gini’s radical skepticism regarding the predictability of economic and social phenomena, was itself but a moment within a larger architectonic in which we may include also Gini’s substantial theoretical constructs about “economic pathology” and political authority, to be examined further on.

statistics, social science, and sociology The dissemination of statistical techniques has been a universal phenomenon: from the mid-nineteenth century on, demography and statistics grew together, in a kind of symbiotic embrace; the mathematization of economics was the work of Walras and Jevons as well as that of Pareto; and biometry, a telling example of hybrid knowledge in which theory and method cannot be separated, was an Anglo-Saxon creation. As other intellectual constructs whose history was intimately linked to that of the statistical method (Quetelet’s anthropometry, Galtonian eugenics, or C. Spearman’s psychometry), these sciences offered statisticians a ground on which they could easily rule as well as a privileged position from which they could uphold claims regarding other disciplines, such as sociology, criminology, ethnology, or even biology, and the problems these disciplines usually dealt with. That demography, which was truly consubstantial to statistics, could play such a role is highlighted by works such as Principii di demografia (Benini, 1901a), Forza e ricchezza: studi sulla vita fisica ed economica delle classi sociali (Niceforo, 1906), Le popolazioni delle grandi città italiane (Mortara, 1908), I fattori demografici dell’evoluzione delle nazioni (Gini, 1912a), or I fattori demografici del conflitto europeo (Maroi, 1919), all written during the period of statistics’ emergence as an autonomous discipline. What enabled authors such as Benini, Gini, Mortara, or Niceforo to examine a whole range of problems or top-

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ics that normally fell under disciplines other than statistics was precisely their capacity to impose the superior legitimacy of the methodological devices they had mastered. Nowhere was this advantage more obvious than in the case of Italian statistics’ hegemonic stance with regard to sociology. Indeed, while there existed in early twentieth-century France, Germany, and the United States an already considerable and autonomous body of sociological theory, for which statistics was available as a specific set of tools and techniques, contemporary Italian sociology appeared, in spite of a significant and original production, peculiarly dominated by statisticians. In contrast with statistics, Italian sociology did not succeed in establishing a network of publications that could impose its presence on the public and formalize exchanges among members of a scientific community, nor was it capable of gaining a permanent foothold within the university (Losito and Segre 1992, 45). This situation is aptly described by Barbano and Sola’s diagnosis of a “diffusion without development” or “failed institutionalization” of Italian sociology, by which they mean its absence or near-absence from the loci “that confer the resources, time and status that are able to transform a culture that is socially disseminated and responds to given needs in a science capable of self-reproduction” (Barbano and Sola 1985, 52–54, 64–66, 78, 182). Indeed, notwithstanding the existence of a journal such as the Rivista italiana di sociologia (which lasted from 1897 to 1921) or the appearance, in 1905, of a Dizionario di sociologia, sociology was not integrated into the regular university curriculum except as an optional subject, as was the case with the 1898 course offered in Siena by Filippo Virgilii on the sociology and transformation of law. The fact that Fausto Squillace’s 1905 Dizionario was the result of a single author’s efforts rather than a collective undertaking, was in itself a sign of weakness. In 1906, the minister of Public Instruction finally rejected a petition asking for the creation of sociology chairs (Losito and Segre 1992, 45). It should also be mentioned that F. Virgilii, a leading member of the group editing the Rivista italiana di sociologia and himself the author of numerous sociological works, remained for the major part of his career a professor of statistics, and that his most popular work was the already-mentioned statistical textbook, which saw no fewer than ten editions over four decades (1891 to 1939). The same thing can be said of Niceforo, who would join the board of the journal after

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the death of its founder, Guido Cavaglieri in 1918, but who also pursued his career as a professor of statistics. A Rivista di sociologia was also published from 1927 to 1940 (its publication being interrupted from 1935 to 1938), but as its index indicates, its main function was to disseminate the results of French, German, and American sociology rather than develop an original Italian variety; its founder and editor, Sincero Rugarli, held no stable position in the academic and scientific world. About this, Gini wrote a few years later that, “In an appropriate manner, the journal was never designated as ‘Italian’, since it could not be said that it ever represented Italian sociology. … Even though he was a sincere and enthusiastic scientist, Rugarli held no university position and did not present high scientific qualifications” (1950–52, 247). As Roberto Michels could write as late as 1930, Italian sociology had “no academic citizenship” and its practitioners were either outside the university or holding chairs attached to already well-structured disciplines such as law and economics (Michels 1930, 20). Michels himself, whose quickly and widely translated Political Parties had established his international reputation as a sociologist, held a chair in the history of economic doctrines at Perugia. The very first compulsory course in sociology would in fact be taught in the academic year 1926–27 by none other than Corrado Gini, by that time president of the css and director of Rome’s School of Statistics. This course was especially idiosyncratic, since it was dedicated to the theory of neo-organicism, by which Gini designated the general synthesis he had derived from his own statistical-demographical research. That Gini felt that the regularities that sociology was in search of had to be uncovered and asserted with the statistical method is clearly shown by the fact that all Italian work he referred to favourably was of a statistical nature (besides his own, Gini quoted work by Benini, Bresciani-Turroni, Corridore, Niceforo, Pareto, Porru, and Savorgnan [1927b, 3–15]). And even though some Italians had been active within the Institut international de sociologie, whose seventh meeting was held in Rome in 1912, the Società Italiana di Sociologia would only be created a quarter of a century later, in 1937, again under Gini’s chairmanship, a fact that indicated clearly the degree of its dependence on statistics. Indeed, statisticians such as Gaetano Pietra, Paolo Fortunati, Lanfranco Maroi, Franco Savorgnan, and Libero Lenti would be among the main participants at its scientific meetings. Domination of its pro-

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ceedings by statisticians was especially obvious on the occasion of its third meeting, held in Rome in 1942, where they delivered no fewer than sixteen papers out of a total of twenty-nine: four were read by Gini himself, three by C. D’Agata (from istat), two each by N. Federici, L. Maroi, and F. Savorgnan, and one each by P. Fortunati, L. Lenti, and G. Parenti (see Garzia 1998, 71–7). On the occasion of the 1931 International Congress on Population Studies, held in Rome, the sociology section, which was chaired by Benini, included nine Italian papers, six of which were authored by statisticians.8 It may also be noted that the Società Italiana di Statistica, which was created in 1939 and comprised more or less the same people as the Società Italiana di Sociologia, was, strangely enough, referred to by the same acronym, sis. A number of reasons may be given that account for this peculiarity of the Italian social-scientific panorama. First, with regard to the internal dynamics of social science, the ambitious œuvre of Vilfredo Pareto, with the Cours d’économie politique (1896–97) and the Traité de sociologie générale (1916) as its two poles, constituted a prestigious legacy, whose management would have complex effects. On the one hand, it presented the image of a synthetic social science whose laws could be uncovered through statistical investigation and presented in a mathematical form, as shown by the famous “wealth distribution curve.” On the other hand, given its success and the technical skills its full comprehension required, Pareto’s œuvre furnished its would-be followers with a specific disciplinary identity that would not in any way impede them from intervening in the business of statistics in their own right: this would be the case, for instance, for an Amoroso or a de Pietri-Tonelli. In the larger field of Italian intellectual life, the success of the struggle waged by Idealist philosophers against positivism and materialism at the dawn of the century would largely inhibit the development of an Italian sociology strong enough to claim, vis-à-vis philosophy, a theoretical legitimacy comparable to that of Durkheim in France or Weber in Germany; Losito and Segre recall that the most eminent of these philosophers, Benedetto Croce, intervened strongly and decisively against the creation of sociology chairs (1992, 44). According to Barbano and Sola, this question of the obstacles to sociology’s institutionalization within the university and of Idealism’s opposition to sociology as “positivistic” must be seen in a more general context. “Positivistic” sociology was in competition not only with

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Idealist philosophers who defended an intellectual division of labour that was to their advantage, but also with Marxists (the best-known among them being Antonio Labriola) and with all those who were active within disciplines that already benefited from institutional recognition (mainly law and political economy) and with which sociology had to share its objects of inquiry (Barbano and Sola 1985, 13–4 and 167–80; on the Marxist critique of positivism, see Bobbio 1990). The obstacles that the institutionalization of sociology encountered were not some kind of an Italian exception. In France also, Durkheim’s work was unable to establish a position for sociology within the university; as in Italy, no success was met in this regard before the end of the 1950s. Peculiar to Italy, however, were the conditions under which the struggle for the acknowledgment of sociology as an autonomous scientific discipline was waged. On the one hand, at the exact time – roughly 1900–15 – when an institutionalization of sociology seemed a possibility (somewhat fragile, to be sure), a statistical field emerged and was rapidly structured; statistics, which drew upon a tradition of political-administrative surveys that often dealt with the same problems and objects to which sociological thinking was devoted, brought with it an epistemological and methodological framework that was able to take into account these problems and objects, but in a radically empirical and quantitative manner. The advent of the Mussolinian regime, which occurred in the period that immediately followed, “froze” this situation: not only could the ideological constraints of the new regime cope easily enough with the descriptive and apparently non-speculative character of the social-scientific knowledge produced by statisticians, but, with regard to the ambitions of his regime, such a “science of action” appeared extremely promising. Any historiography of that era’s social science must take into account the subordinate and non-autonomous position of sociology. Thus, any picture of Italian sociology as a mixed bag of the work of Corrado Gini, Roberto Michels, and of opponents such as Luigi Sturzo or Antonio Gramsci is far from being sociologically realistic (for instance, Losito and Segre 1992). The unity of such narratives is essentially the effect of an a posteriori perspective. Even though the works of these authors may have dealt with similar topics, the respective positions from which they proceeded can be understood only by taking into account the disciplinary divisions

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that existed at that time. Thus, while there obviously existed a field of statistics from 1910–14 on, there was no such thing as a field of sociology. Despite the fact that he insists on the institutional dimension in order to give some consistency to what he defines as a tradition of scientific research and “a single body of sociological theory,” M. Garzia acknowledges that “the history of Italian sociology is the history of the conviction that almost all the sociological theories of social action can and must be couched in mathematical-statistical terms,” and he goes on to define the paradigm of Italian sociology in the following terms: “empirical, theoretical, and cumulative science characterized by a meaningful and careful collection of data (historical, statistical, etc.), by experiments replicable using particular procedures, by abstraction and mathematical formalization, and by prediction” (Garzia 1998, ix, 4–5). Most of the journals Garzia mentions, most of the theories he evokes, the methods he discusses at more length, the names he quotes most often – all belong to the statistical field. In the same manner, nine of the fifteen authors Padovan designates as sociologists and demographers in the introduction of this book on Italian social sciences were first and foremost known as statisticians (Gini, Niceforo, Savorgnan, Maroi, Virgilii, Benini, Livi, Boldrini, Uggè; see Padovan 1999, 27–28). Thus, the ecumenical conception of Italian sociology such a perspective adopts, and that leads to quoting Sturzo or Salvemini here and there, has no great sociological consistency. What, on the contrary, is truly consistent within the corpus under study can be understood only as an effect of the statistical field (it is not by chance that Garzia, for instance, devotes much space to Gini and his neo-organicist theory). In the struggle by Italian statisticians to establish hegemony over the social sciences, one of the issues at stake was the domination of sociology by statistics, which they presented as epistemologically obvious. In the picture he drew of the teaching of sociology in 1941, V. Castrilli, after having criticized the “amateurishness” that characterized turn-of-the-century Italian sociology, presented statistics as “the relevant instrument for submitting to verification and control” the hypotheses put forward by the sociologist (Castrilli 1941, 12 and 17). Nowhere was this hegemony of statistics over social-scientific knowledge, this ambition for a “total” social science founded upon statistics and induction, more obviously put forward than in the architectonic project of the Trattato elementare di statistica that

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was published under the auspices of istat during the second half of the 1930s and in the various overarching syntheses that were proposed by the field’s major figures, with variable degrees of theoretical and speculative elaboration.

a monument: the

TRATTATO ELEMENTARE DI

STATISTICA

The huge Trattato elementare di statistica that was published under the auspices of istat from 1934 to 1942 (it included six volumes amounting to more than 3,000 pages) may be viewed as a crowning achievement of statistics as the primum inter pares of Italian social sciences. No fewer than forty authors were mobilized around this project – as one might expect, under Gini’s guidance. In the general introduction he wrote, Gini presented the Trattato as the first “complete examination of the vast array of subjects over which statistics now extends its dominion” and the base on which those who were preparing for the state examination in statistics could rely (Gini 1936, iii). Following a division that was similar to that of the curriculum of statistical schools, the Trattato dealt with five main areas: (1) statistical methodology, (2) demography, (3) anthropometry and biometry, (4) economic statistics, and (5) social statistics. These subjects were themselves divided into forty-five different topics (see table 4.2), offering thus a panoramic view of the territory over which statistics aspired to rule. For the most part, this treatise was not limited to the usual content of textbooks (methodology was confined to a “mathematical introduction to the statistical method,” written by Galvani);9 by presenting a vast array of subjects, it implied that an adequate understanding of these presupposed a mastery of statistical methods as well as of the data relative to these subjects. Table 4.2 presents the architecture of the Trattato, indicating, for each chapter, the author and the institution with which he was identified. The Trattato’s plan itself presents an image – albeit a deformed one – of power relations within the field. Thus, demography, anthropometry, and biometry appear as aspects (if not creations) of statistics, and the volumes dedicated to these matters include elaborate theoretical discussion (for instance, Rugiu’s chapter on population theory and demographic policy or Boldrini’s volume). On the other hand, the economic statistics volumes have a quasi-

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Table 4.2: Plan of the Trattato elementare di statistica methodological statistics (vol. 1): 1 The teaching of statistics (M. Saibante, Statistical Institute, University of Rome) 2 The organization of official statistics (M. Saibante) 3 The organization of international statistics (V. Dore, International Institute of Agriculture) 4 Mathematical statistics (L. Galvani, Higher Institute of Economic and Commercial Sciences, Naples) demography (vol. 2): 1 Historical demography (P. Fortunati, Ferrara University) 2 Demographic censuses (U. Giusti, National Institute of Agrarian Economics and University of Rome) 3 State of the population (G. Zingali, University of Catania) 4 Natural movement of the population (F. Savorgnan, president of istat) 5 Migration and exodus (M. De Vergottini, University of Rome) 6 Population dynamics (G. Rugiu, University of Rome) 7 Tables of mortality and morbidity (C. Pinghini) 8 Social diseases (L. De Berardinis, istat) 9 Causes of death (L. De Berardinis) 10 Urbanization (A. Del Bue) 11 Mobility of urban population (Roberto Bachi, University of Palermo) 12 Population theory and demographic policy (G. Rugiu) anthropometry and biometry (vol. 3 – m. boldrini, sacred heart university, milan): 1 Statistical investigation of the living 2 Biometry (quantitative methods and the study of the evolution of individuals and populations) 3 Anthropometry (human characteristics, races and types) economic statistics (vol. 4 and 5): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Income and wealth of nations (G. Pietra and G. Ferrari, University of Padua) Concentration and distribution of income and wealth (M. De Vergottini) Cost and monetary value of man (G. Pietra and G. Ferrari) Finances of the State, of autonomous administrations and of autarkical agencies (F. A. Répaci, University of Bari) Fiscal pressure in Italy across time (J. Tivaroni, University of Genoa) The calculation of price index-numbers (G. Tagliacarne, University of Milan) Price dynamics (E. Cianci, Ministry of Corporations) Wages and cost of living (P. M. Arcari, School of Statistics, University of Rome) Food, consumption and family budgets (G. Zingali) Indexes of economic state and progress (M. Saibante) Joint-stock companies (G. Barsanti, istat) Enterprise coalitions (F. Vito, Sacred Heart University, Milan) Statistics of supplies (F. Coppola d’Anna, Association of Italian Joint-stock Companies and General Fascist Confederation of Italian Industry) Balance of payments (G. Borgatta, University of Milan) Historical and economic statistics (L. De Novellis, School of Statistics, University of Rome) Agrarian statistics (A. de Polzer, University of Padua)

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Table 4.2 continued social statistics (vol. 6): 1 Statistics and social science (M. Marsili Libelli, University of Florence) 2 Scientific organization of labour (R. Tremelloni, University of Geneva) 3 Unemployment statistics (A. Uggè, Higher Institute of Economic and Commercial Sciences, Venice) 4 Insurance statistics (P. Luzzatto-Fegiz, University of Trieste) 5 Social insurance statistics (L. Cibrario, General Fascist Confederation of Italian Industry) 6 Public assistance statistics (L. Cibrario) 7 Judicial statistics (A. Spallanzani, Counsel near the Corte di Cassazione) 8 Intellectual statistics (V. Castrilli, University of Bari) 9 Statistics of tourism (M. Avancini, National Agency of Touristic Industries) 10 Statistics of religions (C. D’Agata, istat)

encyclopaedic character, with no fewer than sixteen different topics being covered, but in a much less organic manner, the relations with political economy as a discipline not being directly addressed. Given the breadth of the domains to be covered, this “integral” statistics mobilized a significant number of practitioners within the field, and offered at the same time an impressive picture of its ramification and cohesion. Aside from various public and private entities (istat and ministries; Confindustria), more than a dozen universities and higher institutes were represented. But the Trattato was also a Ginian enterprise, as shown by the massive presence of his pupils, disciples and close collaborators (around a quarter of the thirty-seven contributors circulated directly around the RomePadua pole – Saibante, Galvani, Fortunati, Rugiu, Boldrini, Pietra, Arcari, de Polzer, Uggè), by the abundant references to the master’s theories and methods (notably in the Pietra, Fortunati, Boldrini, and Rugiu chapters), but mostly by the conspicuous absence of other central figures in the field such as Livi, Mortara, and Vinci. It should also be mentioned that only five political economy professors were present. They were Répaci, Vito, Borgatta, Tivaroni, and Marsili Libelli (the last three holding chairs in “financial law and finance theory”). Among them, three may be described as holding positions at the intersection of the two fields: thus, Répaci was director of Turin’s communal statistical office from 1921 to 1926 and would be among the promoters of the Società italiana di statistica; Tivaroni was in charge of the course in statistics at the University of Ferrara for a decade, as was Marsili Libelli in Florence. As for Borgatta, it may be recalled that he belonged to the

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group that had been mobilized for the preparation of statistical documents around the problem of the war debt (see above, ch. 3).

from mortara to niceforo: the broader view Though no statistician could alone cover the range of topics covered by a collective endeavour such as the Trattato, the capacity to simultaneously embrace a variety of domains was characteristic of the most prominent. In order to reach such a position, not only did one need to demonstrate a thorough command of statistica metodologica and add to it one’s own personal input, but one was also expected to provide substantial contributions to some of the areas over which statistics sought to extend its dominion. In other words, the technical dimension that was typical of the statistician’s habitus had to be transcended, if one sought to be acknowledged as a true master, by a capacity to go beyond narrow specialization. The architectonic ambition that animated the field as a whole was to be incorporated and refracted within individual œuvres. Such was the case with the abundant, yet sober, work of Giorgio Mortara, for whom the statistical method led to an organic treatment of demographic, economic and social phenomena, as even a cursory examination of his bibliography shows.10 Even though Mortara did not publish his definitive summa (Economia della Popolazione: Analisi delle Relazioni tra Fenomeni Economici e Fenomeni Demografici, 1960) until he returned from his Brazilian exile, the impressive string of books and papers he wrote during his first Italian period, that is from 1905 to 1938, is a remarkable exemple of the broad view that was held by the major statisticians of the era. Aside from his significant methodological work (notably on index numbers), Mortara was interested mostly by the interdependency of economic and demographic phenomena, as well as by the respective movements and interactions of the Italian and world economies. The yearly Prospettive economiche, which he launched in the context of Italy’s precarious economic and food situation in the aftermath of the Great War, and that he would publish until he was forced into exile, offer an outstanding example of a mix of ambition with regard to objectives (“locate the Italian economy within the global economy, scrutinize Italian problems from an Italian point of view, make out consistent trends through the

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enmeshment of changing directions”), of restraint or even dryness in style (each volume took the form of a series of small monographs on various products [grain, wine, fruits, wool, coal, iron, …] or economic factors [labour, emigration, transports, money, …]), and of prudence – one might say reserve – in conclusions (“I have sought to present the elements of the problems and […] I have refrained, in general, from exposing and, most of all, patronizing any determined solution”). These were all traits that were characteristic of Mortara as an individual, and acknowledged as such very early on by his peers (Mortara 1937b, vii-x). Already in 1913, during the contest for the Padua chair, the commission, made up of Benini, Einaudi, Jannaccone, Pantaleoni, and Ferroglio, had ranked Mortara second, describing him as a “worthy equal of Gini …, a cultivated, balanced, exact mind [that] evolves within a more circumscribed orbit than Gini’s, with regard to whom he appears more circumspect, more rigidly technical, on the whole of a less diverse culture and of a less swift and less fecund genius” (acs 1912–16, b. 6). In this regard, La salute pubblica in Italia durante e dopo la guerra (1925), which was published in the Carnegie series and that dealt with the demographic consequences of the war, also exhibits a degree of caution, rigour and critical sense (of sources, notably) far above that of other authors, who had dealt with the same issues, such as Gini, Maroi, or Savorgnan. To be sure, this rigour that sometimes led Mortara to extreme severity against others did not prevent him from sometimes crossing the border that he himself drew between brute facts and opinion. For instance, Mortara’s assertions about bad treatment suffered by Italian war prisoners and the inhabitants of territories occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces (chapters 3, 4, and 5) would provoke some unease in the American sponsors and lead the editor of the series (James Shotwell, from Columbia University) to write in his introduction that Mortara’s work reflected only the opinions of its author (see Degli Esposti 2001, 438–40). In his 1923 Prospettive, he approved the “energetic will” exhibited by the Fascist government to “clean up Italy’s wounds” (Mortara 1923a, xvi); in 1936, he deplored “the Anglo-French-Soviet aggression,” that is the sanctions imposed on Italy after it had conquered Ethiopia (1936a, x). His writings also show traces of what S. Lanaro designates as the elements of a “nativistic economic anthropology” (1979, 55). According to Mortara, there was a causal link between

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critique and the enforcement of norms in the field L. Maroi was a victim of Mortara’s rigour in 1919. In the review he wrote of I fattori demografici del conflitto europeo, Mortara described the book as belonging to “journalistic-scientific literature;” he reproached its author with not “having put his brain to work very much” (!) and with having often quoted “opinions and second-hand or third-hand information”. After having identified a number of “inaccuracies,” Mortara added that “errors are generously disseminated.” Besides, “the sociological as well as the methodological introductions are an encumbering and useless baggage:” the sociological introduction was a “conglomerate of assertions that are historically unfounded if not deprived of any reasonable significance,” while the methodological introduction was “inaccurate and deficient.” Mortara concluded by acknowledging that Maroi’s book may have “received praise from the most undemanding critics” (a direct shot at Gini, who had agreed to write a preface for the book), but that the author should take this praise “for what it was worth” and rather take some profit from “the admonitions that, not without regret, I was forced to administer him”. (Mortara 1919, 353–5) We can see here at play the privileged norms of the field (exactness, preponderance of facts over interpretation) as well as the respective positions of the critic and of the one who was the object of the critique. Thus, Mortara held at that time the prestigious Rome chair, while Maroi, who was then thirty years old, did not yet hold a chair and was employed as a statistician by the city of Rome (he would obtain the rather marginal Camerino chair in 1925 [he was the sole candidate] after having lost contests in Bari [1921], Messina [1924] and Milan [1924] [acs 1924–54, b.1, 2 and 6]).

“the stage of technical evolution of a given population and its ethnic characteristics” and its economic system. Russians, who were “an apathetic people,” were well-suited to a Bolshevik-type wage earners’ economy. Italians, who were more intelligent and had more initiative, needed a freer economic system; corporatism would insure such freedom within limits compatible with the collective interest (1934a, 5). Mortara’s 1911 inaugural lecture at Messina

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(significantly entitled “The Nightmare of Depopulation and Italy”) shared the pessimistic perspective in Italian demography, and referred notably to the “Slavic tide” (1912a, 21). Yet, the conclusions Mortara drew by the end of his lecture (notably that a decrease in fertility was essentially the result of voluntary limitation of births and of temporary disunion of couples due to emigration) show that he was generally more inclined to the establishment of facts and their intelligible description than to metatheoretical speculation. Notwithstanding their differences, one finds that the impressive œuvres – as shown by the spans of their bibliographies – of Benini (1887–1952), Boldrini (1911–67), Vinci (1912–61), and Livi (1914–69), are structured by a similar tripartition (methodology, demography, economy) and thus present comparable breadths. The case of Rodolfo Benini is especially interesting given his generational collocation within the temporal arc that covers the grand season of “investigative” statistics associated with Bodio and Ferraris (who were both proponents of industrialization stimulated by the action of the state, and architects of modern public administration), the emergence of modern methodological statistics (his role in this regard would earn him the title of “first complete statistician”), and the period of Fascist corporatism (Gini 1929b). Benini came onto the intellectual stage during the debate opposing free trade and protectionism, with the former defended by most economists (first and foremost: Pareto, Pantaleoni, and Einaudi), and the latter favoured by a number of captains of industry and politicians. Benini preferred protectionism, using arguments that would soon be taken up by nationalist intellectuals (1890). The contrast between the imaginary homo oeconomicus of marginalism and the behavior of “real human beings,” between a deductive approach founded upon apodictic principles and the inductive search for economic laws, determined from then on a career in which the development of tools and devices suited to empirical inquiry (index numbers, interpolation, diagrams, etc.) would be put to use in examining topics related to the problem of social cohesion. The inequality of contracting parties in a competitive economy, which would become one of the favoured topics of Benini during the Fascist era, would lead him to defend, against “liberist” positions such as that held by Einaudi, the necessity of legislative dispositions protecting workers from capitalists and of the state acting as an agent of social cohesion (Benini 1930).

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Marcello Boldrini, who belonged to the next generation, became known primarily for his work on “the statistical investigation of the living,” which belonged to anthropometry, biometry and demography (and of which his contribution to the Trattato offered a synthesis). Proposing statistics as the method according to which this investigation should be led, Boldrini could thus examine a remarkable variety of objects and processes: the respective properties of human constitutional types (or “biotypes”), the social stratification of physical characteristics, the formation and succession of social classes, economic mutations, and so on. Methodology, epistemology and the philosophical foundations of knowledge would move to the center of this Catholic intellectual’s interests from 1940 on (he would publish an essay called Neo Umanesimo e Statistica in 1956), but this would not deter him from exploring other domains, such as literary statistics (Statistiche letterarie, 1948) or the structural analysis of language, nor from making contributions to the study of economic problems (incomes, prices, taxation).11 Felice Vinci, aside from a series of methodological contributions and critical interventions, as well as a considerable output of textbooks (among which was his highly regarded 1934 Manuale di Statistica), was significantly active with regard to political economy (his main papers in this area were collected in a two-volume edition of Analisi economiche in 1940 and 1941), demography (with a Statistica demografica in 1927 and a collection of his writings on Problemi demografici in 1939), as well as, although on a more modest scale, biometry.12 Livio Livi, for his part, had undoubtedly become the most eminent Italian demographer by the mid-1930s; yet the importance of his Trattato di demografia (1941) should not obscure the polymorphic character of his interests. His Elementi di statistica underwent no fewer than fifteen editions (from 1926 to 1968) and his more basic Principi di statistica, no fewer than ten (from 1927 to 1963). It should also be mentioned that, precisely during the decade that saw his rise as Italy’s major demographer, he maintained a significant output regarding economic matters: monthly research notes on business cycles in the Barometro economico, regular teaching leading to published notes (Lezioni di statistica degli affari, 1934; Corso di statistica economica, 1935), a monograph (La previsione delle crisi e la disciplina dell’attività produttive, 1934), as well as the setting up of the Centro di statitica aziendale (1936).13

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Among the research programs that presented statistics as the epistemologically privileged path to social scientific knowledge, the work of Alfredo Niceforo, which had been built on the “racialist” concerns of authors such as Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge, and H.S. Chamberlain, offers an even more striking case of multi-faceted investigations conducted along a mainly quantitative perspective – to quote Niceforo himself, “a quantitative symptomology of social facts” (1921, 24).14 The comprehensive character of this endeavour is clear from the procedure Niceforo proposed to follow and that extended the problem of economic index numbers to the whole of social life: (1) choosing the facts that are deemed “signaletic” of a reality, (2) translating these facts into figures, and (3) reducing all these figures to a single number. In this manner, not only could one reconstruct the diversity of civilizations and the transformations they underwent, but it also became possible, through “quantitative determination [that is] the ideal of any science,” to rank them according to a true hierarchy (ibid., 24, 20). The table of contents of the annotated “auto-bibliography” that was published on the occasion of Niceforo’s fiftieth anniversary of scientific activity illustrates in quasi-poetic terms his own topography of an integral social science. Thus, phenomena as diverse as human personality, physiology, mores and customs, war, delinquency, illness, reproductive behaviour, social inequality, economic fluctuations, linguistic practices, works of art, etc. were all intelligible, insofar as they were submitted to statistical analysis. In a perspective that was structured by a series of alternatives (deep self/superficial self, constant characters/residual diversity, hierarchical stratifications/massification, normality/abnormality, order/ disorder, progress/regression), they were all capable of being “translated into measures and equations” and represented through diagrams, “barometers,” graphic profiles or “parallelograms of forces,” for the invention of which the author’s imagination seemed unlimited. According to Niceforo, whose complete works amounted to some fifty monographs and nearly two hundred articles, statistics was “the scientific method par excellence.” He described its inductive program as follows: “objective description of a phenomenon’s manifestations, through a number of measures or an objective nomenclature; search for the uniformities of succession and coexistence between the various manifestations of a phenomenon; search

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alfredo niceforo’s topography of life and human societies (1953) i ii iii iv v vi vii viii ix x xi xii xiii xiv xv xvi xvii xviii xix xx xxi xxii xxiii xxiv

De anima (psychology) Among lost beings (criminology) New torments and the newly tormented (anthropo-psychology of the poor classes) The scientific organization of labour Anthropos (races and anthropometric characteristics) The turn (description and interpretation) De varietate hominum (the law of inequality; normal man; characterology) Human inequalities: the inequality in wealth distribution The ‘why’ of conduct Homo loquens (psychology of slangs and languages) Number and style About the millimetric map of Universe (statistical methodology) Biometry, biometrics and biological statistics Sport and ‘sportism’: biometrics and psychology Generatio praeterit et generatio advenit: demography and population science Some pages of history with numbers and otherwise than with numbers Numbers and figures of economic life Barometers and graphic profiles of the ‘worst’ and the ‘best’ in social life Cradles and graves Home and table Once again on the road to infirmity and death For a museum of numbers and figures of Italian life Magnificent destinies: civilization and progress Homo homini lupus: the structure and life of human societies

for probability and prevision, all this in order to reach progressively quantitative or qualitative formulas that summarize a constantly growing number of facts” (Niceforo 1953, 213).

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gini’s neo-organicism and its critics The most ambitious, the most militant, and the most speculative of these architectonics was – as one might expect – Gini’s “neoorganicism,” which he also designated under alternative labels such as the “theory of social metabolism” or “integral demography.” Gini’s research program, which had already been sketched in his 1908 monograph, Il diverso accrescimento delle classi sociali e la concentrazione della ricchezza (a work in which, as we have seen, hypotheses about social phenomena and processes were intertwined with methodological innovations), and presented under a more elaborate guise in his 1912 I fattori demografici dell’evoluzione delle nazioni, structured – at least until the 1940s – most of the work he conducted on topics that came under the heading of demography, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. The fullest exposition of this program was provided in the fourth edition of Prime linee di patologia economica (1935), a massive 700-page long monograph that was to become his magnum opus. This work (in which, paradoxically, numbers and figures were conspicuously scarce) was presented by its author as the combined product of his teaching on economic pathology at Bocconi University in Milan (1923–24 and 1924–25), on economic policy (1924–25 and 1925–26), and on sociology (1926–27 and 1927–28) at the University of Rome, his numerous papers devoted to economic theory and policy, and as well his experience as a statistical expert on behalf of a number of international and national bodies and commissions since the Great War (Gini 1935, xix-xx). As shown by the density of biological and medical metaphors throughout the book (the three main divisions considered the economic system from the successive points of view of [1] “physiology,” [2] “physio-pathology,” and [3] “pathological morphology” and “aetiology”), Patologia was an attempt at integrating political economy within the neo-organicist framework Gini had developed on the basis of properly statistical and demographic inquiries, in a clean break with physics-inspired metaphors that had up until then guided economists (Amoroso’s meccanica economica, for instance, was also divided along three perspectives: kinematics, statics, and dynamics). Against the deductive approach that was put forward by economists, Gini strongly insisted on the inductive character of his work; it resulted from “the direct observation of the complex economic phenomenology of the

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war and postwar eras.” Even if he did not wish, for aesthetic reasons, to repeatedly interrupt the long development that such a radical calling into question of orthodoxy demanded by presenting series of data, “figures, nevertheless, [were] constantly and precisely present to his mind, in harmony with the author’s nature, who, even when he theorizes, never forgets that he is before anything else a statistician, which means someone who reveals and elaborates facts” (ibid, xxiv; emphasis added). Gini’s neo-organicism was a revision of Pareto’s theory of elite circulation, set out in Les Systèmes socialistes (1902) and then developed in his Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916), and it sought to describe a set of cyclical movements whose rhythms differed, but that were linked by some form of synchronization. Gini thus distinguished: (1) deep biological cycles, characterized by the parabola of a nation’s reproductive capacity, whose ultimate decline could not be prevented except by the infusion of foreign, more vigorous, elements; (2) shorter demo-economic cycles, where rapid demographic growth, characterized by scarcity of capital and weak social differentiation, was followed by a phase during which capital accumulation went hand in hand with a differentiation of reproductive behaviour among social classes and where decline could be prevented only by the admixture to upper classes of the best elements of lower classes; (3) political cycles characterized by the alternation between periods of diffusion and periods of concentration of authority (political, of course, but also familial, religious, and economic). According to a contemporary observer, Pareto’s and Gini’s theories were sharply different: Pareto’s was largely descriptive and was essentially founded upon a series of examples drawn from history; Gini’s had an explanatory character, since it reduced all cycles to an ultimately biological factor and relied on statistical analysis (Levi Della Vida 1935). The neo-organicist framework consisted in uncovering all relations between these cycles, and, more generally, between the various constitutive dimensions of the “social organism” (collective psychology, physical, intellectual, moral, and cultural characteristics of populations, economic conjuncture, equilibrium between population and available resources, etc.). In this theory, the idea of natural selection played, however, only a minor role.15 Its defining trait was the identification of social with living organisms, both characterized by an evolutionary curve that led them from birth to extinction. Such was the case of nations,

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which were, beyond their social and cultural characters, biological organisms and that, like all organisms, followed such a parabola because of the exhaustion, in the long term, of their “genetic instinct” and of their members’ “germinal cells” (Gini 1930b, 15–6). Neo-organicism presented itself as fundamentally different from the organicism that had been developed by earlier authors such as Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, or René Worms and that Gini deemed literary and superficial: while the old organicism was founded upon formal analogies whose value was merely descriptive, his own version, he declared, rested upon a substantial analogy and its value was first and foremost of a heuristic character (1927b, 19–20). (This does not mean, of course, that Gini did not sometimes indulge in analogies that could be described as formal. The most obvious one was the comparison he established between the government – as a decision organ by contrast with deliberative assemblies – and the brains of higher vertebrates [1935, 67]). According to Gini, it was “biological chemistry” that had allowed for the emergence of a more exact and more fruitful conception of notions like organism, system, and structure; a living organism could therefore be defined as “a system that was normally in a stationary equilibrium, that was evolutionary or involutional, granted with self-conservation and re-equilibrating faculties” (Gini 1935, 55). The whole question was thus to determine if modern societies conformed to the equilibrium hypothesis and were indeed endowed with powers of self-conservation (which corresponded with normal fluctuation phenomena) and re-equilibration (which corresponded to pathological situations). Gini pretended that such conditions obtained on the level of demography – he gave the example of generational renewal following a war: “with the extinction of diminished generations, population comes back to its normal age distribution” – as well as on that of the economy. While political economy generally described self-conservation mechanisms (which rested on the foundation of “man’s natural tendency to buy at low price and sell at a higher price”), inflation provided an instance of a re-equilibration mechanism. Inflation, which Gini defined as “the creation, on the part of banking or government organisms, of a fictive purchasing power,” could, in certain circumstances (periods of rapid economic development or war), help the organism to survive, or, in other circumstances (in postwar Germany, for instance), take the extreme form of ultra- or hyper-inflation, two pathological

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phenomena that could lead to the disintegration of the organism (ibid., 133, 136, and 181). In this conception, government acted as a governor or thermostat, taking the place of the organism’s homeostatic faculties when they could no longer function in an adequate manner. The “economic physio-pathology” that was developed by Gini during the 1920s and 1930s attests to a profound suspicion – which was shared by many in Italy as elsewhere – with regard to capitalism’s self-regulating capacities. The optimistic hypotheses of political economy about “the coincidence between subjective and objective utility,” “the harmony between the utility of individuals and that of the collectivity” surely held during normal periods. But it was certainly not the case during abnormal or “pathological” periods, for which other regularities held and that, given the incapacity of the usual self-conservation mechanisms to be put to play, required other, more drastic, remedies. This was a reality that, according to Gini, had been demonstrated by the behaviour of economic agents during the war, the immediate postwar era and the Great Depression (ibid., 25–6). Against the hopes of those who believed that an adequate knowledge of the economic situation would help to harmonize the actions of economic agents, Gini thought for instance that “the introduction of an economic barometer, rather than eliminating cyclical movements, would on the contrary intensify them”; what was needed was “an adequate economic policy, pushed by the state, which, contrary to individuals, [could] act with stability and the long term functioning of general economic order in view.” This judgment was made during a meeting held at istat on the topic of economic barometers in February 1928, at which were present L. Amoroso, Riccardo Bachi, R. Benini, F. Carli, F. Coppola d’Anna, G. Dettori, C. Gini, L. Livi, G. Masci, A. Molinari, G. Mortara, G. Olivetti, and C. Ottolenghi (a summary was presented in Ancona 1928; Gini’s point about economic barometers is presented in a more developed fashion in Gini 1935, 576–7). It should be mentioned however that, given Italy’s condition, skepticism about the possibility of developing such an instrument was the dominant attitude then. Riccardo Bachi expressed this neatly in the report he submitted to the group: the immediate construction of an Italian economic barometer was impeded by both the low level of integration of economic activities in the national territory and the lack of statistical data; for now,

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only barometers specific to each industry could be realistically considered (Ancona 1928, 4–5). It is interesting to mention that when he came to define an economic policy and indicate its precise location between the opposing poles of economic liberalism and socialism, Gini did not hide behind the ritual invocation to corporatism, but rather pleaded, in a strikingly ecumenical tone, for “the insertion, within the complicated and delicate mechanism of capitalistic economy, of elements that are by necessity more or less rigid and controlled by the state,” through a trial and error process, in which each government had something to learn from the others (Gini 1935, 696). Neoorganicism offered indeed a quasi-protean character that made it capable of hosting, besides Gini’s biologizing nationalism, other constructs such as Boldrini’s Catholicism (“The origin of organicism, in its most elevated and most lively expression … can be found in the idea of the Church as mystical body, to which belong all Christians, alive and dead … The communion of saints, in this sense, is the more profound expression of the equilibrium between the distinctive functions of singular parts” [Boldrini 1924, 261]) and Fortunati’s Marxism (which will be examined in chapter 5). In this chapter, which considers the project of a total quantitative social science, the purpose is less to present a detailed examination of neo-organicism than to show how, in a manner analogous to the properly integrated or organic character of its content, a comparably comprehensive project was established on the level of the organization of research. Gini’s views, even though they did not rally his colleagues/competitors Mortara, Livi, and Vinci (they were more concerned with the interdependence of economic and demographic phenomena and more doubtful with regard to the search for a fundamental biological factor), were faithfully disseminated among his closest collaborators. For instance, Mario Saibante’s tesi di laurea (‘I meccanismi di autoconservazione della società economica’), submitted in 1925 and dedicated to Gini’s idiosyncratic economic theories (now in Saibante 1959, 1–70), and Paolo Fortunati’s numerous writings on demographic theory, were both of an exemplary orthodoxy. The creation, in 1928, of the Comitato italiano per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione (cisp) offered an institutional framework within which Gini’s neo-organicist research program could be applied to a variety of fields, and be submitted to some sort of empirical validation. Among the cisp’s most remarkable

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endeavours were a series of research expeditions, of a simultaneously demographic, anthropological, and bio-medical character, among “primitive” populations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and America. This fieldwork, which had an undeniably colonial dimension, was conducted by Gini himself and led him before groups such as “the Samaritans in Palestine, the Dauadas in Fezzan, … the Berbers of Giado in Libya, the Bantus of Maoamulo in South Africa, eleven indigenous groups of Indians in Mexico, the Caraïtes in Poland and Lithuania, as well as a number of non-native colonies in Southern Italy and Sardinia” (Gini 1955). This work was the occasion of considerable methodological reflection for Gini, which led him to formulate research guidelines that combined the most radical empiricism (“approach a population without any preconceived idea and thus having read as little as possible about it”; “found experiments upon the observation of facts as they spontaneously present themselves to our attention”), an a priori rejection of anything that escapes quantification (“limit the questionnaires to characters that can be measured objectively”), and the quest for exhaustiveness (“examine the great majority – if possible, the totality – of individuals composing the ethnic group”) (ibid., 142–4).16 Since the groups under observation were small, Gini and his aides were generally able to “examine,” if not all their members, at the very least most of them, and to make a series of measurable observations. The idea of submitting a human population to a total “statisticization,” which had up until then been impeded by their large sizes, was possible here. Each individual was the object, first, of a medical sheet, on which were gathered information and observations (body temperature, breathing rhythm, blood type) on illnesses suffered (with a clear interest in “social diseases” [gonorrhea, alcoholism, tuberculosis, etc.] and on gynaecological history as regards women). An anthropometrical file recorded more than one hundred characteristics, ranging from height and cranial configuration (dolico-, meso-, or brachicephalic) to weight and colorimetric characters, and was supplemented with material evidence (a photograph of the individual, dental imprints, the shape and imprint of the right hand and foot, a hair sample). A third file, dedicated to demographic information, was assigned to each family under study and sought to reconstruct the network of ancestry and alliances in which it was embedded, and collect information of a social or economic kind (type of housing, means of subsistence, occupation,

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language, religion, level of instruction, etc.) (Gini 1937b, 225–7). The perspective that guided Gini was that of the decline of reproductive potency that eventually affected any nation and for which senescent populations offered a privileged observation ground. The results of these inquiries were disseminated mainly through Genus (fifteen articles during the years 1934–42 alone) and through cisp’s impressive publication program (with four monographs on these expeditions for the period 1934–43). cisp published nearly twenty monographs between 1928 and 1940 (a third of them by foreign authors), as well as the Fonti archivistiche per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione fino al 1848, a monument of historical demography (nine volumes) realized under the direction of Professor Giulio Beloch. The 1931 International Congress on Population, held in Rome under Gini’s chairmanship, also led to proceedings amounting to ten volumes and 6,000 pages. The sections covered (1) history, (2) biology and eugenics, (3) anthropology and geography, (4) medicine and hygiene, (5) demography, (6) sociology, (7) economics, and (8) methodology, which may testify to a “multidisciplinary approach to population themes” (Padovan 1999, 187), but mainly illustrates the attractive power of Italian statistics over social science. On this occasion, at a time when his position within the field had reached its peak, Gini presented, besides the opening address, no fewer than twelve papers, and was thus present in all sections save that of economics (in which – need it be said? – no prominent Italian political economist took part). Gini and his group’s domination is evidenced by the presence of Boldrini (one paper under his name, but no fewer than eight from members of his laboratory), Fortunati, Pietra, Castrilli, etc. Mortara and Livi each presented a paper, but not Amoroso, whose name appears only on the list of those registered, while Vinci does not even seem to have attended the proceedings (cisp 1933–34). On the occasion of his opening address, Gini reasserted, in terms in which could be read as a critique of the deductive approach taken by Amoroso and others, his own profession of faith in empiricism as well as his pragmatic view of science: In the domain of population problems, we need facts above anything else. It is not that I believe we should proscribe theoretical schemes. Nothing would be further from my personal tenden-

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cies; nothing would contradict more the orientation I have sought to give to my school. Without theoretical frameworks, all facts would amount to an amorphous collection of materials. Yet, on the other hand, theoretical frameworks, when they are not filled with facts, do not represent much more than the skeleton of a building about which we can divine the elegance of shape, but that we cannot use for any practical purpose. (cisp 1933–34, vol. I, xxvii-xxviii). In spite of the solid positions gained by Gini and his group over the years, neo-organicism would encounter a number of criticisms from within as well as from the margins of the field. Alberto De Stefani struck the first significant blow in this regard as early as 1920. Trained as an economist (his thesis dealt with the theory of international commerce) and a professor at Venice’s Istituto superiore di commercio, De Stefani had worked with Gini on the development of variability and concentration indexes in the early 1910s, and again during the war, when he had been commandeered to do a study of economic and financial legislation on behalf of the Ufficio storiografico della mobilitazione. This monograph having led to a bitter authorship dispute between the two, maybe one should not be surprised at the virulence of Decadenza demografica e decadenza economica, the pamphlet De Stefani wrote against the “illustrious statistician” Gini’s demographic theory (1920, x).17 In I fattori demografici dell’evoluzione delle nazioni (1912b) and in a series of papers published during and in the aftermath of the war, and then collected in Problemi sociologici della guerra (1921b), Gini had vigorously upheld that the reproductive capacity of nations was the independent variable that could account for their destiny: Fertility decline was ineluctably followed by a nation’s decadence in all its aspects. Bearing in mind those who would be tempted to interpret his criticisms as an economist’s narrow and interested reaction, De Stefani warned that he was only “calling back to reality” and checking some of Gini’s assertions against simple facts (De Stefani 1920, vii). Yet, given the detailed examination to which he submitted Gini’s sources, calculations and arguments, he was clearly seeking to establish that the edifice rested upon very fragile causal hypotheses, the direction of which could not easily be determined, save for accepting a priori the truth of the theory they

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de stefani on gini’s statistical sloppiness Right from the start, De Stefani sought to discredit the empirical validity of Gini’s work by mentioning a surprising mistake – facts always being the touchstone, in the statistician’s discourse as well as in the proclaimed norms of the field. Relying on French material, Gini had observed that, during the last third of the nineteenth century, all classes of occupations, with the sole exception of ‘miners’, had seen their total share of saving accounts decrease with respect to those held by persons of independent means, an undeniable indication of wealth concentration, according to him (Gini 1912b, 81). Wondering about this anomaly, De Stefani discovered that Gini had confounded minors with miners, the same word (“mineurs”) being used for both in French. As a matter of fact, the French yearbook used by Gini indeed made reference to “minors without occupation, male and female.” This blunder did not invalidate Gini’s general theoretical argument, but it obviously sowed some doubt as to the rigour of his work. More importantly, and more problematically with regard to statistical analysis, a whole series of demographic and economic observations about France (decrease of tilled land, depopulation in rural zones, etc.) and which, according to Gini, were due to French birth decline, presented comparable values in other countries, which had undergone no comparable birth decline. De Stefani drew from this a dire conclusion: “almost all documentation should be remade” (1920, xi–xiii). Nearly half of the pamphlet was dedicated to a minute examination of the French situation, notably of the twelve variables Gini had identified as indicators of economic decadence: in each and every case, De Stefani concluded either that it was impossible to establish the primacy of the demographic over the economic factor, that another explanatory variable was present (for instance, an increase in tax evasion in the case of patrimonial transfers), that variations observed by Gini were not significant (if the number of labour stoppages undeniably grew in France, this increase was the smallest to be observed among European countries for which statistics were available), or that there was probably an error in measurement (while Gini wrote that France’s international trade was stagnant, for instance, De Stefani, who was here on familiar ground, observed a nearly 100% growth in trade for the 1901–13 period). (Ibid., 68–108, passim).

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were there to support. The hierarchy Gini had established between demographic and economic factors was, as a consequence, open to contention. If he admitted the existence of correlation between demographic and economic factors, the economist refused on the other hand to concede that there was an equation between demographic and economic decline. The “organic conception of classes, nations, and ethnic groups,” which relied on “the old analogies that always flourish again” and assimilated the curve of their existence to the parabola of youth, maturity and decadence, was therefore false. To the simple and unidirectional causal schemes of demographic theory, De Stefani opposed the notion of “interdependency” (ibid, 3). But, to this methodological critique, De Stefani added an overtly and crudely ideological one. De Stefani also criticized the “democratic” character of Gini’s demographic theory, its tendency to interpret history as a “collective and statistical phenomenon” that was “essentially impersonal, and thus ‘anti-heroic’: in other words, it relied on the ‘average’ rather than the ‘Great’ man” (ibid., 4; author’s emphasis). Indeed, Gini’s book began with a rebuke of the “popular” views that ascribed the fortunes of peoples to the presence or absence of “great men” and called for a Messiah, a Liberator, a condottiere, or a prince. As a matter of fact, Gini wrote, “any epoch had an abundance of grand figures.” However, epochs were not shaped by these great men; it was rather the other way around, epochs enabling or not “those who are exceptionally gifted to become great, when their ideas and proposals find an echo in the state of the minds and souls of peoples” (Gini 1912b, 4–5; he added in a footnote: “Or, to be more precise, in this greater or smaller part of peoples that makes up the ruling classes”). To Gini’s ambition, which was to elaborate a scientific, evolutionary history that would be more than a “commentary on names and dates” and a discourse about great men and cataclysms, De Stefani opposed a conception of interdependency that gave the ‘revolutionary moment’ its correct place, did not drown “heroes in the masses,” nor replace “broken lines with smooth curves” or rapid changes with continuity, nor reduce groups to “the number of their components,” but considered them in their “energetic result” and acknowledged an equilibrium between the possible and the actual, between creation and reproduction (Gini 1912b, 4; De Stefani 1920, 4).18 At the time of writing, De Stefani was in fact in the process of joining the Fascist movement: this would be done the following

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year, when he took a personal part in the violent action of Fascist squadrons in Fiume, Genoa, and Trento; soon after that, De Stefani would become the first member of the Italian parliament to be elected on an exclusively Fascist slate and from then on he would be in the forefront of the movement (Marcoaldi 1991). In a political address he made in 1921, De Stefani set his own “energetic vision of national life” in opposition to the “purely statistical vision” (quoted in Lanaro 1979, 252). The contrast between Gini’s vision, which was, according to De Stefani, “unilateral,” since it sought to reduce all phenomena to a fundamental, bio-demographic one, and his own, which acknowledged the “mutual determination” of “demographic, economic, political, religious, moral, and cultural circumstances” (De Stefani 1920, 5), may be interpreted as a sort of theoretical sublimation of a more strictly political conflict dividing the milieu of nationalist intellectuals. It opposed the partisans of “authoritarian neo-liberism,” of which De Stefani, soon to become minister of Finance in Mussolini’s first government, was the most prominent political representative – and around whom would gather, at least for a while, prestigious economists such as M. Pantaleoni, U. Ricci, and P. Jannacone, who had all held, during the war, a stance critical of the dirigiste policy of the so-called “economic dictators,” to those who favoured the statist, protectionist and interventionist approach of Alfredo Rocco, former leader of the nationalist movement, Justice minister in the same government, whose positions were in agreement with Gini’s criticism of “liberism” and his insistence on the obvious contradiction that existed between the harmony predicted by economic orthodoxy and the true behaviour of states that pretended to be faithful to it (Lanaro 1979, 257–8; Marcoaldi 1986, 9–55; Bedeschi 2002, 55–62). Gini’s economic views on liberism were clearly expressed in his report on raw materials prepared on behalf of the League of Nations (1922), as well as, in a more polemical fashion, in his brochure La revisione del processo contro il protezionismo (1923b). It should be mentioned that Rocco held a chair in commercial law at Padua from 1910 to 1925, during the same period as Gini held his in statistics (1913–25). A direct echo of De Stefani’s critique of Gini can be found in a paper published by Felice Vinci some ten years later, when, incidentally, he and De Stefani were co-editors of the Rivista italiana di statistica. The context was far different, since Gini was then head of

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istat and thus held a dominant and safe position within the field of statistics. Like De Stefani, Vinci attacked Gini’s theory of biological causality as exposed in Nascita, evoluzione e morte delle nazioni (1930b) and raised against it a series of criticisms and examples that were based upon the hypothesis of “interdependency”. Vinci’s attack was overtly political, since it described Gini’s “depressive doctrine” as a kind of “demographic pessimism” that did not entice “cooperation … with that active, motivating, and confident demographic policy, which it was the very high merit of the Duce to have initiated and conducted with tenacity” (Vinci 1939, 85). (De Stefani had written in 1920 of “catastrophist demographers” and “dismal Cassandras.”) Vinci took the opportunity to recall that numerous criticisms had been addressed to Gini’s theory not only by Italian statisticians but by foreign students as well (ibid., 91). In a later paper (1935), Vinci would put forward a statistical definition of the “relationship of interdependency” (something De Stefani had not done): it was not “a two-way causal relationship,” but rather “a simultaneously reciprocal dependency” in which “the values of an event” were related to “the partial corresponding means of another,” while this latter event’s values were in their turn related to “the partial corresponding means of the former;” it was the understanding of such relationships of interdependency that had led to Galton and Pearson’s correlation theory (ibid., 154). One also finds in Livi’s writings a global criticism of neo-organicism that relies on purely statistical arguments: thus, against the biological theory upheld by Gini in order to account for the decline of the small populations that were examined during the cisp expeditions (Gini imputed their proximate extinction to a weakening of “germinal plasma”), Livi upheld the existence of a minimal threshold (500 persons) under which any population was in a position of demographic instability and was susceptible to rapid extinction if its distribution took certain forms with regard to age or sex (1938b). A more general attack on neo-organicism can be found in Livi’s Trattato di demografia, where he criticizes the very formal character of the organicist analogies put forward by Gini (Livi 1941b, 17–20). As the regime further advanced in the direction of totalitarianism, a process that culminated in the enactment of racial laws in 1938, the gap between demographic theory and demographic policy became narrower and the struggle for hegemony over this turf became fiercer (Treves 2001).

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If De Stefani was not the first economist to take aim at Gini’s demographic theory (in 1915, Augusto Graziani, a political economist from Naples, had done the same in his inaugural lecture [1916]), the thorough examination he made of it and the “monist” epithet he attached to it were probably decisive as to the position its author could henceforth aspire to within the field of political economy. Never would professional economists consider Gini other than a statistician who collected data that could be of some interest. On a theoretical level, the unorthodox position developed by Gini through the successive editions of his Patologia economica could only confirm this marginal status, at attested by the weak response his magnum opus met with from economists. L. Amoroso, the only economist who wrote about Gini’s project, described it as “nonEuclidean economics.” When Amoroso spoke of “non-Euclidean economics,” he meant that Gini’s views were about what reality could or should be rather than about what the experience of the past had taught us about it. Other instances of such “non-Euclidean economics” were Marxism (which was founded upon the hypothesis of private property’s abolition), as well as Plato’s, More’s, or Fourier’s utopias. Amoroso conceded that Gini’s economic pathology, if it belonged to the family of non-Euclidean economics, was, however, “altogether more fecund,” but only insofar as, in conformity with “economic mechanics,” a pathological state was defined in terms that allowed the exclusion of “the possibility that it could not be exceptional,” a restriction that amounted to an emasculation of the unorthodox character of Gini’s views (Amoroso 1924, 54). The 1935 edition of Patologia economica would receive praise only from Boldrini, Saibante, and Fortunati, all Gini disciples and all statisticians rather than bona fide economists. Boldrini presented Gini as “an observer of things as they were rather than as they should be according to theory,” something he saw as a consequence of his being a statistician. He contrasted this perspective with that of “deductive economists,” which he defined as “checking to what degree economic phenomena of the war and postwar eras had been in accordance with the general, immortal, unchanging in time and space, in other words unreal, postulates of political economy” (Boldrini 1924, 265). According to Fortunati, the defiance of economists vis-à-vis neo-organicism was due to its “statistical, experimental orientation” and Gini’s requirement that any economic theory should be elaborated statistically and experimentally rather than deductively (Fortunati 1942b, 362–3). Indeed, one can

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measure, by comparing these judgments to Amoroso’s, quoted above, how rivalry between statisticians and orthodox economists coincided with perfectly opposite views as to the respective content of positive and normative statements.

the battlefield of methodology Notwithstanding its obvious successes in terms of institutional ramification – through the network of laboratories, institutes, journals, and other forms of scientific cooperation, as well as the national statistical system: in other words, the field’s material infrastructure – and of intellectual dominance with regard to interwar social science, Italian statistics remained engaged, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in a protracted struggle over the extent of its autonomy, over the degree of hegemony that, as a method but also as a body of data about social reality, it was liable to exert over its competitors, as well as over the distribution of power and prestige within the field. That situation can be described, from an epistemological perspective, as one of enduring tension between a strong propensity towards the integration of various kinds of knowledge (demographic, economic, sociological, anthropological, etc.) under the mantle of methodological statistics, and an enduring degree of pluralism and competition between all practitioners of social science who mastered the techniques of quantification. Independent events such as De Stefani’s vigorous attack against the “statistician-demographer” Gini, Amoroso’s repeated dissent over matters discussed at css meetings, and recurrent debates about measures of variability, can all be interpreted as episodes in this contest. One of the foundations of this rivalry was, as we have seen, the jurisdictional conflict that put pure statisticians in opposition to political economists. Another was the quest for hegemony that many in the field, from the 1920s on, imputed to Gini and his group, opening the way for the creation of two rival statistical societies by the end of the 1930s. In spite of their esoteric and formal character, the methodological debates that punctuated four decades of the field’s history clearly demonstrate the stability and recurrence of dividing lines, as shown in table 4.3. One of the most virulent of these debates occurred in the early 1930s, on the issue of the respective merits of various variability and concentration indexes (Pareto’s α, Gini’s δ and R, simple mean

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Table 4.3: Four decades of methodological debates Law of small numbers 1907–1908 Variability and concentration indexes (I) 1914–1920

Gini

Demographic theory vs interdependency (I) 1920 Evolution of industrial wages 1922 Variability and concentration indexes (II) 1930–1935

Gini

Bortkiewicz Bresciani Mortara Bresciani Ricci Vinci De Stefani

Gini

Mortara

Gini Pietra Savorgnan Castellano Gini

Bortkiewicz Bresciani Mortara D’Addario Vinci

Gini Pietra Fortunati

Vinci Niceforo Bresciani

Demographic theory vs interdependency (II) 1930–1935 The profiles method* 1938–1939 Inequality index** 1945–1946

Gini Pietra

* The profiles method, which was meant to represent qualitative characters graphically, was developed mainly by Vinci and Niceforo and was frequently criticized by Gini and Pietra (notably in Gini 1938; reply in Vinci 1940b, 310–21). ** This debate is surveyed in the next chapter.

deviation [Sµ], mean difference [
]). Those who took part were, on one side, Bortkiewicz (1930), Mortara (1934b), D’Addario (1934), and Bresciani-Turroni (1936), and, on the other, Gini (1930a; 1932), Savorgnan (1930), Pietra (1930, 1931–32, 1934b, 1935), and V. Castellano (1935). The properly methodological discussion was mixed here with touchy issues of intellectual property and national pride, Bortkiewicz being accused by Gini, Pietra, and Savorgnan – on the occasion of the nineteenth isi meeting held in Tokyo in 1930 – of having made use, without giving due credit, of results that had been derived by the first two some fifteen years before (on this incident, see Giorgi 2005, 307). Bresciani defended his master as he had done in 1908, Mortara – who was also a Bortkiewicz pupil – opposed Gini as usual, and D’Addario – who was a pupil of mathematician Bonferroni – logically sided with the position nearest to mathematical statistics. Gini, Pietra, Savorgnan, and Castellano agreed to defend what they saw as the Italian school’s most decisive contribution against all criticisms.

5 The Theory and Practice of Totalitarianism

Most Italian statisticians publicly lent their support to the Fascist regime or at least to some of its policies at one time or another during the ventennio. This attitude may have been dictated, in no small measure, by caution and conformism: those rare professors who dared refuse to take the 1931 loyalty oath were dismissed; praise for corporatism, and later for economic autarchy as well, became a required ritual from the early 1930s on. But there undoubtedly was a clear convergence between the nationalism to which most of them had subscribed well before the advent of Fascism and the latter’s colonial and imperial policy. Thus, Giorgio Mortara, who did not take his membership card before March 1933, later explained his decision to join the National-Fascist Party as a response to the horror he felt at Stalin’s regime on returning from the Soviet Union, and as having been under “the vain illusion” that “the coming over to Fascism of moderate and cultivated elements could transform it into a factor of progress for our country” (1985, 34). Yet, in late 1936, he established a clear link between nationalism and Fascism and welcomed wholeheartedly the conquest of Ethiopia: “The policy of national economic independence (followed by Fascism) had opened the way to this victory, which makes our pride and our hope” (1936b, 758). Under his guidance, the Giornale degli economisti committed itself vigorously to the campaign against the economic sanctions that were imposed on Italy. In a letter written to his protégé Paolo Baffi in October 1937 – just a year before he himself became a victim of the regime following the enactment of anti-Jewish laws – Mortara defended his own nationalism in the

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following terms, which testify to the ongoing importance of the “mutilated victory” syndrome as a source of resentment: With regard to nationalism, it is a good thing that a young person such as you should maintain some internationalist illusions. As for me, after having seen the truly despicable manner in which we have been treated by the French and the English during and after the war, when Italy was at their side with all its ingenuity, I have become convinced that the sincerity of certain ideas and sentiments was indeed very limited. … I have persuaded myself intimately that we should entertain no illusion as to the liberism and pacifism of others (quoted in Baffi 1967, 8). Others statisticians had joined the Party very early on: this was the case, for instance, of Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz who, besides his scientific training and career, had been an active irredentist militant in Trieste and who became a pnf member in 1922, at the time the Fasci di combattimento integrated with the nationalist movement (Rinauro 2002). Gaetano Zingali, for his part, had taken his Party card before the march on Rome and had later become Federal secretary of the Catania pnf branch in 1927–28 and then national counsel in the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth legislatures, from 1929 to 1938 (acs 1940–70, b. 492). For some, like Paolo Fortunati and Gaetano Pietra, who would become the main proponents of “corporative statistics,” support and enthusiasm rested equally on the organizational and planning capacities of Fascism, which seemed to allow for the transcendence of the antinomies of bourgeois society, and could attract statisticians with the promise of a privileged position regarding the management of economic and social policy. Obviously, this ideological conformity of statisticians was not exceptional. We have seen how, by combining the language of epic with that of physics and thus opposing the mass to the hero and his energy, political economist Alberto De Stefani, whose commitment to the regime was even more pronounced (he was successively a squadrista, a deputy, a minister, and a member of the Fascist Grand Council up to the regime’s fall), proposed his own interpretation of history and revolution. For his colleague Luigi Amoroso, there was in fact an elective affinity between Fascism and Catholicism and it lay in their common assertion of dogma against liberal skepticism as well as in their shared rejection of anarchy. In a series of lectures

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given in 1928–29 and significantly entitled Dal Liberalismo al Fascismo, Lezioni di metafisica economica, he wished to defend “the truth of the corporative order” by resorting to faith (1929, 23–24). The ethics of the corporative economy, which he described as simultaneously revolutionary and conservative, even restorative, were nothing less than the rediscovery of that “block of moral principles that formed, for a millennium and up to the Protestant Reform, the deep substratum of the Roman and Catholic civilization” (Amoroso 1932a, 1). In 1932, Amoroso would publish a full-length monograph entitled Critica al sistema capitalista. Amoroso and De Stefani combined their efforts when they presented, on the occasion of the Second International Conference of the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a report on the logic of the corporative system (Conferenza internazionale di studi su lo Stato e la vita economica 1934); in a paper published the following year, they reaffirmed their support for corporatism and praised Fascism for having “destroyed Mammon’s idolatry” (Amoroso and De Stefani [1934] 1982, 262). Yet, if Amoroso considered Protestantism as the source of capitalism and professed his faith in corporatism, he never went as far as putting into question his confidence in economic orthodoxy and in the marginalist model. He could write for instance: “corporative economics is not a negation of classical economics, in its logical aspect of a physics of economy. … This whole construction rightfully exists in corporative economics” (Amoroso 1932a, 4–5; on the manner in which Amoroso succeeded in reconciling a conservative interpretation of Fascism and corporatism with economic orthodoxy, see Zagari 1990 and Keppler 1994). Professions of faith made by economists in favour of Fascism were not rare – their degrees of enthusiasm and sincerity being of course variable. But the obvious homology between economic orthodoxy and economic liberalism remained an available starting point for a dissidence with regard to all forms of economic dirigisme, notwithstanding the almost unanimous gathering of Italian economists around the “liberist” or Manchesterian Fascism of the 1922–25 era. This dissidence was sometimes expressed in cautious and moderate terms, as when Luigi Einaudi criticized “economic trenches” – by which he referred to the protectionist measures taken in favour of existing industries – or spoke in favour of an open conception of the corporation – by which he meant economic

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competition (Einaudi [1933] 1982 and [1934] 1982). It sometimes occurred in a more dramatic fashion, as when, on the occasion of the May 1942 meeting on the study of economic problems of the New Order, Giovanni Demaria, editor of the Giornale degli economisti, launched, “in the name of the scientific truths” to which he declared having given his faith, a full-fledged attack against the foundations of corporatism and the autarchy policy.1 However, the theoretical content of statistics was not, contrary to that of orthodox political economy, structured around a nucleus of “established basic truths” on which history – if not logic – pinned a number of normative conclusions. As a set of devices capable of shining some light upon the grammar of reality – showing the world “as it is,” i.e., always subject to instability, unpredictable, and not “as it ought to be,” i.e., moving towards equilibrium and not requiring active state intervention – statistics could therefore appear as the method appropriate to certain intellectual tasks that were required for the establishment of a totalitarian society. The present chapter will focus on two of the ideological constructs that Italian statisticians elaborated during the Fascist era and that testify to their theoretical and practical ambitions. One is the physio-pathology of politics developed by Gini in order to account for the emergence of the Fascist regime as against the basic tenets of democratic ideology and determine the institutional design appropriate to a national organism, notably the quantum of political authoritarianism required for its adequate functioning. Here again, Gini set himself apart from his fellow statisticians and economists by the peculiar theoretical and ideological efforts he devoted to exposing the “scientific basis of fascism” and setting it against the erroneous ideas upon which rested democracy. And even though his nationalist political origins made him a fiancheggiatore – that is, one of those conservatives who, by contrast with early Fascists, had joined the movement at the time of victory – the criticism of democracy Gini articulated was very different from the widespread traditionalist reaction. Quite the contrary in fact since it was firmly grounded in the rationalistic enthusiasm that was typical of the modern scientific mind. In the context of interwar Italy, the Ginian critique of democracy was the kind of intellectual construct that could reconcile those who were guided by the scientific ideal, with the Fascist fait accompli.

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The second ideological construct elaborated by Italian statisticians during the Fascist era, put forward mainly by Gaetano Pietra and Paolo Fortunati, two statisticians who had embraced not only Gini’s methodological views but also the neo-organicist architectonic, is “corporative statistics,” a project that was intended to provide “a continuous vision of the economic situation” and allow “the state, in its integral expression, to harmonize and channel all the manifestations of its singular components” (Fortunati 1932b, 167). The ambition – never realized – of an exhaustive and continuous statistical registration of all human and material resources, defined as the sine qua non of a true “totalitarian organization of producers” and of “the state’s coordinating activity,” was a practical translation – by contrast with the cognitive projects discussed in chapter 4 – of the quest for omniscience entertained by Italian statisticians. In the logic of a scheme destined to support the integral planning of economic activities, statistics became the science of the state. Not only did the theoretical knowledge required for the mastery of material production as well as of human reproduction result from an inductive approach based upon statistical inquiry, but the practical knowledge that was essential to specific decision-making also took a statistical shape. In this totalitarian project of a ramified knowledge of society, the epistemological limits of the statistical enterprise were themselves extended. While traditional statistics had to content itself, following the criteria that established the field’s autonomy, with functions of analysis and prediction, corporative statistics, which took its inspiration from an “integral vision of the phenomenon of production,” passed these limits and replaced them with functions of supervision and control (Pietra 1934a, 10–2).

the science of political authority Gini’s ambition of an integral social science, which culminated in the author’s “economic pathology,” was supplemented by a “political pathology” that offered, on a theoretical level and in a language that reconciled the new dominant ideological conventions with forms of understanding suitable to a scientifically-trained mind, a rationalization of the political transformations undergone since the advent of Fascism. A towering figure in the field of Italian statistics, Gini was

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probably, compared to his peers, one of those whose commitment to the regime was the strongest and the most enduring. Ideologically and politically, Gini was identified with the Nationalist movement that had developed in Italy during the first two decades of the twentieth century. This was also the case for many other statisticians, and like many of them, as we have seen above, he was deeply involved in the bureaucratic organization of the war effort and the postwar advocacy of Italian claims over territories and access to raw materials. In 1925, he was the sole statistician among the 250 or so initial signatories of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals; the same year, he was chosen as a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Constitutional Reforms (also known, following the name of its president, as the Gentile Commission, or, referring to the number of its members, as the Commission of the xviii, or again, in conformity with the flattering tone that was to become a trait of the regime, as the Commission of the Solons). A year later, he was designated to chair the css and reorganize government statistics. His bureaucratic-cum-scientific credentials made him, for a while, an authorized mouthpiece of the Fascist regime, especially with regards to its demographic policy, which he presented and defended publicly in a number of European languages (see for instance Gini 1931b, which is the English version of a chapter in a multi-authored monograph devoted to the regime’s accomplishments, contemporaneously published in Italian and in French; Gini’s essay was also translated in Polish and German academic journals). In spite of his resignation from istat and the css in 1932, Gini was an outstanding figure in the academic and statistical world throughout the 1930s. He remained a high-level propagandist of the regime on the occasion of the numerous conferences he was allowed to attend outside Italy. And while the anti-Jewish campaign, and above all Italy’s entry into the war on Germany’s side, had sown doubt if not consternation in the minds of many, Gini delivered two highly politically-loaded conferences in Berlin, one before the German Press Association and the other before the German Superior Institute of Economic Science, by early 1942. This resilient commitment led, in the aftermath of the regime’s fall, to his being accused of Fascist activities; his university privileges and duties as well as his position as sis chairman were suspended for a year. The writings Gini specifically devoted to comparing the respective merits of Fascism and democracy were of course a very minor part of his abundant œuvre. They were, however, written in decisive

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periods: the years of building up the regime (with Gini’s contribution to the 1925 Constitutional Commission and the appearance in the American Political Science Quarterly of an address he delivered in Washington that same year, under the eloquent title of “The Scientific Basis of Fascism,” shortly afterward), the era of the alliance with Nazi Germany (with, notably, ‘La lotta attuale tra popoli conservatori e popoli espansionisti’ [The Present Struggle Between Conservative and Expansionist Peoples, 1941] or ‘La crisi della borghesia e il compito dei regimi totalitari’ [Crisis of the Bourgeoisie and Duties of the Totalitarian Regimes, 1942], two papers with self-evident titles), and that of the intermezzo between Fascism and the Republic (with Problemi del dopoguerra, a brochure published in 1944). In conformity with the dominant views of the Italian nationalist movement, Gini’s writings echoed the complex and diverse antiparliamentarian tradition that permeated post-Risorgimental Italy, as well as the cyclical model of history characteristic of Machiavelli’s, Polybius’s, Plutarch’s, and Aristotle’s social and political thought (on Italian anti-parliamentarianism, see Patrucco 1992). To be sure, this critique was largely founded upon a common set of arguments that had already been developed before the war and to which the complicated aftermath of Italian intervention had given an unexpected boost. The passage from parliamentary democracy to party democracy, including the spectacular extension of electoral franchise at the turn of the century, the calls for proportional representation (and in some cases, its introduction), the progressive replacement of traditional political elites by “party men” in the modern sense of the term, the displacement of discussion from Parliament to party headquarters, were all characteristic features, and were met, notably in Italy and France, with very acute reactions (Manin 1997). Indeed, the years that preceded and followed the war witnessed a flood of books and articles attacking or defending democracy, which they generally defined as the combination of universal suffrage and parliamentarianism. On either side of the Alps, the authors of these writings, some of which were primarily polemical tracts while others were of a more learned character, quoted and criticized each other, positioning themselves along similar dividing lines.2 Thus, the stigmatization of liberal atomism was undoubtedly a convention of Fascist political discourse (and, in fact, of many currents that were critical of democracy from the turn of the

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century on), but Gini gave it a peculiar turn when he defined the problem of political representation as one of computation and weighting of interests at play.3 At a conjuncture that looked like the dawn of a post-democratic age and in conformity with the “metric” habitus of the statistician, Gini proposed a clearer and more radical version of this indictment. It resulted in a “political pathology” that could be defined, following Gini’s own characterization of his “economic pathology,” as the study of the causes of disequilibrium of polities and of the mechanisms for restoring their equilibrium (1935, 725–6). In the same way as economic pathology had emerged as a response to traditional or liberist political economy’s refusal to take into account the real economic behaviour of states, political pathology adopted a realist or naturalist stance, in the disillusioned mode characteristic of the Paretian tradition. To those who saw in majoritarian opinion the ultima ratio of decision-making, Gini raised the question of the measurement, weighting and aggregation problems encountered by any collective undertaking. The intensity of preferences, intergenerational equity, the opposition of individual and collective interests, the aggregation problems that the determination of social choice ran up against, the problematic definition of a common good: all these topics that derive from the classical theme of the “just political order” are present in Gini’s writings, but detached from their normative dimension and brutally laid down on the ground of hard facts.

The Equality, Intensity, and Weighting of Interests “The Scientific Basis of Fascism”: this was the title of Gini’s 1925 address, which he made on the occasion of the Italian Debt Funding Commission’s visit to Washington. A few months earlier, as mentioned above, he had been appointed to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Constitutional Reforms, a clear indication of the new rulers’ trust. The proceedings of this body, whose creation was decreed on 31 January 1925 and whose report was tabled in July of the same year, dealt with relations between the executive and legislative branches of government as well as with those between the state and its citizens, as individuals and as members of various associations (Relazioni e proposte della Commissione

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presidenziale per lo studio delle riforme costituzionali 1925). It should be remembered that Italy was by then in the thick of the transition between the democratic-liberal and authoritarian regimes. We can date Mussolini’s “Eighteenth Brumaire,” that is, the actual move from the old democratic-liberal regime that had existed from the Unification to the advent of the properly Fascist regime, from November 1926, this being the final point of a transition begun on the aftermath of Socialist MP Matteotti’s assassination, in June 1924 (De Felice [1968] 1995, 220–1). Gini frankly acknowledged the revolutionary and minoritarian character of Mussolini’s seizure of power (he described it as “a succession of coups d’état”) and he spoke of fascism as an experiment, a term that connoted both the phenomenon’s novelty and its interest with regard to a scientific approach to political phenomena (Gini 1927a, 111). Don’t the accession of the Fascist Party to power and its capacity to maintain itself in this position, Gini asked, demonstrate “that the premises that the scientific world adopts as the basis of political theory and political practice are at least incomplete, if not inexact, in so far as they fail to meet the exigencies of certain situations that can occur in the lives of nations” (ibid., 99)? The first and most obvious of these premises was “that the government should rest upon the consent of the majority of the citizens and interpret the will of that majority.” Yet, Italian events from 1920 to 1925 rather illustrate that the Fascist minority was “disposed to fight and die rather than relinquish power,” while a disparate majority, “composed of elements more or less openly opposed to the Fascist regime, did not manifest any comparable interest in the contest.” The evident falsification of the initial premise that was imposed by historical experience resulted from the fact that it “takes for granted … that the majority and the minority that take shape in connection with various questions manifest in the solution of those questions an interest, if not identical with their own magnitude, at least in the same order of magnitude.” This egalitarian a priori is “taken for granted not with respect to particular individuals” (nobody denies that interest and participation in the political process vary widely from one person to another), but “with regard to the average of the majority or minority.” The right of the majority which democratic theory rests upon may be “generalized and transformed into the postulate of the pre-eminence of interests, according to which the government is to be administered by the

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part of the population that represents the prevailing interests” (ibid., 99–100). The combination of universal suffrage (a quasiuniversal [male] franchise had been introduced in Italy in 1912) and of proportional representation (introduced for its part in 1919) was the purest institutional translation of this postulate.4 Such a principle may be deemed a satisfactory approximation of reality in many circumstances. Even though the hypothesis of a comparable magnitude between contending parties and their respective interests would obtain only rarely, the introduction of adequate correctives might allow for the proper assessment of the latter, independent of the respective sizes of majority and minority. The unequal distribution of material resources (at the limit, bribery) and propaganda might play such a role. In given circumstances, however, the questions at hand might have such a vital and fundamental importance that neither persuasion nor material interest will be sufficient to correctly attain the true equilibrium: Neither from the moral point of view nor from the political point of view is there anything, as a matter of fact, which can justify a state of affairs wherein one individual whose interests are prejudiced by reason of a given governmental measure or program to the extent, let us say, of ten monetary units, must give way to two individuals each of whom derives, in consequence of the particular program or measure, an advantage to the extent of, let us say, three monetary units (ibid., 102). The defect of the democratic postulate therefore resides in the fact that it neglects to take into account the intensity of preferences; in other words, that it consists in adding the number of votes rather than weighting the interests. The gross equivalence it establishes results in giving to the interests of the numerical minority a magnitude that is proportional to its size, namely one third, while an adequate weighting procedure would establish its preponderance, in this case 5/8 ([1 X 10]/[2 X 3] + [1 X 10]). In a document written to defend himself during the purge trial to which he was subjected in 1944–45, Gini declared, regarding precisely this paper that his accusers described as an “apology for Fascism”: “An eminent Norwegian colleague, Dr. Ragnar Frisch, said about this theory that it moved into the political field the theory of weighted averages,

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of which the theory of simple means is a particular case” (acs 1944–46, b. 16).5 The same argument was reiterated, in completely different circumstances, in a 1944 brochure entitled Problemi del dopoguerra. In a section entitled “Number of voters and weight of represented interests,” Gini gave the example of a measure that would offer an advantage of “intensity 1” to 90 per cent of voters and a disadvantage of “intensity 20” for the remaining 10 per cent: such a measure would obtain an impressive majority, yet, the comparison of advantages [1 X 90]) and disadvantages [20 X 10] would result in an overall disadvantage whose intensity can be assessed [110] (Gini 1944, 61–2). The use of violence (or at least civil disobedience) by a numerical minority whose interests, however, had more weight is once again mentioned, as a kind of homeostatic mechanism that insures an adequate representation of this preponderance when other means – propaganda, corruption – fail. Gini evoked in this regard the annexation of Fiume and quoted examples given by American author A.L. Lowell in his 1923 Public opinion in war and peace: the Suffragists in Britain, the resistance of Southern white Americans to Black voting rights, the Irish rebellion.6 In this brochure written following Mussolini’s first fall from power and at the request of the Social-Democratic party, the solutions put forward by Gini in order to counter the problem posed by the democratic levelling of preferences were of course of a different character than those he had championed in 1925 (acs 1944–46, b. 16); we shall come back to these differences later. The point here is that the diagnosis of a distortion of true preferences because of the legally enforced equality of suffrage was upheld: the fact that Gini came back with the same argument in two radically different political contexts suggests that it cannot be dismissed as opportunistic or apologetic. The “one person/one vote” equation was founded upon an atomistic view of society, which it implicitly defined as “an aggregate of individuals who must look after their own interests” and that regarded the state as “an emanation of the individual wills intended to eliminate the conflicts between the interests of individuals.” As a consequence of this methodological individualism, it could not take into account the reality of the nation, which was a distinctive organism, with its own life and interests (and whose

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foundations were in the last instance of a biological character, according to Gini’s cyclical theory). Democratic theory only took into consideration the interests of the present generation, or, at least, it postulated an ever-present harmony between the desires of the present generation and the interests of future generations. Yet it was far from impossible that the two might collide, or at least, that they might differ in intensity or in direction (Gini 1927a, 102–3). Democratic theory, because of the atomistic view upon which it was founded, embodied thus a second major defect, since it did not take into account the problem of intergenerational equity. Because of this, it encouraged the hedonism and apathy that were characteristic of the declining bourgeois society and of which one of the most obvious symptoms was birth decline, to which Gini imputed a series of negative consequences. The comparison between the population policies of democratic nations and those of totalitarian nations, developed at length by Gini in two papers published during the war, shed light on this defect (Gini 1940a and 1941c). The former remained centred on present generations: their objective was a stationary population; they viewed birth control with sympathy and envisioned the transfer of resources to families with children as the best solution to the problem of birth decline. The latter took into account future generations: they aimed at population growth and supplemented the transfer of resources with a number of coercive measures. Gini repeated here an argument he had previously developed: by comparison with individuals for whom “the future is short and uncertain” and who computed the difference between the value of present goods and that of future goods by measuring the cost of renouncing the former while waiting for the latter to appear, the state, whose existence was “at least in theory, infinite,” could include generations to come in its calculations, as well as the present ones (1931a, 150). This criticism may be interpreted by and large as a formal and systematic version of the conventions through which, on the eve of the First World War, Italian nationalists discussed relations between nationalism and democracy – in other words, their translation into the language and categories that were specific to the statistical field. Independently of the positions taken by participants in this debate (one may, following P.M. Arcari’s tripartite scheme, distinguish between “democrats,” for whom both terms were necessarily compatible, “reactionaries,” who favoured an aristocratic nationalism,

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and those who were “equidistant,” that is, who refused to choose between positions they deemed too uncompromising [Arcari 1934–39, 779–801]),7 the fact is that it was conducted in the shadow of the merciless trial to which democracy was subjected in France by such resolute opponents as Charles Maurras’ Action française monarchists or the revolutionary syndicalists inspired by Georges Sorel’s writings. In the major work that defined the position of democratic nationalists, Il nazionalismo e i partiti politici, written by sociologist Scipio Sighele (who would resign from the Italian Nationalist Association following its Florence congress), as well as in the reactionary articles that appeared regularly in L’Idea Nazionale or in La Lupa, one finds a description of democracy as an “arithmetic of ballots” or as “the sum of petty egoisms” (ibid., 786–7; on Italian nationalism, see also De Grand 1978). Concerned with the fact that “the nationalist doctrine should climb down from the aristocratic intellectual spheres and the narrow circles of political oligarchies and reach for the heart of the multitude, where it shall find its most assured and strongest base of support,” Sighele envisioned the citizen as a “shareholder, who owns a right to vote in the assemblies of the society to which he belongs,” but he remained aware of the difficulty of reconciling, on the one hand, “the mathematical principle of right according to number,” which tended to equate politics with administration, the economy, or a kind of contract, and, on the other hand, the existence of non-economic interests, the ideas of historical necessity and collective destiny that were consubstantial to nationalism (Sighele 1911, 189–90).8 In December 1920, during the months that saw Italian Fascism emerge as a more structured political force, and while he continued to attack the “demographic/democratic” theses of the nationalist Gini, A. De Stefani also made use of language – there is an obvious homology between the energy/number ratio and the move from simple mean to weighted average – that foreshadowed the 1925 Gini who would by then have come over to Fascism: In the political and economic struggle … each group must be counted for the whole energy he holds, not for his numerical importance. There exists no universal and necessary relation between number and mass: and identifying the former with the latter is but one of the numerous ideologies of bourgeois revolution that history refutes on a day-to-day basis … groups

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therefore do not count for the number of their components but for the energetic result (De Stefani [1921] 1942, 860). This is precisely the opposition that shaped the argument of the two reports of the 1925 Commission. Thus, the one written by state councillor Domenico Barone (“Sui rapporti fra Potere Esecutivo e Potere Legislativo”) equated the principle of universal franchise and the political-juridical equality it embodied with a utilitarian view of politics, which reduced it to a means of “satisfying adequately the greatest sum of individual interests”; against this view, it put forward one in which the state was no longer envisioned as “the sum but as the synthesis of interests” and “pursues its own ends, which are of a higher and permanent character, of a moral and ideal rather than material and economic nature” (Relazioni e proposte della Commissione presidenziale per lo studio delle riforme costituzionali, 53–54). The report submitted by Professor Gino Arias (“Sul problema sindacale e sull’Ordinamento Corporativo”) gave a summary of all the criticisms that, in Italy as elsewhere, were directed against the principle of individual political representation, since its adoption (ibid., 130–2; Arias, who taught in Genoa, also mentioned the converging criticisms of individualist democracy that were put forward by Maurras and Sorel). For these authors as well as for their colleague Gini, the introduction of some kind of organic representation based upon professional corporations seemed the most adequate solution to the weighting of preferences whose intensity varied. It may be summarized as replacing the democratic postulate of arithmetical equality with a form of geometrical equality in which the political weight of individuals was in proportion to “the importance they assumed for the life of the state,” as Gini wrote in his own contribution to the commission’s proceedings (1925, 191).9 More precisely, the object was to balance one form of representation with the other and thus insure equilibrium between the representation of individual interests and that of collective or state interests. Gini, who submitted a minority report on this issue, considered that, given certain conditions, the Italian bicameral system could maintain such equilibrium. Individual interests would continue to be represented and defended in the lower house, whose members would be elected on a territorial basis, while interests of the state would be represented in

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the upper house, through the nomination of representatives from professional categories; thus, in the former, individuals would be represented qua citizens, while, in the latter, they would be qua producers. The majority of the commission’s members proposed changing the composition of both houses, introducing a degree of organic representation in the lower house while retaining partial territorial representation, and maintaining the composition of the upper house (senators were nominated by the king) while introducing to it a certain degree of representativity. Gini saw two problems with the majority’s positions: first, the legislature would be unbalanced, since it did not give sufficient weight to individual interests, and second, by combining the principles of individual and organic representation, it incurred the risk of the latter being corrupted through contact with the former (Gini 1925, 193). On the occasion of its October 1925 meeting, the Fascist Grand Council declared that it favoured Gini’s solution, but no practical consequences followed from this (De Felice [1968] 1995, 315–6). However, Gini insisted, one should reason here in conformity with the theory of weighted average and avoid introducing the principle of numerical representation into organic representation: small producers would in such a case hold a degree of power that would be incomparable with their real economic weight, to the detriment of large industrial and agricultural interests (Gini 1925, 192–3). If relations between citizens were by definition founded upon arithmetical equality, production corresponded, on the contrary, to a functional hierarchy (which had to be reflected in geometrical equality). Taking into account long-term interests, comparing those of future generations with those of present generations, supposed a redefinition of the relations between executive and legislative powers, in the direction of emancipation of the former with regard to fluctuating parliamentary majorities. In this regard, Gini wrote that government was: an agency, not for the changeable wishes of numerical majorities or of major interests, but rather for the effectuation of a program in the interests of the national organism. In consequence, therefore, there is a tendency to free the administration from the constant control of parliamentary majorities. Once the program of the administration is approved, the administration henceforth

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derives its authority directly from the program itself and cannot permit others to interfere with it in giving effect to the program (1927a, 103). This idea that it was necessary to reinforce the executive branch was a direct consequence of the negative judgment passed on Italy’s recent parliamentary history. The redefinition of relations between the Cabinet and the Chambers had been, as indicated by its President Gentile, one of the two mandates of the 1925 Commission.

The Problem of Aggregate Preferences “Concentration of power” was one of the characteristics of Fascism’s seizure of power: given the increased authority he was endowed with, the president of the Council of Ministers soon assumed “for all practical purposes, the functions of dictatorship.” Gini imputed this extension of the State’s functions to the increasing complexity of society. Thus, “the constantly rising density of populations, the multiplication of all means of communication, the increasing division of labour, the fact that the economic feeling of individuals becomes ever more refined, and the development of anticipation capacities” induced such phenomena as protectionist claims, with regard to commerce as well as immigration, or appeals to government intervention over conflicts between capital and labour (Gini 1927a, 107–8). This interventionism, for which liberal economic theory offered no plausible explanation (it ran counter to this theory’s predictions/prescriptions), was in no way peculiar to Fascist Italy: quite to the contrary, it corresponded to the economic practice of most states during and after the Great War. However, an efficient coordination of all these new functions of the state, which gave way to an extremely complex and diverse set of measures, required some kind of central control. This historical growth of interventionism and of the coordinating role of government with regard to economic policy could be compared, according to Gini, with the increasing importance of the brain’s coordination and control functions as biological organisms became more complex. Thus, “rather than to a parliament or a representative regime, the brain of superior vertebrates should, more rightly, be compared to a government that, from various parts of the territory, receives information, listens to their desiderata, but maintains the privilege of decision-

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making in view of the interests of the organism as a whole” (Gini 1935, 679). Gini did not, however, content himself with this organicist analogy: as his critique of the principle of democratic equality was founded upon an insistence on the one-dimensional character of the translation it offered of individual preferences (they were added up, but their respective intensities were not taken into account), his critique of parliamentarianism insisted on the incapacity of deliberative assemblies to define programs that were at the same time coherent and in accordance with majoritarian preferences. “All collective deliberations that result from votes taken on the basis of majority rule on separate elements of a measure or a program” had to deal with the problem of preference aggregation: When a collective is made up of at least three persons and the points on which a vote must be taken are also at least three in number, one cannot exclude the following possibility: when each voter defends a solution that is coherent and can be applied, the combination of their votes leads, on the contrary, to the approval of a program or a measure that are themselves incoherent and that cannot be applied. Let us suppose that the first voter has on all three points a coherent solution that we represent with the letters A, B, C; the second has another solution, coherent as well, that we may represent by the letters A, b, c; the third one has yet another solution, coherent also, represented by the letters a, B, c. The resulting majoritarian solution will be A, B, c, which is different from any of the solutions proposed and cannot be completely coherent. Insofar as the number of points submitted to a vote and the number of voters increases, the probability of an incoherent solution will also increase. To avoid such an inconvenience, we may, after having voted on each point taken separately, vote again on the whole solution. The approval of an incoherent and unpractical solution, which can be avoided, now becomes an extreme eventuality; the most probable eventuality is that we may approve separately a solution that is, to be sure, coherent and practical, yet less efficient than others, and, in such a case, this solution is approved as a whole as the only possible one. The most frequent case is that we do not vote separately on each of the points, but directly on the whole solution; to obtain

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a majority, it becomes necessary to rally around a conciliatory position that represents the lowest common denominator of all solutions put forward by the individuals. The solution then amounts to a series of general propositions that look like statements of the obvious. In this problem resides the fundamental reason for the inefficiency of deliberative assemblies in all countries, in all nations, in all times. After long and difficult discussions, they approve measures that are in fact simple palliatives or conclude by assertions of principle that are purely truistic (Gini 1941c, 410–1). This was clearly an unacknowledged reference to the Condorcet paradox, with which Gini was familiar from his early work on probability. There is, notably, a reference to the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix in one of Gini’s early papers on probability ([1907b] 1968) and it may be added that Condorcet’s Essai, and most specifically the famous paradox, were discussed by Isaac Todhunter in his 1865 A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability, another work Gini knew well. One could say, using the categories later developed by Kenneth Arrow, who independently rediscovered the Condorcet paradox and offered a mathematical formalization of it known as the impossibility theorem (because of the impossibility of defining a collective preference function that could satisfy the conditions laid down by Arrow), that the solution on which Gini falls back in order to resolve the problem of the incoherence of collective preferences violates the exclusion clause of dictatorship (Arrow 1951). The context in which Gini developed this critique of parliamentarianism should, however, be remembered. The article in which this passage appeared was published first in the September 1941 issue of the German Weltwirschaftliches Archiv, and an Italian version was published in the Archivio di Studi Corporativi by the end of the same year. The conclusion, which blamed all the great conflicts in modern European history on the egocentric plans of England, clearly shows that the paper can be read as an intellectual contribution to the Nazi-Fascist war effort. The criticism of the incoherence to which all deliberative assemblies that had to take a stand on a plurality of options were condemned was directed first and foremost against “scientific parliamentarianism.” Here Gini made an explicit reference to international

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expert conferences, which were frequent during the interwar years (and many of which he had himself attended); these intellectual gatherings were typically characterized by a double move of the parliamentary system, “from the political to the technical terrain, and from the national to the international arena” (Gini 1941c, 409). Examining the proceedings of the Tenth Conference of Advanced International Studies held in Paris in 1937, Gini stressed the impractical character of the most favoured proposals (ibid., 416). At first sight, this scientific parliamentarianism fulfilled the conditions for success, at least in theory, since it put together participants of an undeniable competency who were motivated by a shared scientific ideal. If such a body could not overcome the problem of defining a coherent majoritarian will, what could assemblies of a national or international character, whose ends were immediately political, reasonably accomplish? The solution to this impasse resided precisely, according to Gini, in a rigorous distinction between deliberation and decision: assemblies should limit themselves to the former and entrust the latter to government. And the form of government most able to avoid the problem of preference definition was of course that of a single will: dictatorship (ibid., 412). The fragmentation of the party system that was characteristic of Liberal Italy’s parliament, its consequent incapacity to produce a stable majority and its successive contradictory decisions, offer a concrete picture of the phenomenon described by Gini. From this perspective, dictatorship appeared as “the natural epilogue of degenerated democracy” (1944, 58). In fact, the problem was not so much that of the number of parties and fractions as that of the diversity of programs and of the rivalry among individuals; in other words, their incapacity to agree on functional compromises (ibid., 56). It should be mentioned that Gini’s remark was confirmed by later research on the mathematical properties of the Condorcet paradox: in the case of three voters and three options, it occurs with a frequency of 5.6 per cent; this frequency rises to 8.8 per cent when the number of voters rises; but “the frequency of occurrence of the Condorcet effect increases very rapidly when, instead of the number of voters, it is the number of options to be ordered that rises; the probability then reaches nearly 100 per cent” (Favre 1976, 45–6). In the long passage quoted above, Gini wrote: “Insofar as the number of points submitted to a vote and the number of voters increase,

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the probability of an incoherent solution will also increase” (1944, 56). Here also, the short term political context and the chronology of events should be kept in mind: Mussolini found himself in a minority position on the occasion of the Fascist Grand Council meeting held on the night of 24–25 July 1943; he was fired by the king and put under arrest the next day. On 8 September, the German army occupied Rome and all central and northern Italy, which provoked the flight of the king and of Marshal Badoglio’s government to Allies-controlled territory; on 5 June 1944, the Germans were constrained to abandon Rome under the pressure of the Allied advance, and a government led by Ivanoe Bonomi – who had briefly acted as prime minister in 1921–22 – was installed. Gini’s Problemi del dopoguerra was published in Rome only two months after the Wehrmacht’s retreat, at a time when Gini had joined the Social- Democratic party, then led by Bonomi. The brochure is significant precisely because, in the context of Fascism’s end, it had become imperative to rethink the configuration of political institutions by taking into account the abuses of the recent dictatorship as well as the weaknesses of the democratic regime from which it had emerged. Yet, even though Gini insisted more on the inconveniences of dictatorship than on its advantages and, from now on, used the epithet “totalitarian” in a negative fashion (in that sense, Problemi was part of Gini’s attempt at swift political reconversion), the analysis of democracy and the remedies he proposed are largely founded, as the footnotes indicate, upon the elaborate criticism he had developed during the ventennio.10 One may distinguish, in the analysis of modern democracy, between two requirements that are made of institutions: legitimacy, which means that those who govern must have obtained the consent of those who are governed, and representativity, which means that those who govern should “resemble” those who are governed, or, to use a statistical concept, the class of representatives should constitute a reasonably accurate sample of the represented population. The main defect of the democratic model was, according to the Gini of 1925, that it founded representation upon a double simplification of reality: that of, so to say, arithmetically equalizing individuals and that of taking into account only the interests of individuals, in conformity with the atomistic and individualist logic of liberalism. The corporatist model offered, on the other hand, a more sophisticated model of representation: it distinguished, for

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each individual, between the citizen, to whom juridical equality was granted, and the producer, whose importance was determined by the position he held in a functional hierarchy. The distinction between the interests of present-day individuals and those of the nation considered as an entity that would outlive them was guaranteed by the emancipation of executive power from parliamentary majorities, in other words by dictatorship. This gain on the level of representativity implied a certain cost with regard to legitimacy: Gini acknowledged that the Fascist coup d’état was made in the absence of the majority’s consent – or, more precisely, he added that this consent was anticipated (1927a, 100). In the 1944 context, such a solution was obviously out of the question. This did not induce Gini to renounce his critique of democracy, but rather to develop it so that it could take into account the phenomenon of dictatorship. Our purpose here is not to present a detailed account of the political proposals submitted by Gini on this occasion, but only to highlight in what way this “constructive” criticism of democracy, also structured with the help of the categories and oppositions that were characteristic of the statistical field, was in line with that of the preceding years. Its point of departure was an examination of the impacts of the progressive extension of franchise upon the quality of representation in modern democracies. By having the citizen body grow from a few hundred thousand individuals to some ten, twenty, thirty, (in some cases, more than a hundred) million people, it became imperative to raise the number of representatives as well as the number of voters each of them represented. As a direct consequence, discussion within assemblies became more laborious and representation became more difficult, given the loosening of relations between voters and representatives and the increased heterogeneousness of both groups. Large assemblies sitting in the name of heterogeneous masses replaced small assemblies representing fairly homogeneous populations of voters. The dysfunctions these assemblies demonstrated in many countries in the aftermath of the Great War (above all, the absence of stable parliamentary majorities in troubled times) were presented by Gini as the result of the increase in value of one variable (the number of voters) and of the effects it had on others (an increase in the number of representatives and a concomitant decrease of their average quality at a time when the increased complexity of political decisions called for more competence on

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their part, an increase in the average distance between representative and voters, an increase in the average distance between voters themselves): a problem, in other words, much like those for which Italian statisticians had developed tools to measure the “mutability” or the “dissimilarity” of statistical series. The advent of a dictatorship, a fate met by, among others, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, was the (provisional) conclusion of a cyclical movement whose scheme may be traced back to Aristotle, but to which Gini’s intellectual style gave the shape of a complex equation, all of its variables being quantities theoretically susceptible of being measured. The stability that comes from an absolute majority was not, however, an adequate answer to the problem of democracy’s survival, since the leader of the majority will exhibit, through a kind of natural reaction, a tendency for dictatorship (as was the case in Italy after the majoritarian law had insured the preponderance of the Fascist Party). In countries where there existed a strong public opinion (Gini speaks of small states that are highly civilized and mentions the case of Nordic democracies), this tendency can be contained. Adequate protection of minorities requires, however, some institutional dispositions. In Britain, for instance, the political minority had a proper function and even a name – His Majesty’s Opposition (Gini 1944, 60). So, Gini proposed a series of mechanisms that would avoid the twin perils of instability and a too-strong majority: (1) a proportion of seats for the minority as well as for the majority: the party that got the absolute majority of votes (in a second ballot, if such a threshold was not obtained on the first) was to be awarded a fraction of seats not inferior to a certain number (for instance, 60 per cent), while minorities would also be guaranteed a minimal proportion of seats (for instance, 20 per cent); (2) the creation of a system of weights and balances: Gini proposed, for instance, that the head of state, staffed with a council on which the minority would be represented, be granted powers independent from those of the head of government and be entrusted with the protection of minorities; (3) a combination of universal and indirect suffrage: a multi-stage election system (with communal, provincial, regional, and national levels), besides being a serious obstacle to the usurpation of power (opposition would be present at all four levels), would offer the advantage of combining universal suffrage (for the election of communal delegates) with

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filtering and selection procedures (provincial delegates would be elected by communal, regional by provincial, and national by regional) and therefore establish some form of commensurability between the range of a person’s voting rights and her cognitive competence; (4) the use of referendum, initiative, and petition; (5) the use of public hearings and opinion polls (Gini 1944, 66–80 passim). In spite of this arsenal of measures inspired by Italy’s negative experience as well as by those, more positive, of Britain, Switzerland, or the United States, Gini’s conclusion reasserted the porosity of the frontier between democracy and dictatorship: if democracy could be defined as “government of the state by means of public opinion,” it should not be forgotten that “in a democratic regime, opinion is often manipulated to a point where its expression coincides with the interests and desires of one or a few persons,” and that, on the other hand, “the best-advised autocrats not only are concerned with knowing, but take into account public opinion, so that they can find in the masses support for their regimes.” From there comes the practical convergence of the measures adopted by interwar democracies and dictatorships alike “for everything that concerns social security and assistance, communications, public works, exchange, and international credit policies’ (ibid., 80). It should be recalled that two years earlier, Gini had published a review of most American literature – quite restrained, to be sure – that dealt with public opinion polls, and whose title (‘Il polso della nazione’) was modelled on that of Gallup and Rae’s The Pulse of Democracy (1940). The article was also, even though this was not explicitly stated, a reply (it appeared indeed under the heading “Polemiche”) to a previous and enthusiastic article by Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz about American opinion polling that had just been published in Statistica (Luzzatto Fegiz 1942; for a detailed analysis of the polemic, see Rinauro 2002). Apparently well aware of the technical and statistical dimensions of polls realized at that time, and notably of the representativity problems attached to systematic samples (the so-called quotas method), Gini discussed mostly the political uses to which they could be put. According to him, public opinion was a “non-negligible” factor for authoritarian as well as democratic regimes; and since they were not constrained by the publicity requirement that incited democracies to model and manipulate public opinion (Gini accused American leaders of having acted in this way to justify their country’s entry into the war),

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the former may have been in a better position to measure it correctly (Gini 1942b). In the immediate aftermath of the war, Gini seemed in fact less reconciled with the democratic principle than disillusioned with the virtues of dictatorship.

The Law of Political Cycles The relationship between democracy and dictatorship was dependent on a type of alternation that had been claiming the attention of historians for a long time: The exercise of sovereign and political authority … appears to be concentrated at the outset in the hands of a single individual, and then, little by little, its privileges are expanded through a constantly larger group until it ends up being regarded as a right that theoretically belongs to all the individuals who constitute the nation. But after some time the democratic regime reveals symptoms of degeneration and a monarch, a tyrant or a dictator, or whatever name he may bear, steps in, and the cycle once more begins its course (Gini 1927a, 109). The law of political cycles that was put forward by Gini was founded more specifically upon the acknowledgment of an insufficiency of classical political economic analysis. Exercising political authority and taking part in public affairs both seemed, from an economic point of view, paradoxical activities: they did not present the costly character implied by the economic definition of labour; yet, given their productive usefulness, political economy had to take them into account. As a result of the pleasant, rather than painful, character of political activity and, especially, of the exercise of authority, instead of the specialization that predicted the principle of the division of labour (each individual devoting himself to a specific activity in view of exchange), there obtained a phenomenon of division and subdivision of political power, with each individual seeking to conquer a share of political power, according to a movement Gini compared with the second law of thermodynamics. But once this dilution of authority reached a point that it lost most of its efficiency, self-re-equilibration obtained through a restoration of its centralized exercise, by way of a coup d’état or a revolution. The

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system thus regained stability, as proved by Italy’s Fascist “experiment” (ibid., 110–1). In an address he gave at Harvard University’s tricentennial in 1936 (on the occasion of which he was awarded an honorary degree), Gini argued that analogous cyclical movements could be identified at the level of familial authority (which disintegrated in the modern era as it had done at certain times in Ancient Greece and Rome), of religious authority (with the alternation between mystical and materialist periods) and of economic organization (moving back and forth between individualism and corporatism). A thorough understanding of these cyclical movements supposed, however, that one sought to establish, in line with the logic of concomitant variations, “a consistent correspondence between such regularities and external circumstances or internal conditions of populations” (Gini 1937c, 252). The best regime was therefore the one that best matched the circumstances. Thus, nineteenth century British parliamentarianism was a good political fit for the age of individualism, materialism, and laissez-faire; the centralized empires of Rome and Byzantium, as well as those of the Aztecs and Incas, also represented, in another context, forms whose success was attested to by these civilizations’ accomplishments and by the comparatively undeveloped character of the political bodies that surrounded them at that time (ibid., 253). According to Gini, the factors that governed relationships between the individual and familial, state or religious authority were quite diverse. They included, for instance, group psychology. The diffusion of a sense of personal initiative and self-control – typical of the English people – allowed for an individualist and democratic organization; for peoples that were “frivolous and readily deluded,” “indolent and pessimistic,” or “inconstant and erratic” (read: the Italians), an authoritarian regime was more suitable – in fact, “indispensable for stimulating appropriate behaviour or for curbing natural excesses.” Others were the degree of physical and cultural homogeneousness, which was in inverse relation with the degree of authority that “permits the spontaneous realization of social consensus”; the distribution of intellectual, artistic, and moral resources (a weak mean deviation will favour democracy, since individuals will resemble each other, while a stronger dispersion was an indication of natural hierarchy and called for government by the most talented

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elements); economic environment (a crisis, for instance, will induce a demand for intervention by political authority); the equilibrium between population and available resources (overpopulation as well as underpopulation might call for a vigorous demographic policy) (ibid., 253–8, passim). Here again, we have a series of quantifiable variables whose inclusion in a complex equation made up the research program of an authentic science of political authority. These factors’ interplay was a function, as mentioned in the previous chapter, of the cyclical evolution of nations, which could be disentangled into a superficial level where social-economic transformations responded to demographic changes, and a more fundamental one, where demography became the dependent variable and was to be explained by properly biological causes. The succession of political regimes was modelled on the deeper and more obscure movements, but these also gave rise to brutal oscillations. The aim of Gini’s political science was thus to translate the classical cyclical representation of Aristotle, Polybius, and others into a scientific theory that fit, in conformity with its systematic ambition, into the general architectonic of neo-organicism. And even though, with regard to economic policy, Gini did not derive from this a program of comparable comprehensiveness (observing the growing and generalized intervention of governments in economic activity – of which Soviet planning, Italian corporatism, and the New Deal were three examples – he expressed his preference, as we have seen, for “the insertion, into the complicated and delicate mechanism of capitalist economy, of elements that are more or less rigid, and controlled by the state”), other statisticians would seek to put neoorganicism to a much more radical practical use.

a totalitarian project: corporative statistics The theme of corporative statistics was initiated at the turn of the 1930s by Gaetano Pietra and Paolo Fortunati, two statisticians who were very close to Gini and at the same time much involved in Fascist intellectual circles of the province of Ferrara, whose central political figure was Italo Balbo, a member of the quadrumvirat that made up Mussolini’s main acolytes at the time of the March on Rome (the others were General Emilio De Bono, member of Parliament Cesare De Vecchi, and former Revolutionary Syndicalist

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inductivism and deductivism: a structuring opposition The structuring opposition between inductive statistics and deductive mathematical economy was also proposed in the field of a scientific understanding of politics. First in an article entitled “Per una teoria matematica del puro potere politico” (1941), and then in a short but dense monograph known as Teoria matematica delle scelte politiche (1943a), economist Alfonso de Pietri-Tonelli pretended that he could, for the first time in the history of human thought, propose a rigorous mathematical treatment of the political problem. Isolating among the various dimensions of politics those he identified as command and obedience, this intransigent defender of “rational” economics sought to determine a set of equations that would allow, by taking into account the incentives that drive political subjects to take action and the relationships that insured social cohesion, for a solution to the problem of “hierarchically ordering the various social aggregates.” In the same manner as predictive models founded upon the component methods (Gini/De Finetti) could be opposed to those based upon the logistic law (Amoroso) in the field of demographic dynamics, Gini’s political science, which sought to uncover historical laws through empirical generalizations and historical examples, could be opposed to the universal, rigorously abstract, and mathematical-deductive model put forward by de Pietri-Tonelli.

Michele Bianchi). Ferrara’s university, where Massimo Fovel held the political economy chair, was one of the rare strongholds of corporatist theory and was presided over by Balbo himself. Pietra and Fortunati both taught there as incaricati; they also founded and successively headed Ferrara’s Gabinetto di Statistica and were involved in the creation there, in 1936, of an Advanced School in Corporatist Sciences. Ferrara was equally the host, in 1932, of the Second Conference of Trade Union and Corporative Studies in which Pietra and Fortunati were both participants. Their first writings devoted to the topic of corporative statistics were published in the Corriere Padano, a daily newspaper edited by Nello Quilici, a close friend of Balbo whose intellectual activity played an important part in establishing the latter’s reputation as an anti-conformist

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(on Ferrara under Fascism, see Rochat 1986, 176–90); it was also Quilici who founded, in 1930, Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia, one of the main journals that promoted corporatist ideas, from which originated the Supplemento statistico (1935), and, after Balbo and Quilici had died, Statistica (1940), the official organ of the sis. Pietra’s political trajectory and, even more so, that of Fortunati hardly followed straight lines. Paolo Fortunati (1906–80) declared in the biographical notes he prepared for the 1934 Sassari statistics chair competition that he had “always followed a scientific-political inspiration.” He was a member and soon a leader of the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (guf) before joining the party; he later was in charge of party propaganda in Padua, something that was duly appreciated by the commission. Fortunati’s nomination to a statistics chair was, to our knowledge, the only case where a candidate’s positive political merits were invoked in his favour– by comparison with simple party membership, which was compulsory for entering the academy at that time (acs 1924–54, b. 84). This fact, which was part of a cultural offensive directed at the country’s youth and its intellectuals, attests to the regime’s growing totalitarian character from the mid–1930s on. In 1937, notably, the Fascist Youth (Gioventù italiana del littorio) was established as the “single organization designated to supervise all youths,” in a struggle for the “control of minds,” directed largely against the Catholic Church’s influence (De Felice 1981, 125). On this occasion, a large number of academics were mobilized to supervise those sections of the Fascist Youth that were dedicated to culture and the arts (Littoriali della Cultura e dell’Arte). According to R. Zangrandi, “at least 90 per cent of talented academics” took part or sought to take part as commissars in the activities of the Littoriali; among those commissars was Fortunati – as, indeed, were Livio Livi and Libero Lenti – whose functions dealt, predictably, with “demographic studies.” And if, as writes Zangrandi who himself belonged to the Fascist Youth organization, its contests and activities were “the greatest occasion Fascism gave (to youths) to express their own opinions in a climate of relative liberty or, better, of necessary tolerance,” “the inclusion of adult cultivated men into adjudication commissions (an inclusion that was not imposed on them, but often, if not always, the result of insistent demands on their part) presupposed almost all the time agreement with the ideologies of the regime”

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(Zangrandi 1962, 104, 106, and 373; on Fortunati’s, Livi’s, and Lenti’s participation, see 376). Besides his teaching and research activities in Ferrara and then in Padua, Fortunati was also entrusted with various bureaucraticscientific duties. In 1930, he set up the statistical services of the Consiglio Provinciale dell’Economia Corporativa di Padova, and then, in 1932–33, those of the Ferrara Fascist Provincial Federation of Farmers. After having moved to Palermo in 1936, Fortunati became, two years later, the president of its Fascist Cultural Institute. Soon after that, he was chosen for the Bologna University chair of statistics, where he created a statistical institute as well as the journal Statistica. In 1940, Fortunati was designated as a member of the executive board of the Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista (incf), headed by Camillo Pellizzi, the restructuring of which was also a sign of the regime’s radicalization and totalitarization; the incf was the successor body to the Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura (infc), which had been created following the publication of the 1925 Fascist Manifesto and was chaired by Giovanni Gentile until 1937. While the infc was an element of Gentile’s elitist project of forming a ruling class, the incf, strongly supported by minister Bottai, was part of a whole series of cultural initiatives more concerned with the problem of supervising populations in the mass society of the eventual post-World War II new order (see Longo 2000). By the end of 1941, Fortunati secretly joined the Italian Communist Party (pci) while maintaining a public intellectual life, attending incf meetings up until the fall of the regime, and writing, notably for Civiltà fascista, one of the regime’s semi-official journals edited by Pellizzi, and with which many intellectuals leaning towards Marxism would collaborate (this was the case, for instance, of historians Delio Cantimori and Giorgio Candeloro, who belonged to Fortunati’s generation and also joined the Communist Party during the last years of Fascism). As a founding member of the Gruppo intellettuale Antonio Labriola and of the antifascist journal Tempi nuovi, he was fully involved in the anti-Nazi struggle after July 1943. He was arrested in October 1944 and sentenced to death, but succeeded in escaping prison and returned to partisan activity until the Liberation. Fortunati was elected as a Communist Senator in 1948, a position he held until 1972, and that made him one of the leading scientific figures of the pci. Fortunati also held a communal council seat in Bologna, the

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Italian Communists’ model city (acs 1924–54, b. 84; Melis 1997a). Fortunati’s “master,” Gaetano Pietra (1879–1961), who had played an important role in the organization of supplies during the Great War before dedicating himself to scientific statistics, held an official position (as president of the political sciences and law faculties at Padua University) until the regime’s fall in July 1943; in April 1945, he was appointed vice-commissar, and from January 1946, president of Udine’s Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture; he was also elected to the Senate in 1948, but on the Christian Democratic ticket (Fortunati 1961). Alfredo de Polzer (1904–65), who was a close colleague of Pietra and Fortunati and was also closely related to the corporative statistics project, joined the Labriola Group, headed by Fortunati, in 1942, and then the Communist Party in 1944. He was elected to Parliament as a Communist in 1964, one year before he died (Fortunati 1966). Another mathematician-statistician who deserves mention here is Bruno De Finetti (1906–85), who had been a collaborator of Gini’s at istat from 1927 to 1931 and who was a member of the editorial board of the Supplemento and of Statistica. On many occasions, De Finetti voiced his hostility to capitalism as well as his skepticism regarding abstract political economy. He denounced, among other things, what he called “the optimistic sophism of liberalism, the superstition of self-regulating anarchy, according to which the most simple and most secure way to get to the maximum welfare for all consists in allowing each person to tend to realize the highest egoistic profit,” and would maintain this attitude after Fascism’s fall, even though his militant political involvement was in no way comparable to that of his colleagues (De Finetti 1935, 12).11

Statistics and Corporatism The work that was published as corporative statistics during that period was characterized by its empirical orientation and by the way it sought to integrate the economic and demographic dimensions. In 1934, Pietra defined corporative statistics as “an application of the statistical method to the corporative phenomenon,” and thus as a synthesis of what was formerly viewed distinctively as economic, social, and demographic statistics (Pietra 1934a, 20).12 According to Pietra, it was upon Italo Balbo’s request in the late 1920s that he had prepared, with the help of Fortunati, an agrarian

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survey design that was meant to “provide local political and economic authorities with a rational instrument for the understanding, orientation, and control of that important and delicate duty of absorbing agricultural manpower” (ibid., 7). In the context of internal migration and colonization policies, there was a clear need for a general survey that would allow for the integration of the phenomenon of production within “the demographic framework of the whole nation,” since the first Italy-wide agricultural census had not yet been taken (it would be in 1930). As a matter of fact, it was precisely this integral perspective, also characteristic of the neoorganicist framework, which was intended by the epithet “corporative.” The close relationship that existed between demography and economy was a clear obstacle to any independent examination of production and distribution, or of labour and consumption. The demographic and economic transformations of the Italian countryside and the distribution and concentration of landed property, social mobility, and income distribution were among the most frequent topics of these studies (Pietra, Fortunati, and de Polzer 1935; de Polzer 1938; Fortunati 1941d and 1943c). Giovanni Ferrari wrote: “for the benefit of the control functions of the economy, statistical economic studies can no longer be limited to specific surveys … they must embrace all aspects of the nation’s life in a totalitarian vision” (Ferrari 1939, 216). This corporative statistics literature also contains vigorous pledges seeking to impose the idea of the central role of statistical knowledge in the rational management of economic and social life (Fortunati 1932b). The place of statistics in modern life – or what should be its place – justified that it be designated, in conformity with its etymology, as the science of the state, the universality of statistics being a methodological reflection of the state’s totalitarian ambitions (Fortunati 1932a). Thus, it should come as no surprise that corporative statistics literature constantly drew together: (1) epistemological theses arguing the superiority of inductive-experimental economics (in other words: statistics), privileging concrete historical reality over deductive, abstract, and metaphysical views (which were those of a majority of political economists), (2) political proposals in favour of a controlled, planned, or regulated economy, by contrast with the “system of economic freedom,” which proved incapable of selecting the nation’s best elements, and (3) pledges in favour of consolidating and expanding the teaching of statistics (Pietra 1941; de Polzer

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1941; Forrunati 1942a, in which is put forward the ambitious proposal that statistics become a compulsory subject for all university faculties, save philosophy and the arts). The corporative statistics corpus has not yet attracted much attention from historians (save for Leti 1996, 452–6 and Melis 1997b). This lack of interest may be because of the “rhetorical and ideological character of most interventions about corporative statistics” (Favero and Trivellato 2000, 275), and the fact that corporative statistics remained, in the end, a project (which made it “typical of the Italian habit of designating the same thing [i.e., economic statistics] by different names” [Leti 1996, 453]), but it results also from the fact that the history of Italian corporatism was, before it was anything else, that of two obvious failures. The first of these corresponded to what Marco E. L. Guidi aptly describes as the “miscarriage” of the corporative economy, understood as an overall institutional project. In the aftermath of Alberto De Stefani’s resignation, which signalled the break with the Manchesterian economic policy that had been pursued since 1922 and a turn back to significant government intervention in the economy, a whole set of institutions (Ministry of Corporations [1926], Charter of Labour [1927], twenty-two corporations defined according to a nomenclature that corresponded to cycles of production [1934 law], etc.) were created, in line with the regime’s proclaimed objective of “replac[ing] the classical liberal mechanism of political representation based on the individual vote by a new model of representation founded upon collective representation of professional and economic interests” (Guidi 1998, 3). As a matter of fact, this sweeping organizational architecture never lived up to the promises regarding cooperation between “capital, labour, and political leadership.” It consisted, for all practical purposes, of not much more than an authoritarian mechanism for wage control. The “revolutionary” discourse about corporative ownership as a third way between capitalism and socialism never made it to the stage of practical realization (Petri 2002, 106–7). The second failure was the obvious theoretical rout encountered by the promoters of corporative political economy, whose ambition was no less than a re-foundation of economics on new theoretical bases, by replacing orthodoxy’s homo œconomicus by a new homo corporativus whose psychology was in conformity with the desired economic and social transformations (Guidi 1998, 7). Now, if dis-

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tinctions are drawn between the various uses that were made of the concept of corporatism at that time (they ranged from a prudent or purely ritualistic invocation to the attempt to analyse the problems of a corporative economy within the marginalist framework and to a calling into question of the individualistic postulates of economic theory), it seems obvious, judging from an examination of published material or recruitment in the universities, that economic orthodoxy largely maintained its dominant position, at the price of the minimum compromise with opponents whose intellectual capital within the field of political economy was not very impressive (ibid., 9, 12). This was the case of Ugo Spirito, the philosopher whose name was most frequently associated with corporatism, but also of Alfredo Rocco and of Giuseppe Bottai, none of whom was trained as an economist and whose influence came from the fact that they were members of the government. And if there were a number of journals that promoted a corporative political economy, those in which the most radical versions of it were defended with constancy were precisely those that did not belong to the field of political economy, but were rather political-cultural organs (for instance: Politica, which had emerged from the nationalist movement, Gerarchia, one of the regime’s official journals, Critica fascista and Bibliografia fascista, both of a semi-official character, La stirpe, which was closely linked to Fascist trade unions, Civiltà fascista, which was the organ of the National Institute of Fascist Culture, etc.) or multidisciplinary journals, emanating from the few universities where corporatist ideas received some institutional support (Archivio di studi corporativi [Pisa], Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia [Ferrari], Lo Stato Corporativo [Naples]). And if a number of corporative political economy textbooks were published (Guidi lists eight of them, for which the corporative approach was not mere window dressing), monographs and journals that belonged strictly to the field of political economy remained largely faithful to marginalist orthodoxy while maintaining a considerable output. If one puts aside problems pertaining to the history of economic thought (what place did corporatist theories hold vis-à-vis economic orthodoxy?) or to Fascism’s economic policy (what were the true importance and function of corporatist institutions?), one may consider corporative statistics as one of those scientific/ideological constructs through which the limits of alignment and dissent

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toward the regime were subject to negotiation. Following De Felice, one may distinguish, in the early 1930s, a series of positions that claimed the mantle of corporatism with varying degrees of conviction. The first one, inspired by Catholicism, had the support of Confindustria and was upheld most prominently by Gino Arias (himself a member, as mentioned above, of the 1925 Constitutional Commission). It envisioned corporatist institutions foremost as a judicial tool aimed at disciplining labour relations, but did not in any way put into question the private character of production control and property. The second one, according to which some “social limitations” could be imposed upon “private initiative,” covered a wide array of proposals that corresponded to various degrees of government intervention. They went from progressive taxation (a position defended notably by R. Benini) to the setting up of “integral” corporatist systems, with a liberist or, on the contrary, socialist bent (Amoroso and De Stefani offered an instance of the former, while M. Fovel proposed a variant of the latter type). A third one, represented by philosopher Ugo Spirito and generally considered the most radical, saw in corporatism a third way that sought to resolve contradictions between individual interests and those of the community. A fourth, less articulate, position, was that of Fascist trade unionists who criticized the bureaucratic character of corporations and insisted on the necessity of an effective control of production (De Felice 1974, 12–8). The notion of corporative statistics, which may be located among the strongly state-centered variants of the second position, may be defined in contrast with the individualistic conception of society, by the idea of an integrated apprehension of phenomena that takes into account the “practical necessities of the social organism,” and by the practical project of a permanent and exhaustive registry that would provide political authority with the cognitive infrastructure needed for decision-making of a kind capable of “harmonizing and channelling” the actions of individual economic agents, with the greater good of the organism in view (Fortunati 1932b, 167). Obviously, corporative meant here an integrated, unified perspective on social and economic reality rather than the division into sectors that was typical of corporations as defined by the 1934 law. The use authors such as Fortunati, de Polzer, and Pietra made of corporatism also exhibits many of the traits that were characteristic of “left Fascism”: anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist polemics, the

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rejection of liberal democracy in favour of a popular and totalitarian one, raising labour to the status of a fundamental and constitutive value of social hierarchy (Parlato 2000, 17–8). Such a vision and such a project, which were both strongly critical of orthodox political economy, survived the defeat met by left-wing corporatism on the occasion of the second Conference of Trade Unionist and Corporative Studies held in Ferrara in May 1932 (Massimo Fovel was criticized here for his socialist views, and Ugo Spirito denounced by his opponents as a Bolshevik) and benefited from a second life in the early 1940s, on the occasion of debates pertaining to the postwar economic order (on the Ferrara conference, see Mancini, Perillo, and Zingari 1982, I, 29 and, mostly, BalandiAndrea Maggi 2004). We must mention here the Pisa meeting on economic problems of the new order held in May 1942, the sips meeting held in September and October of the same year, as well as the scientific encounters organized by the incf in November 1942 and April 1943, which dealt with “the idea of Europe” (with a report submitted by Pietra [reprinted in Longo 1994]) and “the economic plan” (with Fortunati as rapporteur this time [reprinted in Melis 1997b). This concept of an economic plan was opportunistically capable of reconciling an organic nationalism that fell under the regime’s set of ideological conventions with views that bordered on a more or less well-disguised Marxism. But the significance of these debates becomes more obvious if we take into account the 1943–45 polemic launched by Fortunati, who was now openly Communist, against the notion of economic policy as defined by Bresciani-Turroni, soon to become president of the Banca di Roma, in his Introduzione alla politica economica (Bresciani-Turroni [1942] 1943; Fortunati [1943a] 1967 and 1945–46). There is a striking contrast between the coherence and continuity that were characteristic of the form as well as content of corporative statistics, and, on the other hand, the political mobility of its proponents, of which Fortunati offered the most impressive case. In spite of the radical political shift that represented their passage to anti-Fascism in the early 1940s, the views and writings of corporative statistics proponents testify to the remarkable persistence of some core ideas. This is corroborated by their faithfulness to Gini’s methodological views and to the central tenets of neo-organicism, by the fact that large portions of articles published in 1942 were directly picked up from earlier writings, as well as by the insistence

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of the authors themselves on this continuity (Fortunati 1942b, [1943a] 1967, and 1945–46; Pietra 1942b). Thus, not only did Fortunati continue to refer positively to his corporatist papers of the 1930s once he had become an avowed Communist, but he also argued that, as early as the late 1920s, Pietra had considered him a Communist and that, together, “they thought about the necessity of knowing how to overcome the capitalist system” (Bergonzini 1967, 311). In fact, notwithstanding the results of the 1932 Ferrara meeting, vocabulary relative to the plan, to economic planning or programming, even though its exact significance varied according to the authors, was largely present throughout the regime’s last decade. In journals such as Critica fascista, edited by Giuseppe Bottai who was minister of Corporations (1926–30) and of National Education (1936–43), and Civiltà fascista, which belonged to the National Institute of Fascist Culture, a number of papers were published that made explicit reference to the notion of an economic plan. Pietra and Giuffrida’s 1936 Provital, in which they related their experience as war economy managers, also belongs to this literature, as an empirical example of economic planning. Mussolini himself, in a speech he gave in March 1936, talked about a coming “regulative plan of the Italian economy” (De Felice 1974, 698). That same year, Hitler announced the launch of a “second four-year plan” (Barucci 1978, 185). On a more theoretical level, the international debate about “collectivist economic planning,” whose main contenders were Friedrich August Hayek and Oskar Lange, from Austria and Poland respectively – Italian Enrico Barone appeared as a kind of posthumous protagonist, with his “Il ministro della produzione nello stato collettivista,” originally published in 1908 in the Giornale degli economisti – made a large impact in Italian learned economic journals (Barone [1908] 1935; Hayek 1935). Although the Italian translation of Hayek’s collection would only be published in 1946 (with an introduction by Bresciani-Turroni), mention of it as well as of the literature it generated can be found notably in the lectures given by G. Demaria at Bocconi University from 1935 to 1938 (Demaria 1969). In that sense, corporative statistics and the economic plan defended by the Padua and Ferrara statisticians may be described as an especially coherent and radical version of that diffuse “planism,” more precisely as a practical project aimed at thorough planning of economic activities, and that established statistics as the type of

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knowledge required by this task. One should not, of course, minimize the evolution of the authors’ views or the authenticity of their personal convictions: the Marxist influence in Fortunati’s 1942 report on the economic plan is hardly debatable; his having joined the Communist Party in 1941 or 1942, before the fortunes of war had changed sides, could not be an act of political opportunism. But this hostility towards liberalism and capitalism, the references to planning as an antidote to the anarchy of the market, which were common to certain strata of Fascism and to Marxism, would allow for this rather easy transition and make of the direct shift from left Fascism to Communism a not uncommon trajectory among intellectuals. As De Felice wrote: Many moves towards anti-Fascism (and we do not refer here to those that had a purely opportunistic character) on the part of younger intellectuals and many members of the guf (Gruppi universitari fascisti) will occur in a natural way, which denotes an obvious and deep cultural and psychological affinity as well as a continuity between their initial Fascism and their successive anti-Fascism and Communism (intellectuals and ex-Fascist members of the guf will tend to move toward Communism rather than democratic culture and parties) and suggests not so much a cultural break as an enduring fidelity to a vision of the world and of politics they sought to realize first through Fascism and later through anti-Fascism and especially Communism (De Felice, 1990b, 846–7). This transition may have been easy on the theoretical level; on a more practical level, however, it meant changing sides in a context of civil warfare, something that incurred considerable risks. The 1942 corporative statistics literature exhibits only two lexical differences compared to that of 1934–36: more frequent recourse to the adjective totalitarian, which had become representative of anti-bourgeois rhetoric, synonymous with corporative, as well as a more frequent use of plan and planning as equivalents of control and coordination. Corporative statistics thus became, for a number of statisticians, one more battleground between inductive statistics and deductive political economy, between economic organicism and liberal individualism. But it also represented a vehicle that would facilitate their political reconversion at a time when Fascism

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seemed to have run its course. This episode shows how, in a structured scientific field, a significantly wide gap – like the one that existed between Gini’s and Fortunati’s respective political positions in 1942 – is not necessarily an obstacle to working in common or mutual esteem, provided this gap is not located on a constitutive dimension of the field. In other words, the stronger are a field’s autonomy and cohesion – both being defined by positive properties (“the mental habitus required by quantitative analysis and that of mass problems” [Pietra] and the specific skills that go with it) as well as by negative judgments about competitors (economists for whom, allegedly, abstract analysis was to be preferred to empirical analysis), the less political disagreements or oppositions will appear decisive.

From Organicism to Marxist Dialectics In the perspective that guides the present study, that of the discourses and projects that statisticians put forward in order to sustain their claim to an authoritative position with regard to Italian social science, it is relevant to observe that an historicist and inductivist epistemology, specific methodological constructs and well-defined political conclusions are here especially well-integrated – organically, one might say. Statistics is indeed a ‘forma mentis’, a “logical knowledge process” and not merely a simple auxiliary technical tool. It is this logic, proper to statistical inquiry, which impedes one from postulating a transcendent, abstract individual and on the contrary requires that attention be centred on the concrete average historical individual. By contrast with homo oeconomicus, that can in no way be an average man since he is always the same by definition, and since an average has significance only by contrast with variation, the statistician’s uomo medio can only be “the synthesis of variable concrete men made on the basis of an historical and experimental investigation conducted in a given time and space.” And if one follows the detailed and distinctive logic of statistical inquiry, one will conclude that there is not one but a number of average “men,” each corresponding to one of various social and economic categories, a plurality of “mean values” from which it will become possible to infer, for a given historical moment, the whole economic and social structure. One cannot content oneself with a metaphysical conception of supply and demand:

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one must measure concretely “where, how, when, by whom, thanks to what, on average,” supply and demand will be defined. Nor can one restrain oneself from examining the logical problem that results from the contrast between scarcity of means and unlimited diversity of needs: “what is important is the scale of needs, the scale of valuations, the spatial and temporal overlapping of the relations that appear or are posited.” The logical significance of statistical inquiry lies precisely in its capacity to illuminate the “singular individual manifestations of a phenomenon” as “intimately linked between themselves by mutual influence relations” or as “more or less accidental deviations” (Fortunati [1943a] 1967, 490–9 and 532). With regard to such criteria, Gini’s pathological economics or neo-organicism, in its attempt to draw the main traits of an evolutionary economic psychology, was in clear contrast with an orthodox political economy that seemed incapable of explaining actual economic behaviour. It could therefore function as a privileged reference for corporative statistics, at least as long as the Fascist regime subsided and Marxism remained excluded from the circle of legitimate references. Thus, studies on the social origins of university students that displayed the rigidity of Italian class structure could be presented as belonging to research on “social metabolism” and denounce social reproduction by the school system by invoking, in conformity with the language of eugenics, its failure to achieve an optimal selection of the nation’s competencies. In April 1943, during a debate held at the incf, Fortunati mentioned for instance the fact that only 2½ to 3 per cent of Padua’s student body came from working class families while this proportion reached 8 to 10 per cent in Hungary (Melis 1997b, 199). The shift from organicism to Marxism was especially obvious in a paper published by the end of 1942, and in which Fortunati offered a radical, even subversive, interpretation of Gini’s ideas: relying on the anti-bourgeois rhetoric Gini had used in his Berlin conference (1942a), Fortunati asked notably if distinctions between physiology and pathology or between self-conservation and self-re-equilibration could be maintained if the capitalist economic system was characterized by a trend that could be compared to a chronic illness, or even to a “morbid constitution” putting at risk the self-conservation and self-re-equilibration of the demographic organism itself (Fortunati 1942b). In 1943, this idea would be recast in the Marxist language of a contradiction between productive forces and

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relations of production: because of a constant and irretrievable phase difference between production and distribution, “competitive economy can no longer increase the volume of production in conformity with the physical requirements of human masses” (Fortunati [1943a] 1967, 504). A practical postscript to this adaptation/reconversion of Gini’s views occurred when Fortunati supported Gini on the occasion of the purge trial to which he was subjected in the aftermath of the war. In a letter dated 9 November 1945 and addressed to the commission in charge of the trial, Fortunati, who conspicuously mentioned his own credentials as a partisan fighter and a Communist, declared that as early as the spring of 1939 (was this an allusion to the constitutive meeting of the Società italiana di statistica?), Gini had developed “a position that was favourable to the emergence, in Italy, of a new social and economic organization, in which the fundamental requirements of the masses’ life could be satisfied and that was beyond the traditional capitalist structure” (acs 1944–46, b. 16; author’s emphasis). Indeed, Gini had dedicated a chapter of the above-mentioned brochure Problemi del dopoguerra to the topic of economic plans: there, notably, he quoted Fortunati’s intervention with the incf and declared himself in accord with its main tenets, while insisting on the independence statistical services should maintain with regard to planning authorities (Gini 1944, 44–5). But this was in 1944. The convergence that was made possible by a common theoretical/methodological framework is also obvious, in spite of an increasing political distance, during the Pisa meeting of May 1942, at a moment when tensions between competing perspectives on postwar economic policy were simultaneously very high and not clearly stated. Thus, while Fortunati, who had by then become an undercover Communist, made use of the empiricist-historicist conventions of corporative statistics in order to criticize the passionate defence of economic orthodoxy put forward by Giovanni Demaria (Fortunati blamed Italy’s economic failures on the weaknesses of private initiative rather than on the state’s interventions [see ‘Il convegno di Pisa’ 1942, Pavanelli 1997, 179 and Melis 1997b, 15]), Gini submitted a report on “autarchy and supranational complexes.” Relying on data about production, exportation, and importation of a series of commodities (food supplies and natural raw products), he sought to determine the optimal configuration of

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postwar economic blocks (Gini 1942c). Gini presented earlier versions of this conference before the Società Italiana di Statistica in January 1942 and then in February before the Berlin Superior School of Economic Studies. Statisticians pretended they were the most capable of addressing this topic, which is located somewhere at the crossroads between political economy and geopolitics; indeed, it also attracted the interest of Felice Vinci, who presented contributions on autarchy on the occasion of sids meetings as well as before the January 1943 Heidelberg meeting of the Institute for the Economy of Lebensraum, with a presentation entitled ‘Il carattere essenziale dei cosidetti spazi economici’ (Vinci 1942a and 1942b; De Felice 1990a, 442–3). As coherent as Demaria was in his liberal outlook, Gini admitted that an economic unity of a superior order could not be defined so long as corresponding judicial regulations and political authority were not defined; he added, in conformity with his systematic cast of mind and with the importance he had always granted to demography, that a cultural and ethnic homogeneousness was also needed. Thus, the “planning of the Grossraumwirtschaft” (large economic space) should take into account the “problem of the Grossvolkplanung” (large-scale demographic planning). Yet, given the autarchic superiority of an hypothetical “European complex” over a Europe that would be divided along Mediterranean and Nordic lines, as it was established by Gini’s statistical analysis, and given the “almost superhuman epic accomplished by Germany during the present war,” all this could be summed up as an acknowledgment of the latter’s imperial domination over the postwar world (Gini 1942c, 248–58, passim). An even more remarkable example of the juxtapositions that were made possible by the conventions allowed at that time can be found in Pietra’s report on the idea of Europe, read before the incf meeting only five months later. Its author makes use of the “vital space” rhetoric, approves Gini’s analysis of large economic blocks, criticizes the limits of economic pathology because it “continues to acknowledge that economic liberalism remains fully valid,” offers a rigorous pledge in favour of planning and regulation of production, markets, and prices and finally gives as an example of this Nazi Germany’s agrarian policy! (Longo 1994, 170–82) With the outbreak of the civil war, these ambiguities were tossed away and the discussion about Bresciani-Turroni’s Introduzione alla politica economica allowed Fortunati to express openly the

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properly political dimension of statistical tools, completing the reconversion of Gini and Pietra’s set of variability indexes for the benefit of Marxist dialectics. Bresciani-Turroni’s monograph, which was published in 1942 and prefaced by no less an authority than Einaudi, can be set against the above-mentioned debates on economic planning. As a kind of liberal manifesto, it would play a significant role in the strategy put forward by market-oriented economists in order to regain an influential position at a time when it had become clear to many that the days of the Fascist regime were almost over (see Bini 1992, 245–60). It contained both a vigorous reassertion of economic orthodoxy and a severe criticism of any kind of planned, programmed, or regulated economy, as well as a statistical analysis of the distribution problem. To this end, Bresciani-Turroni devised an inequality index (D), which he defined as the difference between the relative share of total income that went to those individuals whose income was above average (Q) and the ratio between the number of individuals whose income was above average and the total number of members in a collective (P). The higher D, which corresponded also to the ratio between half of the mean deviation and average income, the higher the inequality of the distribution (thus, if D = 0.40, “this means that individual incomes’ mean deviation from average income equals 80 per cent of average income” [[1942] 1943, 357–8]). Applying this index to data sets from Prussia (1854–1928) and England (1801–1924), Bresciani-Turroni observed neither a progressive concentration of wealth in the hands of plutocrats nor any mass pauperization, but rather “a stability in individual income curves”; he saw in this “an indication of the permanent character of the fundamental causes on which depend the curve’s shape itself” and he concluded, in conformity with his Paretian inspiration, that any corrective intervention in this regard would be useless (ibid., 366). Among the many criticisms that Fortunati made of Bresciani-Turroni’s work, the one that he elaborated most had to do with his choice of indexes. The latter’s behaviour did not conform, in 50 per cent of cases on average, to the theoretical relation postulated by Pareto’s law: in the case where a distribution followed Pareto’s law, P and D should vary in opposite directions; yet, for the meagre data sets submitted by BrescianiTurroni, P and D did not conform to that rule five times out of ten (the values of the two indexes being given only for five points in time, only 10 combinations were therefore possible). Bresciani-

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Turroni’s indexes were, on the other hand, not very sensitive to variations (they were in fact less sensitive than Pareto’s α, from which they were derived and to which Gini had attributed some lack of sensitivity), to a degree that constant distributions could simply be due to this defect. Finally, when, from values computed by Bresciani-Turroni, one obtained by interpolation corresponding values for Gini’s δ or R, variations observed became much more intense (δ) and often took the opposite direction (R) (Fortunati [1943a] 1967, 513–7, passim). According to Fortunati, an adequate understanding of phenomena such as income distribution implied, besides appropriate statistical tools, a series of “experimental” inquiries that would allow the problem to be examined from various angles – labour income vs. capital income, for instance – or, in a more general framework, income vs. availability of credit or of productive means, general conditions of the wage system (ibid., 519–20). Such inquiries would in turn be possible insofar as there existed a statistical information system based upon protocols of inquiry, administrative procedures, a division of labour, and a bureaucratic organization that were adequate to the task. (An especially disquieting aspect of Bresciani-Turroni’s work had to do with the complete absence of any discussion regarding the representativity of the data he used, something Fortunati underlined with discretion. Not only were the numbers he used extremely sparse and their sources not well identified, but Bresciani-Turroni contented himself with presenting the index values without mentioning the raw data. Maybe this attitude should be interpreted as a sign of his complete passage into the political economy field, where the critique of sources and data reliability do not hold the same value as they do for statisticians. Interest in survey design was an important trait of the Ginian school and notably of corporative statistics.)

A Statistical Fantasy The “integral conception of the productive phenomenon” that characterized Fascist corporatism of the late 1930s as well as any economic planning project of the same time period supposed a complete reorganization of the statistical information system. In its conception of sources and in its methods, istat remained shaped by “the old system of the Liberal State, which was by definition agnostic with regard to the economy,” while trade union statistics were

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inevitably tainted with “specific class interests” (Pietra 1934a, 10). While, in a liberal regime, defined by unrestricted demand and supply, statistics were mainly concerned with making predictions or identifying tendencies on the basis of which economic agents could adjust their behaviour, a new social and economic order required a truly superior statistical system, one that was characterized by better coordination, higher methodological uniformity, more sensitivity to changes, and a capacity to deliver relevant data at a faster pace. The corporative or planning state, which sought to coordinate and integrate economic factors, could not content itself with “taking the pulse of the nation”: statistics had to move from a function of prediction to one of control (Pietra 1934a, 10–13, passim). The traditional distinction between a statistical system entrusted with producing data for the purposes of scientific study, analysis and forecasting, and an administrative system in charge of management and control, no longer makes sense in a totalitarian state, “which inspires itself, in its activity of economic coordination, from the needs of the collective, subordinates to these needs those of individuals and envisions the collective as an organism – that is as a synthesis of individual activities” (Fortunati 1941c, 194). Indeed, not only were statistics “the foundation of progress in the natural and social disciplines”; only they allowed that “organizational problems of the new system of life of individuals, categories and peoples be correctly set out and solved” (de Polzer 1941). Along such totalitarian lines of organization, where the economy is regulated by political power, one needed to know not only the tendency of phenomena, but their actual real states: How can bread be equitably distributed to the nation if the exact quantities of grain harvests remain unknown? (Pietra 1942a, 309–10) How can wages be adjusted to food requirements if there is no exact measurement of both? (Fortunati 1932b, 168) With regard to such tasks, traditional cognitive tools such as censuses, population registers, cadastral surveys, economic barometers, or even sample surveys – whose diversity indicates that they are suited to the conditions of the pluralist Liberal State – were largely inadequate. These devices were unable to provide “an effective measurement of the phenomenon of distribution (concentration of landed property, wealth, income),” nor a “mass demographic framework for taking into account the economic phenomenon (household income of various categories),” both of which

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were essential to the formulation and execution of the economic plan (Melis 1997b, 64). A totalitarian economy required a tool that integrated demographic and economic data, information pertaining to individuals as well as to enterprises, and in such a manner that political authorities permanently had access to an exhaustive and precise representation of all factors entering into production. Concretely, this would take the form of a corporate register, the basis of which would be territorial, i.e., the commune rather than corporations as defined by the 1934 law. Such a register would include: (a) basic demographic data as well as information regarding the economic activity of each economically active individual; and (b) for each enterprise, a detailed inventory of all elements relevant to the whole production process and to manpower. A system of cards and references would allow for the accumulation and integration of this information as well as for making a series of useful distinctions, notably those between employees, employers, and those who move from one to the other of these positions, between physical presence and legal residence on a commune’s territory, between economic sectors, etc. (Pietra 1934a, 17–9 and 1942a, 311–3). As mentioned by one participant in the 1943 incf meeting, planning required “that we go inside the enterprises, that we know not only data ad valorem, but also the quantities, the performances, the numbers” (Melis 1997b, 252). The homogeneousness that would be provided by the communal basis of the register would allow for a unique framework providing complete coverage of the territory, of its population, its enterprises and their activities – in other words a detailed representation of the national organism. The corporate register would thus become the tool on which central authority could rely for knowledge and control of society. Obviously, we are not dealing here with macroeconomic management policy-making that, by acting upon a number of fundamental variables, would seek to guide the behaviour of agents while granting them a degree of economic liberty. What we have here is rather a project for integral planning, founded upon exact knowledge of all material and human quantities entering into production: “Thus not an indirect but a direct economic policy. Not a series of plans, but a unique plan” (comment made by Fortunati; Melis 1997b, 59). The historical experiences to which its promoters referred were of course those of the Soviet Union, where the integration of demographic statistics with the organs of the Gosplan (State Planning

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Committee) signalled the passage from prevision to control (in 1944, Gini had described the Soviet statistical apparatus as a “mastodon” and deplored the loss of scientific autonomy that resulted from such an integration [Gini 1944, 44]) or the Nazi attempts at the “physical planning” of German industry during World War II (Tooze 2001). The voluntarism and avant-gardism that shaped the rhetoric of Fascism as well as that of Communism were also present here, since the advent of planning was impossible but for the existence of “a minority critically conscious of its necessity,” and that could act as “the interpreter of a historic requirement” (Fortunati’s intervention; Melis 1997b, 125). Neo-organicism offered the appropriate conceptual and lexical framework for those who wished to exalt this authoritarian vision in which fantasies of transparency, omniscience, fusion, and undividedness of the social body were entertained without restraint. The image of “capillarity,” which filled Fortunati’s report, belonged to the conventions of Fascist language in its most totalitarian phase. Thus, Achille Starace, the pnf’s general secretary, had written at the end of 1939: “The capillary structure has been developed to its extreme limits: this does not mean only that the mechanism of organization has been carried to a very high level, but mostly that the work of cohesion and education realized by the Party has reached the minimal unit to which it could be addressed: the individual” (quoted in Gentile 2004, 306). The activities of the incf were themselves described by the regime as following a model of “capillarization” or as aiming at “a ‘capillary’ diffusion of Fascism’s ideological and cultural principles” (Longo 2000, 195 and 199). Thus, the individual would “feel and act as a living and vital cell” and in turn “experience the life and activity of the organism in a physical, spiritual, and logical manner”; in the modern context of “a mass economy that [was] managed and controlled,” his activity would “integrate itself as an instrument of the overall state organism” (Fortunati 1941b, 226). “Self-government and political-economic self-administration” would rely on “capillary organs” and lead to the abolition of the division between the state and the individual; the latter would become “a conscious instrument of society” and “all his activity … be contained within the social orbit.” The frontier between private and public activities would vanish and the individual recover “in all his activities, economic and noneconomic, the sense and the sign of a social function.” The self-

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discipline of traditional sectional corporatism (“trade for merchants, agriculture for farmers, industry for manufacturers”) would itself be overcome by the unique plan guiding the political and economic life of the “new organism.” Thus, classes would become nothing more than “technical-economic categories” indicating the position of an individual within the organization of productive labour; the new society would “find its immediate reflection in the individuals” (Fortunati’s report; Melis 1997b, 56–7).

Conclusion

By 1943, Italy had become a major battleground of the Western front. With the advent of the Italian Social Republic under Germany’s protection by the end of that year, the northern part of the country also became the theatre of a complex and bloody civil war. This dramatic turn of events could not but impact on the situation of Italian statistics. For all practical purposes, official statistical activities came to a halt, even though the istat apparatus was formally re-established in Venice. In view of the changing political panorama, a number of statisticians underwent rapid reconversion, while the academy was being subjected to an anti-Fascist purge, as were other sectors of national life. Although it is not our intention to pursue the history of Italian statistics after World War II, it seems appropriate to present the upheavals of the 1943–45 biennium and to sketch the main traits of the statistical field in its immediate aftermath; we can thus highlight the resilience of the structures that were put in place during the previous decades as well as the new equilibrium that emerged after the fall of Fascism.

the war and its aftermath Regarding the strife into which Italy was plunged following Mussolini’s demise in July 1943, individual statisticians took widely different positions. As mentioned earlier, Paolo Fortunati and Alfredo de Polzer had joined the clandestine Gruppo Intellettuale Antonio Labriola as well as the Communist Party even prior to that date, combining militant and scientific activity, writing papers for the underground journal Tempi nuovi as well as for the very official

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Statistica (Melis 1997a). Libero Lenti was, besides Ferruccio Parri and Ugo La Malfa, a founding member of the Partito d’Azione, which, from 1942–43 on, sought to unite all currents of “non-Communist democratic anti-Fascism”; in the immediate aftermath of the war, Lenti sat as a delegate of this party on the Comitato di liberazione nazionale Alta Italia’s Economic Commission (Misiani 2005).1 Felice Vinci was for his part designated as a commissario prefettorale by the Badoglio government just after the events of 25 July 1943; once the Fascist Salò Republic was put into place, Vinci went into the underground resistance and was put in charge of Milan’s Liberation Committee of Professors and Academic Assistants, in which he acted as a representative of the Italian Socialist Party; these titles he was able to invoke with success in a letter to the minister of Public Instruction, dated 5 December 1945, which he wrote after having been reproached with being an apologist of Fascism, and briefly suspended from his academic duties (acs 1940–70, b. 481). Alessandro Molinari, who had been criticized for his anti-Fascist views during his whole tenure as istat’s DirectorGeneral (from a socialist background, he had never taken the Party card), was also in contact with the Socialists by the end of 1943 and was instrumental in sabotaging the population census that had been ordered by the German command for the purpose of recruiting the unemployed (Misiani 2007, 105–10). Giovanni L’Eltore, who was a specialist in medical statistics at the University of Rome and a founding member of the sis, also joined the Socialist Party and acted for a while as commander of the Matteotti partisan brigade (Cassata 2004, 94). A fervent Catholic, Marcello Boldrini joined the Christian Democrats and took part in resistance activities in his hometown of Matelica, where he was entrusted with “liaison and logistical information duties” (Locorotondo 1988). Silvio Golzio acted as provincial assessor in the junta that headed Turin’s National Liberation Committee, and he became a local Christian Democratic representative until 1946 (Bermond 2001). The head of Turin’s Statistical Institute, Diego De Castro, who had officially joined the Navy in 1941, but remained on solid ground in order to coordinate the workings of the Inter-ministerial Committee on Prices, threw his support behind the Badoglio government in 1943 and left for Rome; from then on, he was appointed to the Ministry of Marine, for which he prepared, in the fluid context that saw Tito’s partisans and then Allied troops occupying Trieste, two

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documents on the problem of territories that were claimed by Yugoslavia (De Castro 1944 and 1945; see also www.diegodecastro.it/ biografia.htm). Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, who had become estranged from Fascism following the enactment of the racial laws and Italy’s entry into the war, was rapidly on good terms with Anglo-American occupation authorities and played a prominent role in the university purge at Trieste (Vinci 1997). For Gaetano Zingali, who taught in Catania and had sat as a Fascist deputy from 1929 to 1938, such reconversion was simply impossible: suspended from all his duties by the Allied military command on 23 December 1943, he was soon interned in a prison camp; he was then indicted by the commission in charge of purging academic personnel and declared unworthy of serving the state because of his Fascist political activities and having been an apologist for Fascism (acs 1940–70, b. 492). Zingali’s sentence was, however, rescinded the following year and he was given back the public finance chair he had held since 1936. The most significant event of this period, with regard to the state of the statistical field after two decades of the Fascist regime and two years of fierce civil war, was undoubtedly the purge trial to which its most eminent figure, Corrado Gini, was subjected. Immediately after Mussolini’s fall, Gini had joined the Social-Democratic Party, which, after merging with the Democrazia del lavoro movement headed by Ivanoe Bonomi, changed its name to Partito democratico del lavoro. Gini was chosen to preside over the commission entrusted with drafting the party’s program, and it was in this context that he published Problemi del dopoguerra, the political brochure discussed in the previous chapter (acs 1944–46, b. 16).2 By the end of 1944, Gini had joined the Movimento Unionista Italiano, a bizarre and short-lived organization whose objective was to make Italy join the United States of America (!) and for which he acted briefly as honorary chairman.3 But in the context of the purges of the academy and public administration that were launched in the summer of 1944, Gini’s eleventh-hour “anti-Fascism” did not prevent him from being indicted on the following charges: (a) having “participated in Fascism’s political life,” as shown by his presence on the 1925 Constitutional Commission and his becoming, on this occasion, ad honorem member of the Fascist Party; (b) having on a number of occasions acted as an “apologist for Fascism,” as attested by many of his writings and by his

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endorsement of Fascist population policies; and (c) having given proof of “Fascist zeal,” notably by setting up a system of political surveillance at istat (acs 1944–46, b. 16). On 6 November 1944, Gini was suspended from all his academic duties while awaiting trial. On 24 January 1945, he was cleared of the first and third charges, but declared guilty of having justified Fascism and, by way of consequence, was suspended from all his teaching and administrative duties and privileges for a year. He was also forced to relinquish the presidency of the sis. A few days later, both parties appealed the decision for opposite reasons: Gini contested that he had ever cultivated any intention to be an apologist for Fascism, while the High Commissioner in charge of the prosecution considered that the other charges should not have been so easily rejected. On 17 December 1945, the whole case was dismissed on a technicality, the High Commissioner’s appeal having been filed a few days after the legal delay had expired. It is not our purpose to summarize Gini’s trial, which has already been minutely reconstituted by Cassata, nor is it to discuss Gini’s defence, which combined, according to the same author, “a claim as to the eccentric character of his own role as a technician of the regime who had been more faithful to science than to the imperatives of politics” with “the assignment of an apolitical connotation to his scientific contributions, which were allegedly limited to the analysis of the ‘structural’ tendencies of social-economic systems, themselves to be considered completely independent of politicalideological superstructures’’ (Cassata 2004, 90). What we intend to do here is rather to examine how some of the field’s structural properties did operate in the context of an especially dramatic episode. First of all, mobilization in favour of Gini was quite impressive: overall, a hundred or so academics, istat top managers and statisticians (among whom, first and foremost was Alessandro Molinari) or personalities from other horizons (such as Pietro Tomasi Della Torretta, president of the Senate) publicly expressed their support for Gini. Indeed, this mobilization testifies also – and perhaps mostly – to the strength of sis networks as well as to the persistent distance between the sis and its non-identical twin, the sids. If we compare the list of all those who personally wrote to the Commission or signed petitions in support of Gini with that of both statistical societies’ respective lists of founding members, i.e., the hard cores represented by the original promoters of the sis, and by

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members of the pre-sids Comitato di consulenza per gli studi sulla popolazione, we observe that more than half of the first group – twenty-one of the forty that were still alive – publicly stated their support of Gini, while only four of the twenty-eight members of the ccsp that were still alive did the same. Gini’s sis supporters were: M. Boldrini, V. Castrilli, P. Fortunati, L. Galvani, G.U. Papi, G. Pietra, F. A. Rèpaci, A. Uggè, A. Giannini, F. Coppola D’Anna, R. Battaglia, L. Camboni, A. de Polzer, N. Federici, G. L’Eltore, M. Saibante, S. Alberti, A. Costanzo, G. De Meo, T. Salvemini, and E. Pizzetti. His ccsp supporters were U. Giusti, L. Lenti, L. Maroi and A. Molinari. (It should be mentioned that Molinari was called to the bar because he had been istat’s general director under Gini and thus a privileged witness as to the “Fascist zeal” charge against Gini – which he denied.) Furthermore, one could detect in those statements in favour of Gini what Cassata describes as “blind faith … in a science that should not be subjected to judicial procedures because it is exempt from political influences and independent of contingent historical situations” (Cassata 2004, 90). This is one of the fundamental principles upon which the statistical field was erected, enabling it to survive the most extreme political tensions. Especially significant in this regard was the intervention of Paolo Fortunati, who, as a Party comrade of the Communist prosecutor, did not fail to mention his credentials as partisan and pci member. In a letter dated 7 November 1945, Fortunati put forward his opinion that, if Gini had accepted ad honorem membership in the Fascist Party, acted as president of istat or collaborated with German cultural institutions during the war, this was due first and foremost to “an intellectualist conviction (which was common to all scientists who have not seriously encountered the practical-critical view of life and history) according to which political life can be dominated and guided by someone holding a scientific position.” In order to defend Gini from charges relative to his support of the regime’s demographic policies (terrain, incidentally, on which Fortunati had deeply committed himself), he candidly invoked the authority of French Communist leader Maurice Thorez (!), according to whom birth decline was “a serious problem.” Fortunati declared that he had noticed himself that, from the spring of 1939, Gini had moved to “a position that was in favour of the advent, in Italy, of a new social and economic organization, in which the fundamental

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requirements of the masses’ life should be satisfied beyond the traditional capitalist structure”; and, in a style that was typical of Stalinist pragmatism, he concluded that the indicted scientist “could still be used for the resolution of the concrete problems that have to do with the progressive democratic rebirth of our country” (acs 1944–46, b. 16; author’s emphasis). The rhetoric deployed by Fortunati for the benefit of his “master” and that consisted in saving the content of Gini’s theories by locating their critique on a gnoseological level consonant with Communist conventions (intellectualism defined as deviance) can indeed also be read as a pro domo plea, or even as a form of veiled self-criticism, which made his own political reconversion more plausible. After all, Fortunati had maintained a close scientific collaboration with Gini even in the darkest hours, as shown by his participation in the third meeting of the Società Italiana di Sociologia, held in Rome in October 1942, by the interpretation of Patologia economica he offered in support of his own economic planning proposals, and also by the content of the 1945–46 issue of Statistica, in which Gini, at Fortunati’s request, published a long paper (probably written in 1944) in which he summarized the work he had conducted on the foundations of statistics since 1939. One may say that maintaining the coherence of his scientific trajectory somewhat constrained Fortunati to express his solidarity with Gini, but that this was possible only as long as Gini’s scientific achievements were presented as independent of any defined political leaning. Given the “failed” character of the postwar purge in Italy, it is not surprising that, from the fall of Fascism to the first years of the Republic, continuity prevailed over change with regard to the structures of the field of statistics.4 With regard to government statistics, the creation of the Italian Social Republic in the part of Italy that was still under Wehrmacht control by the end of September 1943 led to the transfer of istat from Rome to Venice. Its president, Franco Savorgnan, who had openly expressed his contentment with Mussolini’s fall (in a message dated 28 July 1943, he had described as “a grave but radiant moment” those days during which “Italy had recovered liberty”), was dismissed on October 26. Soon after that, General Director Molinari, as well as seven other top managers, including Benedetto Barberi, resigned. Of the 815 members of istat personnel as of 1 January 1943, more than half were fired during the winter of 1943 for refusing transfer (349), health reasons

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(forty) or abandoning their positions (twelve). The activities of the new Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, which was now headed by a reliable Fascist, Commissioner Giuseppe Adami, were apparently limited to the physical organization of the transfer. In June 1944, the arrival of Allied troops in Rome resulted in a rapid recovery of istat, whose management was entrusted first to Molinari; after Molinari was indicted, following a denunciation made by Benedetto Barberi, the latter was put in charge, on 31 January 1945 (on Molinari’s trial, see Misiani 2007, 122–39). A year later, Barberi was officially designated general director, a position he kept until 1963 (see Leti 1996, 261–86). Under his leadership (and with Alberto Canaletti-Gaudenti [1945–50] and Lanfranco Maroi [1950–61] as successive presidents), istat was reorganized and soon faced the same challenges as other statistical offices in developed countries: introduction of sampling methods and of a system of national accounts (see D’Autilia and Melis 2000, 100–9). If Barberi’s nomination signalled the coming of age (he was born in 1901) of statisticians who were trained at a time when the field was already structured (somewhere between 1925 and 1935), generational transition was on the whole a lengthy process. This was also shown by composition of the css during the quarter of a century that followed the end of the war. Thus, R. D’Addario (b. 1899), M. Saibante (b. 1902), S. Golzio (b. 1909), and P. Fortunati (b. 1906) joined it in 1949, P. Luzzatto Fegiz (b. 1900) in 1953, L. Lenti (b. 1906), G. Parenti (b. 1910), and F. Di Fenizio (b. 1906) in 1955 and B. De Finetti (b. 1906) in 1957; but, among those who had been members and leading figures in the field during the ventennio, F. Vinci (b. 1890) remained until 1952, A. Niceforo (b. 1876) until 1954, G. Pietra (b. 1879) until 1956, L. Amoroso (b. 1886) until 1961, M. Boldrini (b. 1890) until 1968, and L. Livi (b. 1891) until 1969 (Parenti 1994, 12–13). The war into which the country was plunged also provoked a temporary but severe disruption of academic activities. Exams were suspended or cancelled, transport and supplies ran into obstacles, etc. Even though no significant growth in the number of students in statistics occurred before the democratization of the universities in the 1960s, the model that was put into place during the period covered in this study (institutes/schools/faculties) and that insured the autonomy of statistics vis-à-vis science faculties (where chairs and departments of mathematics were located) continued to shape the

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discipline’s development. A school of statistics was created, for instance, in Messina in 1955–56, and a Faculty of Statistical Sciences in Padua in 1968 (Cutillo, Favara et al. 1980, 3–9).5 Here also, there was a changing of the guard. In Florence, following Marsili Libelli’s death and Livi’s transfer to Rome, Giuseppe Parenti took charge, in 1948, of both the school and the seminar of statistics, merging them into an institute; in Padua, Albino Uggè succeeded Pietra when the latter retired in 1949, and also became the first director of Milan’s Catholic University’s brand new statistical institute; in 1954, Paolo Fortunati became director of Bologna’s statistics school and mechanographic center; in Rome, Vittorio Castellano (b. 1909) would assume, from 1960 on, leadership of both the faculty and institute of statistics. As for the two statistical societies, bureaucratic continuity was insured, but scientific meetings came to a halt because of the war and the regime’s fall. The sis held no fewer than seven meetings during the first four years of its existence (the last one in June 1943), but the eighth was not convened until 1949. Luigi Galvani, who had been designated as sis commissioner following Gini’s suspension, held to this position until 1949, when Gini resumed the presidency. The sids suspended its activities a bit sooner (its eighth meeting was held in January 1942), but they were also resumed sooner, in April 1947. Here also, continuity was the rule, the most obvious case being that of the sis, where Gini and Pietra maintained their respective positions as president and vice-president until their deaths. It was therefore not until the mid–1960s that statisticians of the younger generation (Fortunati and Lenti) were able to succeed the founding fathers. On the editorial front, the panorama was substantially different. Among the field’s major journals, only Statistica was capable of maintaining itself almost without interruption (with four issues in 1943, one in early 1944, and then, in 1946, a single issue dated 1945–46) before recovering regularity with two issues in 1947 and four again from 1948 on. The Barometro economico italiano ceased to exist in 1942, while Economia, La Vita economica italiana and the Rivista italiana di scienze economiche (formerly Rivista italiana di statistica) all ended for good in 1943. The Giornale degli economisti, which had returned to the economists in 1938 following Mortara’s exile, was, as mentioned earlier, suspended from 1942 on; it was revived in 1946. Metron published a

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triple issue in 1941 and Genus, a double issue in 1942, but both journals remained on hiatus until 1949 and thereafter published on an irregular basis for a few years still. Of the four poles identified in chapter 2, all emerged from the war much weaker, even though the creation, in 1947, of the Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica and the launching of Index a year later cut the losses for Livi and his allies.

the end of hegemony This new topography enables us to measure to what degree, notwithstanding continuity in the statistical field’s own structures, the fall of the regime and the war era represent a clear break with regard to statistics’ intention “to act as the conceptual guide of research” (Ferrarotti 1996, 616, who mentions in this context the names of Gini, Boldrini, and Castellano), with regard to the hegemonic/competitive relationship statistics had maintained vis-à-vis the other disciplines that were concerned with social-scientific investigation and, thus, with regard also to the statistical field’s position as compared with that of other existing (political economy) or emerging (genetics and sociology) fields. The most outstanding case here is probably that of genetics.6 During the whole interwar era, the existence of the Società Italiana di Genetica ed Eugenica (sige), with Gini as its vice-president (from 1919) and then president (from 1934), had somewhat determined the orbit around which Italian genetics had evolved. In Italian genetics and eugenics scientific meetings (1924 [Milan], 1929 [Rome], and 1938 [Bologna]) as well as on the occasion of the 1931 Rome International Congress for Studies on Population, the hegemonic trend was a result of the junction of what Cassata describes as the “statistical-biometrical” and “biotypological-constitutional” approaches, which he respectively identifies with Gini and Boldrini (Cassata 2006a, 166–7). The weak scientific autonomy of Italian genetics at that time can be measured by the following elements: the 1931 Rome Congress included sessions on “biology and eugenics” and on “medicine and hygiene,” but the word genetics itself could be found in the title of only one presentation (Gianferrari 1934); in the Trattato elementare di statistica, “modern genetics” appeared as a chapter of Boldrini’s monograph on biometrics and anthropometry.7 The developments undergone by genetics outside of Italy

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at that time, with the advent, notably, of the “modern synthesis” and the contributions of Ronald A. Fisher, Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Julian Huxley, as well as the total discrediting of eugenics as a result of Nazism’s racial policies, would result in a complete change of setting. The very first Italian chair of genetics was entrusted to Giuseppe Montalenti in Naples in 1944 (it had been nominally created in 1940) and two other contests were held in 1948 in order to fill chairs in Pavia and Milan. A restructuring, by the end of 1948, of the sige, to provide it with two distinct sections, one in genetics and one in eugenics, as well as calls for a parliamentary rather than “presidential” reorganization, both indicate that the previous division of scientific labour had become obsolete, given the new epistemological and political contexts. Statisticians, defined by the university chair they held or their participation in sis meetings, mostly joined the eugenics section, as did Benini, Castellano, Castrilli, Costanzo, Federici, Fortunati, Gini, L’Eltore, Maroi, and Savorgnan. Among statisticians, only Giuseppe Pompilj would join the geneticists (Pompilj being a specialist in sampling methods and mathematical statistics, this choice may have been due to a Fisherian leaning). This alignment and the rising tension between geneticists and the presidency (i.e., Gini) were the occasion of a number of skirmishes, which eventually led to the creation, in 1953, of a completely independent Associazione Genetica Italiana, with Montalenti as its president. The equilibrium between economists and “pure” statisticians clearly changed in favour of the former after the war. The attitude of relative political-cultural defiance that a number of major economists had maintained in the final years of the regime enabled them to move rapidly to enviable positions as soon as reconstruction began. This was the case, notably, of Luigi Einaudi, who became successively governor of the Bank of Italy (1945), minister of the Budget (1947), and, finally, president of the Republic (1948). This was also the case of Costantino Bresciani-Turroni, who was designated as president of the Bank of Rome (1945) and executive manager of the International Bank for Reconstruction (1947), of Giovanni Demaria who became head of the Economic Commission of the Constituent Asssembly (1945), of Epicarmo Corbino and Gustavo Del Vecchio who both acted as ministers of the Treasury (1945 and 1947), etc. As R. Faucci wrote, the significant growth of the public sector – “notwithstanding the proclaimed liberism of

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rulers” – allowed many Italian economists to become not only “experts and counsels, but also often decision makers”(Faucci 2000, 305). A whole series of scientific-cultural initiatives, from the creation of the economic daily newspaper Il Sole/24 Ore (1946) to that of the bi-monthly Mondo Economico (1948), the establishment of a Società italiana degli economisti (1952) and of an Istituto nazionale per lo studio della congiuntura (1957), all converged to make economic policy a major theme of public debates, and testified to a very neat consolidation of the field of political economy. In the context of Italy’s postwar “economic miracle,” the success story of Italy’s economists mirrored that of the economic profession in the whole industrialized world. And while the professionalization of economists gave them privileged access to the sites of political and technocratic power as well as an obvious cultural hegemony (soon to be contested, to be sure), the road along which statisticians evolved followed the path of technical specialization, with the development of sampling techniques, national accounts, and electronic computing. On the other hand, the privileged position that had been maintained by statisticians during the ventennio thanks to their ability to define the objects of social knowledge according to the ideologically acceptable language of facts and observations would also begin to crumble with the restoration of political pluralism. A whole series of new journals, such as Quaderni di sociologia (1951), Il Mulino (1951), Studi politici (1952), Sociologia (1957), Passato e presente (1958), etc., appeared in a climate of expanding political and cultural diversity. The pace of Italian sociology’s institutionalization was, to be sure, rather slow. The first sociology chair in Italy was created in Florence in 1948, through the redefinition of the chair that had previously been devoted to the history and doctrine of Fascism; it was entrusted to Camillo Pellizi, former president of the Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista. Not until 1961 was a second one created, to be filled by Franco Ferrarotti in Rome. The very next year, however, an Istituto superiore di sociologia was set up at Trento University and the 1960s would be a prosperous decade for the “new” discipline. While Gini’s Società italiana di sociologia, which had held its third meeting in 1942, led a ghostly existence, an Associazione italiana delle scienze sociali was created in 1957, at the initiative of Renato Treves; two years later, it would gain admittance to the International Sociological

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Association (isa). Gini, who refused to join any of these, tried to set up his own “Sociological International,” which he labelled, in French, Institut international de sociologie (iis), and that he would chair from 1950 to 1963. The iis held seven congresses during Gini’s tenure. It gathered, besides neo-organicists who had close relations with Gini (first and foremost V. Castellano), a number of individuals who were critical of the turn taken by Italian sociology (for instance, Catholic authors linked to the Istituto Luigi Sturzo), some German sociologists largely discredited because of their collaboration with the Nazi regime (Hans Freyer being among the best-known), as well as marginal or more or less outdated figures such as the French “polemologist” Gaston Bouthoul, the American Pitirim Sorokin, and Enrico H. Sonnabend from South Africa, a long-time partner of the cisp (Cassata 2005a). In this ultimate Ginian enterprise, one can barely see much more than a caricature, an atrophied avatar of the hegemonic and architectonic project entertained by Italian statisticians during the interwar years.

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Notes

introduction 1 A revised and extended version of this paper was to be published, following Gini’s death, under the title ‘Corrado Gini: A Memoir’ (Castellano 1965). It featured a (quasi-) exhaustive bibliography of Gini’s works, which amounted to 87 monographs and textbooks and no fewer than 827 papers, notes, and articles. A list of reviews written by Gini can be found in Rivista di politica economica 1957, 1053–71. 2 The same thing can be said of the Gini biography featured on Metron’s website (www.metronjournal.it/storia/ginibio.htm) and – more surprising, given the nature of the publication in which it appears – of the entry devoted to Gini in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, written (notably) by his disciple Federici, who mentions the adjective “fascista” only once, in the bibliography, where a study by D’Autilia (1992) is mentioned. 3 It should be mentioned that until 1989 the acronym istat meant Istituto Centrale di Statistica; the replacement of “Centrale” by “Nazionale” coincides with the adoption of a decentralized structure by the Italian statistical system. 4 They were then collected in Statistica 1959. Since all statisticians included were alive at the beginning of the survey, most of the bibliographies were not exhaustive; all of the figures were prominent within the field, some of them since the turn of the century. Among Italians (the project had an international dimension), twenty-seven were born before 1900, the extreme cases being those of Rodolfo Benini (1862–1956) and Sergio Steve (born in 1915). Luigi Einaudi, who by then had just completed his term as president of the Italian Republic, was probably, among these authors, the one whose profile was the least “statistical,” but one

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Notes to pages 15–38

can easily understand the symbolic benefit that could be derived from his inclusion. Those who had died before 1956 were not included and at least one statistician who was still alive at that time, Felice Vinci, was mysteriously forgotten. On the usefulness of combining the history of statistics as a science with that of statistics as a government activity, see Desrosières 1993, 17–21. For a state of the art account of studies relative to the cultural (mostly “romantic” and “irrational”) dimensions of Fascism, see Mosse 1999. For a remarkable overview of recent historiographical debates regarding Fascist Italy, see Bosworth 1998. It has been proposed that the difficult-to-translate notion of “intellectuals/officials” (intelletuali funzionari), be contrasted with that of “militant intellectuals,” with the intent of measuring the degree of Fascism’s penetration into, and hegemony over, civil society (Isnenghi 1979, 7–9). One of the most elaborate – and, for a time, most hotly debated – attempts at characterizing fascist ideology has been that of Z. Sternhell, who defines it by the combination of the “anti-materialist revision of Marxism” and of “integral nationalism”. See notably Sternhell 1989, which takes into account the Italian experience (the author’s former works dealt with the case of France), and the very critical review in Germinario 1995. On the question of a minimum common denominator (of Fascism, and not solely of its ideology) and of the classic problem of grouping the Italian and German cases within the same category, see the sceptical remarks in De Felice 1975, ch. 6.

chapter one 1 Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), astronomer and mathematician, was the towering figure of nineteenth-century statistics, to which he brought a number of theoretical contributions as well as remarkable skills as an intellectual entrepreneur and an institutional organizer. See, for instance, Beaud and Prévost 1998a. 2 To be precise, Del Vecchio and Salvioni each published one paper, respectively in 1910 and 1916. However, as will be shown later, the content of both papers indicate in fact up to what point those two representatives of the post-Risorgimental generation had become outdated and marginal. 3 According to Gini, this paper was written on the request of F. Enriques, founder of Scientia, who had read the manuscript of “Teoria logica e psicologica della probabilità.” See Gini 1964, 254.

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4 The question was far from rhetorical, since, in his thesis, Gini did not refrain from speculating on purely biological grounds. The book’s subtitle was indeed Le leggi della produzione dei sessi. 5 The tone that Gini adopted when replying to Bresciani’s criticisms may be related to their rivalry in the contest: Bresciani is thus presented by Gini as a “disciple” of Bortkiewicz, and, moreover, as a not very trustworthy one, since he lent some of his master’s formulas “a much wider range than that given to them” by the latter (Gini 1908b, 669). 6 The French-Italian aristocrat Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), an engineer by training, held the political economy chair in Lausanne, where he succeeded Léon Walras (1834–1910), who was a pioneer in the application of mathematics to economic phenomena and a founding father of neo-classical or marginalist theory (Valade 1990). L. Amoroso (1886–1965), generally considered as one of the foremost Italian economists of the interwar period, was trained in mathematics. He was a professor of financial mathematics at the University of Bari from 1914 to 1921 and held the Chair of Political Economy at the University of Rome from 1926 to 1956. He was a member of the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica (css) from 1926 to 1943 (Giva 1980). A. de Pietri-Tonelli (1883–1952) successively taught statistics in Padua and political economy in Venice, where he chaired the Laboratorio di economia politica, at Ca’Foscari University; he was described as “the Saint Paul of Paretians,” having abandoned his socialist faith after his encounter with Pareto’s work (Giva 1991). F. Vinci (1890–1962), a student of Bresciani, taught for a while at Ca’Foscari where he headed the Laboratorio di statistica, and then moved on to Milan where he taught economics and statistics; he was a member of the css from 1939 to 1943 (Lasorsa 1971). 7 The first was a paper published by the Université de Lausanne. The two volumes of the Cours d’économie politique were published, respectively, in 1896 and 1897. The first Italian translation was only published in 1942. A reprint of the original edition has been issued as vol. I of Pareto’s Œuvres Complètes (1964). 8 A first wave of Italian contributions on the subject of income distribution (Pareto’s law not necessarily being the main focus of these) occurred during the 1905–1915 decade, with papers by C. Bresciani-Turroni , A. Beneduce, V. Furlan, G. Mortara, and L. Amoroso, most of them published in the GDE. A second wave, more specifically concerned with the Pareto curve, occurred from the early 1920s, with, notably, papers by F. P. Cantelli, F. Vinci, G. Mortara, L. Amoroso, A. Lanzillo, C. Alimenti, R. D’Addario, and C. Bresciani-Turroni. A complete – at the time of the

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11

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Notes to pages 49–51

book’s publication – list of writings entirely or partially dedicated to Pareto’s law can be found in Pareto 1975d, 232–49. Having graduated from the University of Padua in 1902, Gaetano Pietra (1879–1966) remained there as assistant in infinitesimal calculus and analytical geometry from 1903 to 1907. During the 1910s, he was employed by the Direzione generale della statistica; he came back to the academy in the early 1920s. Pietra became a central figure of Padua’s Istituto di statistica, set up in 1921 by Gini, who had moved from Cagliari in 1913, and was himself chosen for the Padua statistics chair in 1928, after Gini had moved to Rome (Melis 1997b, 18). Alberto de Stefani (1879–1969), who would become a severe critic of Gini and is better known as Mussolini’s first minister of finance, was at that time libero docente in political economy at Padua (Marcoaldi 1991). Giovanni Dettori, Franco Savorgnan, and E. Porru were all closely linked to Cagliari’s Laboratorio di statistica, set up by Gini in 1910 and of which he remained the head until his departure for Padua. Savorgnan (1879–1966) would later succeed Gini as president of istat in 1932. In both papers, Mortara attacked the Indici and also, in the second, Corridore’s L’evasione dei redditi, (1910), which followed Gini’s methods. Mortara, who, like Bresciani, had studied under Bortkiewicz, held the Messina statistics chair at that time (he had finished second in the Cagliari contest – where Gini had been chosen). In 1912, Gini would again be preferred to Mortara in the contest for the Padua chair (and, as already mentioned, both had been opponents for the Palermo chair in 1908 – where Bresciani had been chosen). After having taught a few years in Rome (where he had moved in 1915 after four years in Messina), Mortara joined, in 1924, the University of Milano, where Bresciani was also located by that time (Lenti 1967). Bresciani’s preceding paper, “Di un indice misuratore della disuguaglianza nella distribuzione della ricchezza,” had been published in 1910. It should be mentioned that in Indici di concentrazione e di dipendenza, Gini had expressed some reservations regarding Bresciani’s Paretooriented work, “Dell’influenza delle conditioni economiche sulla forma della curva dei redditi,” published in the Giornale degli economisti in 1905. On the mathematization process undergone for instance by physics, see Gingras 2001. The author maintains that, besides social and epistemological effects, the mathematization of physics also had an ontological effect, i.e., an effect on the nature of the entities or objects physics dealt with.

Notes to pages 51–9

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13 The exception was the Fourth International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Rome in April 1908 and on the occasion of which Gini read a paper titled “Sulla regolarità dei fenomeni rari.” Otherwise, the Giornale degli economisti was the main forum in this regard. The fact that Gini’s views about probability were disseminated through vehicles that did not strictly belong to the mathematic field is surely something to be taken into account if one wishes to understand why they did not have any echos among mathematicians specialized in probability – Cantelli and Galvani notwithstanding – at that time. In a recent reappraisal of Gini’s work on probability, D. Costantino estimated that the obscurity which had befallen Gini’s views was due to the fact that they were ahead of their time and that they referred to a classical interpretation of probability that had “fallen into disrepute” among mathematicians (1994, 264). This inability to know what to say to whom and when, which is typical of the neophyte and the outsider, looked upon by his contemporaries as behind or not up to date, while later historians consider him ahead of his time, is precisely a result of the division of the social world into fields.

chapter two 1 From the name of Giovanni Giolitti, one of Italy’s most influential parliamentarians at the turn of the century. After having served as a bureaucrat for two decades, Giolitti was elected for the first time in 1882 and would serve five times as Prime Minister (Presidente del Consiglio) between 1892 and 1921. Giolitti’s name is identified with the largely criticized practice of trasformismo, which referred to his ability to rally his adversaries (literally: transforming them into allies). 2 Numbers come from a 1911 speech to the House by Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce Minister F.S. Nitti. Previously, in February 1907, Nitti had described the situation of Italian statistics as “indecent,” marked by “inertia” and “indifference.” In May 1907, he demonstrated in graphic detail the delays in data publication and other dysfunctions from which government statistics suffered (Leti 1996, 61–3). 3 Thus, in 1910, a member of parliament recalled that the Direzione Generale della Statistica was commonly known as “New Caledonia,” because less adept civil servants were “deported” there. In 1921, statistician F. Coletti spoke of official statistics as “the Cinderella” of Italian public administration. In 1922, Mortara described government statistics as the “castrated and mutilated dead body” of what had been the Direzione Generale of Bodio’s years (Leti 1996, 61–5).

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4 Data about chairs is taken from yearbooks of the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (later Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale) from 1900 to 1915 and 1922 to 1942–43 (publication was suspended from 1916 to 1921). Crosschecking with other sources has led to a number of minor corrections. 5 Giacomo Acerbo (1888–1969) and Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959) were both major Fascist politicians. Acerbo, who had studied economics and embarked on an academic career before the war, joined the Fascist movement in 1919, was elected in 1921 and held various positions in the Chamber of Deputies; a member of Fascism’s Great Council, he was Minister of Agriculture and Forests from 1929 to 1935, when he became President of the International Institute of Agriculture. Bottai was the founder of the Rome Fascio in 1919 and was elected in 1923. He became undersecretary of the Ministry of Corporations in 1926 and its Minister from 1929 to 1932; from 1936 to the fall of Fascism, he was Minister of National Education. 6 This quotation and the following are from ‘Intorno alla istituzione di un laboratorio statistico-sociale’, document dated March 4, 1915 and reprinted as an appendix to Cattini et al. 1997, vol. I. 7 Statistician Carlo Benedetti, for instance, said of Gini, under whom he had worked: “Apart from rare exceptions, he (Gini) considered mathematicians as extravagant people who had to be watched closely when they dealt with a concrete problem” (Giorgi 1996, 14). 8 Pietra’s methodological contributions were contained in his papers on relations between variability indexes, written in the direction established by Gini: they were obviously considered by the latter as most up to date, but other members of the commission considered them to be of limited interest. 9 Even if 1858 is often given as a decisive date in the history of statistical teaching within Italian universities, the teaching of statistica goes back to 1811, in the case of Padua, to 1815 (Ottaviani 1989). 10 Six different messages mentioning money transfers amounting to 3,000 lit for the years 1924, 1925 and 1926 can be found in the Gini archival fund. acs, Corrado Gini, Carteggio, b. 2. The money seems to have been used to cover regular expenses and sometimes to realize specific research sponsored by Confindustria. 11 Italo Balbo (1896–1940) was a legendary figure of Fascism, famous notably for extortions committed by the thug squads he led in 1920–21. Balbo held a number of important positions under the regime, but was mostly associated with the development of military aircraft. In 1934, he

Notes to pages 81–7

12

13 14

15 16

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was sent to Libya, of which he became governor, a nomination widely interpreted as a kind of forced exile. The analytical character of the nomenclature used for the index obviously reflects a bias here, “economy,” “corporativist economy,” “agrarian economy,” “finance,” “economic crisis,” etc. all being distinct categories, as well as statistica (singular, i.e., the discipline), statistiche (plural, i.e., the data), “index numbers,” etc. In the issue I examined, I found the letter addressed to P. Jannaccone, at that time a professor at the University of Turin. The complete list of participants and their titles can be found in Leti 1989, 44–7. Leti mentions that nine statisticians of considerable status did not take any part in this debate. They were L. Amoroso, C.E. Bonferroni, C. Bresciani-Turroni, R. D’Addario, L. Galvani, G. Mortara, A. Molinari, A. Niceforo, and F. Savorgnan. In June 1935, accompanying the issue (no 72) in which twenty-nine answers were published, Colombo wrote a new personal letter to those who had not yet made their opinion known (among whom was Jannaccone). Amoroso and Mortara, who were both silent during the debate, had held such positions respectively five and two times. Thus, mathematician Paolo Medolaghi (from Rome’s Faculty, of which Gini was president) dealt with actuarial mathematics and probability, Gaetano Pietra (Padua) with methodological statistics, Fernando Paglino (a former student of Gini who was now employed by the Istituto nazionale delle assicurazioni) with biometrics, Paolo Fortunati (then at Palermo) with population theory and demography, Giovanni Ferrari (Modena) and Alfredo de Polzer (Padua) with economic statistics (Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze 1939). Medolaghi (1873–1950), who held the chair in the economics and finance of insurance since 1936, was an eminent figure in Italian mathematics, whose career combined pure scientific work (with contributions to probability theory as early as 1907) with important bureaucratic-scientific functions (director general of the Istituto di Previdenza Sociale [1923–36], president of the Credito Fondiario Sardo and of the Istituto Italiano degli Attuari [1929–42]). In his memoirs, P. Luzzatto Fegiz recalls that in 1923 (he was about to celebrate his 23rd birthday), as he thought of embracing a career in the teaching of statistics, economist Gustavo Del Vecchio suggested that he talk to Gini, who “was considered then as the number one in statistics.” Luzzatto Fegiz adds, “I should have presented myself to Gini and asked for his counsel: which meant, in the language of the university which I

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ignored then, offering myself as a disciple for his school,” showing that he had not yet integrated the “feudal” nature of the relations that structured not only the statistical field but the whole university (Luzzatto Fegiz 1984, 99). Parenti, at that time libero docente, would rank first in the Genoa contest for the chair of statistics in 1942, one of the rare occasions where Gini was not a member of the commission (it was made up of Boldrini, Fortunati, Livi, Maroi and Vinci). See acs 1924–54, b. 242. The ccsp meetings were a posteriori listed as having been part of the sids. After Livi (1938–41), Vinci (1941–43) and Savorgnan (1943–45), Maroi was nominated as extraordinary commissar in charge of the sids, a position he held for two years before being nominated president in a regular manner. In 1951, Niceforo succeeded him. Maroi became president of istat on August 1, 1949. The sis was officially acknowledged by royal decree on 13 July 1939, two weeks after the sids. The first work to deal systematically with Fascist anti-Semitism was De Felice 1961 (1988). All other historians have felt the need to position themselves in relation to it. According to De Felice, whose views are often presented in a partial manner, Fascist anti-Semitism was partly due to German influence and Mussolini’s desire to consolidate the RomeBerlin axis, but it resulted first and foremost from the latter’s totalitarian will to “transform Italians” into a “race of masters” (258; author’s emphasis). Since I fattori demografici dell’evoluzione delle nazioni (1912), Gini had more than once expressed favourable opinions regarding the eugenic effect of racial interbreeding, which was of course an awkward position, coming from a nationalist. Despite the leniency he was granted due to his forced exile, Mortara had approved the regime’s demographic policy and Italian imperialism on many occasions (see, for instance, Mortara 1936b). Livi 1937a presents answers given by four German statisticians and some of their Italian colleagues to a survey conducted by the ccsp on Nazi demographic policy. Roberto Bachi, notably, encouraged Italy to “imitate” the birth policy of National Socialist Germany (32). If answers given by the Italians (U. Giusti, R. Bachi, S. Golzio, and of course Livi) remained prudent (Giusti mentioned “moral and religious reservations” [28]), those given by Germans were on the other hand quite explicit (F. Zahn, at the time honorary president of the iis, mentioned the positive eugenic effect that resulted from the selection of “couples that were fit for procreation”

Notes to pages 94–103

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[22], and E. Wagemann, director of the Institut für Konjunkturforschung, evoked the “new ideals promoted by National Socialism” [27]). The author of L’Italia economica, who had held the statistics chair in Macerata from 1915 to 1923–24, was, in 1937–38, the holder of a chair in corporative political economy in Rome. See acs 1940–70, b. 26. Respondents were asked to mention their racial groups on the appended form, which was not included in the file kept in the archives. On this point, see Maiocchi 1999, 225–7, whose argument rests upon the analysis of letters between Mussolini and Guido Landra, one of the signatories; the diaries of G. Ciano, Foreign Affairs Minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law; and those of G. Bottai, Minister of National Education and a central character in the advent and implementation of racial measures. Capistro quotes Livi’s answer to the survey, where, in order to refute rumors about his name and its possible Jewish connections, he argued that Livi derived from Livo (Olivo) and argued for its ancient Tuscan origin (2002, 23–4). In a letter to Professor Felix Bernstein of New York University, dated May 13, 1945, Gini wrote, in English, of Metron, “as I refused to suppress the names of the Jew members, I was obliged to discharge all the Editorial Committee” (acs, Corrado Gini, carteggio, b. 1). Giuseppe Parenti, from Genoa University, was granted the prize for a purely methodological paper entitled “A proposito di alcuni indici delle relazioni statistiche” (Statistica 1943, 85–7). According to Capistro, Benedetto Croce is the only intellectual about whom we know for sure that he refused to answer the census of members of the academies, and who justified his attitude by invoking the persecution that motivated this operation (2002, 39–40).

chapter three 1 At that time, Beneduce was thirty-three years old and had just obtained his libera docenza, Bresciani (twenty-eight) and Gini (twenty-six) still held the rank of straordinario and Mortara (twenty-five) was on the verge of obtaining the Messina chair. It may be recalled that these four were the final contestants for the 1908 Palermo chair. Beneduce, who was the oldest of the group, had, however, followed a different path. After having graduated in mathematics, he had begun a career as a public servant, combining important duties in government statistics with theo-

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retical and methodological activity that led him to publish a string of papers in the Giornale degli economisti between 1904 and 1910. Beneduce entered the academy in 1910 and was soon nominated to the statistics chair at the University of Genoa; however, he soon came back to a technocratic career, which, in spite of his Socialist past, culminated under Fascism (Bonelli 1966). Melis has provided an account of the changes in Italian public administration during that period as well as of the debates between “liberisti” (mainly Einaudi and Ricci) and those they described as “economic dictators” (1988, esp. 11–36). Einaudi himself has given his overall assessment of the war economy in La condotta economica e gli effetti sociali della guerra italiana (1933), which was published as a volume in the Carnegie Foundation series on the economic and social history of the World War. Giuffrida and Pietra have narrated their war experience in Provital. Approvigionamenti alimentari d’Italia durante la Grande Guerra 1914–1918, published in 1936, in the context of the boycott imposed on Italy following its invasion of Ethiopia; their book may also be read as a defence of their action in response to Einaudi’s own critical assessment of the war economy (see above n. 2). It was then published by the Commission scientifique interalliée du ravitaillement 1920 with the French and British reports. The Italian version was published a year later. It should be added that Livio Livi and Marcello Boldrini also took part in this work. In the division of labour between the three Italian statisticians, the two younger ones were predictably entrusted with the least prestigious tasks: data collection for Livi and computations for Boldrini. In the context of this commission, Benini also prepared a report on the taxation of patrimonies (1919); on the issue of war damages and of their assessment, Benini would also publish a two-part paper in Economia (1924), as well as an official report, on the request of Minister of Finance Alberto De Stefani (1925). Bachi also prepared, during the same period, a report on the reform of statistical work in the Ministry of Finance and Treasury, on De Stefani’s request, as well as a report on the Italian monetary situation, for the United States Senate’s Commission of Gold and Silver Inquiry. The origins of this commission, created in October 1922, lay in the conflict between manufacturers and trade unions that resulted from the wage cuts made in 1921, in the context of the retreat of the working class movement in favour of industrial control. Pescarolo 1979 offers a thorough presentation of the context and of the work accomplished by the

Notes to pages 111–18

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commission as well as an edited version of its proceedings. The advent of the Mussolini government at the end of 1922 put an end to the commission’s work. Mortara and Gini, who had both produced research on the issue of the evolution of industrial wages, each published a paper representing their contribution to the commission: their conclusions diverged widely as to the estimation of the fall in real wages since the pre-war years, Gini’s analysis being much more optimistic than Mortara’s (Gini 1923c; Mortara 1923b). The delegation published, under the title Statistical Documents about Italy’s Capacity to Pay (1925), a set of twenty-three brochures describing the post-war situation of Italy through an impressive array of data. In addition, it may be mentioned that Savorgnan was also entrusted with preparing, on behalf of the Commission, a report on the settlement of the Austrian public debt. While Gini was in overall charge of the inquiry and of the general report, Vinci prepared seven specific reports, on cereals, wool, cotton, coal, petroleum, iron, and chemical fertilizers (the last four were written with the help of N. Sloutski), which were appended to Gini’s report. The League also published, under Vinci’s signature, another report on the same subject: La question des matières premières et des denrées alimentaires (Geneva, 1921). Lenti argues that Mortara’s attitude proceeded from his direct links with the Risorgimento generation and its sentiment of “an imprescriptible duty to complete the unity of the fatherland” (1967, 204). On Savorgnan, who had succeeded Gini at Cagliari and then moved to Messina (1921–22), Modena (1922–27) and Pisa (1927–29), before obtaining a demography chair in Rome, see the biographic details in D’Autilia and Melis 2000, 85–6. A few examples of monographs with their author’s name: Natural Resources and Growth of the Population of Italy (Mortara), Italy’s Economic and Financial Effort During the War (Livi), The Effects of War on the Population of Italy (Livi), Material Damage Caused to Italy During the War (Benini and Maroi), The Territorial Results of Peace and Italy (Savorgnan), Index Numbers of the Economic Life of Italy in the Post-war Period (Padua Statistics Institute), The Present Economic Status of Italy as Compared with Pre-war Years, and Its Possibilities of Future Development (Gini), International Comparisons of the Burden of Taxation (Boldrini), etc. On this question, see Michelini 1999. It was common at that time to make a distinction between “liberismo,” understood as the economic

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doctrine that opposed state intervention in the market mechanism, and “liberalismo,” which was a more general term and covered the political and philosophical dimensions of liberalism. One could therefore be a “liberist” and make accommodations to an authoritarian political regime. The “Manchesterian policy” (a formula used by Mussolini himself) refers to the economic policy promoted by De Stefani and whose major features were the restriction of consumption and of unproductive expenses, the privatization of various public services (including the telephone), and the elimination of progressive taxation – in short, a reduction of state intervention in the economy. Mortara’s first public pronouncement in favour of Fascism appeared in the 1923 edition of his Prospettive economiche. In a letter he wrote to De Stefani, dated 20 May 1928, Mortara declared that his “faith in Fascism was much greater than that of many of the party’s members” (reprinted in Marcoaldi 1986, 194). The decree was worded as follows: “A Commission of eighteen members is constituted, with the duty to study problems that are today present in national consciousness and which bear on the fundamental relations between the state and all the forces it must contain and guarantee …” Relazioni e proposte della Commissione presidenziale per lo studio delle riforme costituzionale, 1925, 1. Neo-Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) was the main intellectual figure of Fascism. Minister of Public Instruction in the Mussolini government from 1922 to 1924, he then held a series of prominent positions in the cultural arena, among which one of the most significant was probably the coordination of the Enciclopedia Italiana in the 1930s, for which he wrote, with Mussolini, the entry on Fascism. It was Gentile who was the author of the loyalty oath all university professors were forced to take from 1931 on. After the regime’s fall in 1943, Gentile remained faithful to Mussolini and joined the Nazi-protected Italian Social Republic. He was killed by Communist partisans on 15 April 1944. See Papa 1958 for a complete list of the signatures to both documents. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was the other grand figure of Italian idealist philosophy. Nominated to the Senate in 1910, he was Minister of Public Instruction in 1920–21. From 1925 on, he became the symbol of internal and spiritual resistance and constantly reasserted his attachment to liberalism. After the war, he became president of the small Liberal Party. Italian official statistics were at first, from 1861 to 1878, a division within the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce; they were

Notes to pages 121–3

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then promoted to the status of a General Directorate and saw their authority nominally extended to all government statistics while remaining attached to that ministry. A synoptical presentation of the collocation and hierarchical position of Italian central bureaus of statistics up to 1926 can be found in Leti 1996, 41. We may also mention here the use that was made of Gini’s contributions to the methods of measuring national wealth by Australian Commonwealth Statistician G. H. Knibbs (1918). Gini’s fluency in many foreign languages (French, English, Spanish, and German) was an important asset here. If Gini was considered politically reliable, Alessandro Molinari, who became istat’s director general in 1927 and later emerged as the central figure of government statistics under Franco Savorgnan’s weaker leadership, was suspected of being an anti-Fascist and never took the party card. In the 1930s, there was increasing political pressure intended to promote Giuseppe Adami, who was a trusted Fascist, to a new position of co-director general; despite resistance from members of istat’s administrative committee, these pressures finally succeeded. On this episode, see Leti 1996, 160–5. For a brief summary of the discussions surrounding the peculiar (and ambiguous) legal status of parastatal agencies under the Fascist regime, see D’Autilia and Melis 2000, 59–60. According to Giacomo Acerbo, who reported in the Chamber on the bill that created istat, “the new entity was created as a fictional legal public law subject, which enjoys a certain autonomy of management in order to benefit from all advantages of administrative and contractual freedom that legal subjects are endowed with, and yet, at the same time, maintains for itself, and in the limits of justice for its personnel, full possession of the privileges and advantages of state administrations” (quoted ibid.). Among the practical consequences of this autonomy was a certain degree of liberty from civil service norms regarding the hiring of personnel and the determination of remuneration. The 1931 and 1936 censuses largely explain the continuing growth of the second period. There was of course a brutal drop during the war years, but decline began as early as 1935, due to economic sanctions. Delays in the publication calendar was a major problem of Italian official statistics during the quarter of a century previous to the creation of istat: regarding, for instance, the Annuario Statistico, the only one of these publications that existed before istat, a single volume covering the years 1919 to 1921 was published in 1925 (Leti, 1996, 64). Gini mentioned with pride istat’s “editorial punctuality” during his tenure in

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“L’Istituto Centrale di Statistica del Regno d’Italia,” Barometro Economico, 1932, n. 34 (reprinted in Leti 1996, 117–26). It should be recalled that on the issue of wages, Gini had also been on the optimistic side at the time of the 1922 Commission of Inquiry on industry (he thought that the decrease in wages in the post-war years was much less significant than did Mortara, for instance). Guglielmo Tagliacarne and Ugo Giusti joined Livi at istat’s research unit, but all three rapidly left over conflicts with Gini. Raffaele D’Addario succeeded Livi as head of the unit and held the position until 1931. A list of the heads of these bureaus can be found in Barometro economico italiano, no 72, June 1935, 311. It may in fact have been more, but I have not examined the archives for the period before 1900. In a letter to Alberto De’ Stefani dated 20 May 1928, Mortara expressed his “great fear” that Gini would “provoke an ukase for my suppression, or at least that of the Prospettive,” which the latter could have perceived as a competitor to the official statistical yearbook (quoted in Marcoaldi 1986, 193). Ridolfo Livi (1856–1920), as we mentioned in chapter 1, was one of the few Italian authors whose writings were renowned for their rigour and amplitude (his Antropometria militare relied on the detailed physical examination of 299,335 recruits!) and quoted by authors of the “younger generation” (Aliverti 2005). Other Italian members of the isi who are absent from the table were: R. Benini, Riccardo Bachi, C. Bresciani-Turroni, L. De Berardinis, V. Dore, L. Einaudi, U. Giusti, P. Jannaccone, A. Molinari, U. Ricci, and P. Sitta. A few examples: G. Mortara, Lezioni di statistica economica e demografica (1920); L. Livi, Lezioni di statistica economica e demografica (1923); R. Benini, Elementi di statistica metodologica, economica e demografica (1922–23); F. Vinci, Lezioni di statistica economica e demografica (1927); G. Lasorsa, Lezioni su la organizzazione e le fonti della statistica economica e demografica (1928); M. De Vergottini, Lezioni di statistica demografica ed economica (1929); S. Golzio, Lezioni di statistica demografica ed economica (1936); Roberto Bachi, Elementi di statistica metodologica, economica e demografica (1937); P. Luzzatto Fegiz, Statistica demografica ed economica (1940). They are D’Addario, Fortunati, Gini, Lasorsa, Livi, Luzzatto Fegiz, Mortara, Pietra, Savorgnan, Uggè, and Vinci. The list of Italian members of the Econometric Society also included Riccardo Bachi, Benini, and

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Bresciani-Turroni, who had previously held a chair in statistics, but had switched to political economy. Together, they represented 23 per cent of the sixty-five Italian members enumerated in Brandolini and Gobbi 1990. We may add to the already-named members the following, who did not hold a chair of statistics at that time (or held one in another discipline such as mathematics or economics) but were active in the field: L. Amoroso, F. Brambilla, F. Coppola D’Anna, Giovanni Ferrari, P. Medolaghi, and A. Molinari (director general, istat).

chapter four 1 Among studies conducted along these lines, we may mention the monographs dedicated to the estimation of private wealth in the Venetian region, realized under the guidance of G. Pietra and under the auspices of the Padua Statistics Institute. Pietra 1931 is the methodological introduction to this series. Other contributors were D. Donati, G. Ferrari, A. de Polzer, and G. Lasorsa. Outside of Italy, Australian George H. Knibbs, one of the towering figures of Anglo-Saxon official statistics at the turn of the century, had relied on Gini’s approach in his own The Private Wealth of Australia and its Growth (1918). 2 Besides the 1923 edition, we may also consider as a preliminary version of this textbook his 1919 monograph: La misura della vita; applicazioni del metodo statistico alle scienze naturali, alle scienza sociali, all’arte. 3 This judgment should probably be read as an indictment of the Ginians’ Statistica Economica, which almost completely ignored Vinci’s work, as shown by Ferrari and de Polzer’s presentation of the state of the art of the subject at the sips 1939 meeting. Vinci’s name appears only once in the text (for his empirical work on capital concentration) and three of his writings appear in the bibliography; but no mention is made of his contributions on economic barometers, which were as important as those of any other Italian economist or statistician. 4 In a review of Gini 1939b, where Vinci rebutted some of the criticisms addressed to him by Gini, he complained that the former sometimes quoted him abusively in order to sustain his own views (see Vinci 1940b, 314). 5 The bibliography, which is identical in all editions that ran from 1937 to 1947, included seventy-eight titles and had been prepared by Silvio Orlandi, manager of Metron. As might be expected, more than half of these writings (thirty-seven) were authored by Gini, who was followed by Pietra (seven), Cantelli and Galvani (four each), Boldrini, Castellano, and

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De Finetti (two each). Benini, Livi, Mortara, Niceforo, and Vinci were mentioned only once (the first four for their textbooks, the fifth for a 1920 paper in Metron [and, curiously, not for his own textbook]). As shown by letters exchanged by Gini and Kendall, the latter even envisioned publishing an English translation of Gini’s Memorie de statistica metodologica, a project that failed, however (acs, Corrado Gini, Carteggio, b. 4). In the Dictionary’s fifth edition (1990), edited by F.H.C. Marriott, these entries were not retained. Gini’s 1965 paper followed a review of three of his writings by Kendall in which the latter had underlined the preference of Italian statisticians for the description of populations and their reticence towards sampling. It has been argued that Gini’s reading of Fisher’s and Yule and Kendall’s passages was less than charitable and that it applied to the mechanical interpretation of statistical tests, which Fisher and Kendall had themselves warned against (see Frosini 1989: 211–4). They were S. Somogyi and G. Veronese (on the territorial distribution of births and professions), A. Uggè (on birth according to religious groups), C. Gini (on inquiries about large families), G. Zingali (on demographic policy) and G. Veronese (on foreign students in Italy). See Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della Popolazione (cisp) 1933–34, vol. 8. Boldrini’s Statistica (1942a), which covered teoria and metodi, resembles more closely what is generally intended by a statistical treatise. There exists no exhaustive bibliography of Mortara. The one that was published in 1959 (thus, eight years before the author’s death) in Statistica 1959, 376–86, includes 361 entries. The one that appears in Omaggio a Giorgio Mortara/A Tribute to Giorgio Mortara 1885–1967, Vita e Opere/His Life and Works (1985) covers his whole career. In both cases, however, the numerous reviews Mortara wrote, mainly for the Giornale degli economisti, are missing. A bibliography of Boldrini’s writings can be found as an appendix to the obituary notice written by Albino Uggè (1969, 317–42). Boldrini’s stature can be measured by the fact that he was elected to the International Statistical Institute in 1935 and acted as its president from 1959 to 1963. Boldrini also held major positions in the management of natural resources (he was notably vice-president and, later, president of the Ente nazionale idrocarburi [eni]) for nearly two decades (from 1948 to 1967); this made him, besides his professoral and intellectual activities, a leading technocrat of Christian-democratic Italy.

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12 There is an unfortunately very incomplete bibliography of Vinci’s writings, amounting to 122 titles, in Buonpensiere 1990. 13 This interest in economic forecasting would remain after 1945, as attested to by the creation of Index. The most complete bibliography of Livi’s writings can be found in the introduction of his re-issued Trattato di demografia (1974), prepared by his son, renowned demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci. In spite of its 369 items, it remains incomplete: for instance, the controversial ‘In tema di razzismo’ is omitted as are Livi’s contributions to Razza e civiltà. On Livi, see also Farcomeni 2005. 14 Vacher de Lapouge’s Race et milieu social (1909) dedicated a chapter to P. Jacoby and Niceforo’s views on the “circulation of aristocracies,” a recurring theme in Italian social science. On Niceforo’s role in the genesis of the idea of a division of Italy between two races (Nordic and Southern), see Patriarca 1996, 236–8. 15 Natural selection appears in the later versions of Gini’s theories, at a time when he had more or less renounced his interwar views in favour of the labour economy paradigm (economia lavorista). This was the case for the general description he offered of the economic evolution of societies in the ultimate (French) edition of his Pathologie économique. In this description, which belongs to the sociological-economic genre of the stages theory, the decisive variable is the psychology of work: we thus move from an animal state of production (represented by primitive populations) to a stage of constrained labour (exemplified by slavery and serfdom), to one of free labour (to which belong craftsmanship, small rural property, and labour within the entreprise) and finally to that of spontaneous labour (where the latter appears as an expression of personality). It is indeed a natural selection mechanism that accounts for this evolution: thus, at the stage of constrained labour, individuals who are least impervious to labour are especially appreciated by dominant classes and have a tendency to reproduce for generations; in a comparable manner, emigration to America attracts the most hard-working among European labourers and the environment in which they find themselves (virgin territories, rapid development of mechanization) has made labour less exacting, allowing for the emergence of a “labouring society” [Gini 1959a, 22–3]). 16 These reflections on problems related to statistical inquiries among primitive populations, which were presented first in Gini 1937a, were later developed in a small volume entitled Le rivelazioni statistiche tra le popolazioni primitive (1940b [with reprints in 1941, 1942 and 1948–49]).

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17 A. De Stefani pretended in a prefatory note that the original idea was his and Gini, who, in this context, was De Stefani’s commanding officer, contested that claim. Letter from Gini to Giovanni Borelli, director of the Ufficio storiografico della mobilitazione, 26 December 1918 and Borelli’s reply to Gini, 11 June 1919, in which he included a copy of De Stefani’s own reply to a Borelli letter, dated 4 June (acs, Corrado Gini, Documentazione, bD. 11). 18 These ideas were equally developed by De Stefani, without explicit reference to Gini, in ‘La ricchezza dall’aspetto energetico’, his inaugural lecture of 7 December 1920 at the Istituto superiore di commercio de Venezia, first published in La Riforma sociale in 1921 and reprinted in the Rivista italiana di scienze economiche in 1942.

chapter five 1 A lively narrative of this episode can be found in Cattini 1997, vol. II, 224–7. The report submitted by Demaria, L’«ordine nuovo» e il problema industriale italiano nel dopoguerra. Relazione generale, was not included in the meeting’s published proceedings and was not disseminated until after the war (reprinted in Demaria 1951 with a description of the debate that followed and a report to the ministries concerned). Demaria’s Party card was also taken from him (!). At about the same time, he published in the Giornale a book review in which he gave a political extension to his criticism of economic planning, taking on “the present ‘divinization’ of the state” and writing that, even in the context of international war, “the problem of the limitation of state powers” should be posed (Demaria 1942). This intervention led to the immediate suspension of the journal’s publication on the Duce’s order. As is evident from a glance at Demaria’s review, the book under discussion (F. Pergolesi, Orientamenti sociali delle costituzioni contemporanee) was nothing more than a pretext for launching this attack. The Giornale was then considered as sympathetic to the “defeatist” position, as attested by the publication of an article by E. Corbino, which argued the Anglo-Saxon “maritime advantage,” following the “failed invasion” of Britain by Germany (1942, 109–18). On this episode and its context, see also Pavanelli 1997. 2 The two seminal works about political parties, for instance, M. Ostrogorski’s La Démocratie et l’organisation des partis politiques (1903) and R. Michels’s Political Parties (originally published in Germany in 1911, then translated in Italian in 1912 and French in 1914),

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also belong to this context. Robert Michels, who contributed to the syndicalist journals Il Divenire Sociale and Le Mouvement socialiste, embodies the simultaneously French and Italian character of this debate. In his contemporary work on the “crisis of democracy” (1911), French author Georges Guy-Grand shows that this criticism of liberalism as atomistic comes from “the most extreme right” (Charles Maurras, Georges Deherme) as well as from “the most extreme left” (Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth). It should be mentioned that this idea of a convergence between the two extremes, which has provoked a lot of discussion since the appearance of the work of Zeev Sternhell (who defines Fascist ideology as a synthesis between integral nationalism and an anti-materialist revision of Marxism – in short, Barrès plus Sorel), seemed quite evident to Guy-Grand. Proportional representation was abrogated in 1923 and replaced by the majoritarian law, according to which, as long as it obtained at least 25 per cent of the total vote, the list that gathered the most support would be granted two thirds of all seats, the remaining third being proportionally distributed among opposition lists. Ragnar Frisch was a founder of the Econometrics Society in 1933 and remained the editor of Econometrica for more than two decades. The port city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), which had a majority of Italian-speaking inhabitants in the early twentieth century, was one of the territories over which Italy and Yugoslavia had a dispute in the aftermath of World War I. In September 1919, Italian novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio led a 1,000-strong army corps and seized the city, in overt defiance of the Italian government led by F.S. Nitti, and itself torn between its public opinion and its international commitments. D’Annunzio and his men would flee before Italian regular troops five months later. The pro-Fascist bias of this book, which remains a valuable source on Nationalist thought, is undeniable, as shown by another tripartite scheme which posited Mussolinism as the synthesis that transcended both Nationalism (thesis) and Syndicalism (antithesis). It should be reminded that its author was a collaborator of Gini’s at the Rome Faculty of Statistics and a contributor to the Trattato elementare di statistica. Among the authors mentioned by Sighele we find, besides Maurras and Sorel, Georges Deherme, a French writer who was opposed to universal franchise (which he described as “mathematical fetishism”) and parliamentarianism (which he described as “dead democracy”), while favouring a combination of corporatism and plebiscitary dictatorship,

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and liberal conservative Émile Faguet, who championed an “aristocratic democracy.” (Deherme 1909; Faguet 1910). This sentence found its way into “The Scientific Basis of Fascism” (1927a, 106). Bernard Manin describes the difference between both types of equality as follows: “Greek culture distinguished two types of equality: arithmetical equality on the one hand, achieved when the members of a group all receive equal shares (whether of goods, honors, or powers) and geometrical or proportional equality on the other, which was reached by giving individuals shares whose value corresponded to the value of the individuals concerned, assessed according to a particular criterion, whatever it might be. To put it another way, if two individuals, A and B, had shares a and b in a particular asset assigned to them, arithmetical equality was said to obtain if a equaled b and geometrical equality if the ratio of values between the two individuals equaled the ratio of values between the shares (A/B = a/b)” (1997, 35). Gini often quoted from his own work. In Problemi del dopoguerra as well as in many texts written afterwards and in the bibliographies that were published while he was alive, he claimed everything he had written, which testifies to both a persistence in his ideas and a form of moral integrity (it was common, after the war, for Italian intellectuals to conveniently forget about their contributions of the Fascist era). According to his biographer, De Finetti’s thought was always characterized by the encounter of an “acute moral sense,” an “unshakeable confidence in rationality as remedy to the evils of human society” and a sympathetic attitude toward utopian views, which led him to put forward polemical proposals such as the abolition of money (Israel 1987). According to Pietra, the announcement of a monograph on corporative statistics to be included in the Trattato elementare di statistica was to be understood as an official acknowledgement of its existence. This monograph was, however, never published.

conclusion 1 Ferruccio Parri (1890–1981) presided, from June to November 1945, over a government of “national unity” which gathered, besides Actionists, the Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and “Labour Democrats.” The Partito d’Azione soon went into crisis and became a negligible political force. Parri and La Malfa left it to found the Republican Concentration, which soon became the Republican Party.

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Ugo La Malfa (1903–79) became its leader until the time of his death and was often included in ministerial cabinets. 2 Bonomi was a Socialist reformist who had been in charge of the Socialist daily Avanti! until Mussolini succeeded him in 1912; he was a member of government a number of times from 1916 on and acted as president of the Council from July 1921 to February 1922; he succeeded Badoglio as head of the Italian government in June 1944, when the Allied forces took the city of Rome. 3 Correspondence between Gini and leaders of the Movimento Unionista Italiano can be found in acs, Corrado Gini, Carteggio, b.d. 9. The marginal character of both organizations can be measured by the fact that, in the elections held on 2 June 1946 with the purpose of designating members of the Constituent Assembly, the Partito democratico del lavoro obtained no more than 40,000 votes (0.18%) and the Movimento unionista italiano slightly over 70,000 (0.31%), out of a total of twenty-three million votes cast. 4 The title of Cassata’s article about the Gini purge trial, “Cronaca di un’epurazione mancata (luglio 1944-dicembre 1945),” evokes the failed character of the purge, a judgment shared by many historians of the period. See also Woller 1997 and R. Palmer 1996, with its explicit subtitle: storia di un’epurazione che non c’è stata. 5 There are presently five faculties of statistics in Italy (Rome, Padua, Bologna, Messina, Milan). 6 This paragraph essentially follows Cassata 2006a. 7 The table of contents of Boldrini’s monograph was as follows: Part I. Statistical investigation of the living 1 General notions 2 The technique of biometrical inquiry Part II. Biometry 3 Quantitative methods in the doctrine of species: A) Historical theories 4 Quantitative methods in the doctrine of species: B) Modern genetics 5 Quantitative methods in the study of the evolution of individuals and population Part III. Anthropometry 6 Human characters 7 Human races 8 Human types

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Index

Accademia dei Lincei, 100 Acerbo, Giacomo, 62, 81, 266n5; on parastatal agencies under Fascism, 273n21 Adami, Giuseppe, 6, 254, 273n20 aggregate preferences (Condorcet paradox), 216–20 Alberti, Salvatore, 252 Amoroso, Luigi, 30, 31, 44, 74–7, 80, 83, 87, 89, 90, 106, 136–7, 149, 151, 173, 186, 189, 192, 199, 227, 234; member of the css, 126, 128, 160–1, 254; on Fascism, 202–3; on Gini’s neo-organicism, 198–9; position in the field, 153, 160, 263n6, 267n15; theoretical views, 154–5, 186; Ancona, Arrigo, 78, 189 Annali di statistica, 11, 26, 59 Annali di statistica e di economia, 75 Annali dell’Istituto di statistica (Bari), 75 Annuario statistico italiano, 123 anti-Semitism: anti-Jewish laws, 4, 6, 13, 83–4, 91–102, 201,

268n22; victims of, 93–4. See also census, Manifesto of Racist Scientists, race, statistical journals Arcari, Paola Maria, 177–8, 212 Archivio di Statistica, 26, 28, 53, 59 Archivio di Studi Corporativi, 218, 233 Arias, Gino, 62, 80, 89–90, 93, 96, 214, 234 Aristotle, 207, 222, 226 Arrow, Kenneth, 218 Aschieri, Alessandro, 121–2, 134 Associazione delle Società per Azioni, 90 Avancini, Marco, 178 Bachi, Riccardo, 54–5, 62–3, 74–5, 90, 94, 106, 110–11, 113, 119, 127, 142, 189, 270n6, 274n32 Bachi, Roberto, 93–4, 268n24 Badoglio, Pietro (Marshal), 220, 249 Baffi, Paolo, 90, 135, 137, 147, 201 Bagni, Tullio, 35

322

Index

Balbo, Italo, 79, 226–30, 266n11 Banca commerciale italiana, 71, 135, 137 Banca d’Italia (Bank of Italy), 71, 78, 90, 132, 135, 137, 257 Barberi, Benedetto, 167, 253–4 Bari: statistical institute, 72–3, 75, 83; university, 32, 52, 63, 71, 87, 100, 135, 181, 263n6 Barone, Domenico, 214 Barone, Enrico, 236 Barsanti, Gastone, 177 Battaglia, Raffaello, 252 Battara, Pietro, 93, 136–7 Beloch, Giulio, 192 Beneduce, Alberto, 26, 31, 42–3, 76, 103, 106, 111, 113, 125, 279n1, 263n8; on statistics as a method, 54 Benini, Rodolfo, 30–5, 38, 42, 45–7, 54–5, 57, 61, 63, 72, 76, 80, 88, 104, 110–11, 113, 118, 147, 149, 170, 172–3, 175, 180, 189, 257, 261n4, 270n5; member of the css, 121, 125–6; methodological views, 151–2, 154–8; on creating an Italian statistical society, 85–6; on mathematics and statistics, 66; on statistics as a method, 32, 144; political and economic views, 182, 234; position in the field, 133–5, 141–2 Bianchi, Michele, 227 Bibliografia fascista, 233 Biblioteca dell’Economista, 47, 148 biometry, 4, 33, 56, 71, 92–3, 140, 144–5, 151, 163, 170, 176–7, 183, 185

birth ratio, 39–40 Bocconi: see Milan: Luigi Bocconi Bodio, Luigi, 24–6, 55, 59, 104, 122, 149, 168, 182, 265n3 Boldrini, Marcello, 63, 67, 71, 75–9, 89–90, 92–3, 106, 111–13, 137, 140, 151–2, 154, 158, 161, 175–78, 182, 192, 249, 252, 254, 256, 270n4, 275n5, 276n11, 281n7; member of the css, 125–6, 132–3; on economic pathology, 198; on mathematical statistics, 51–2; on neo-organicism, 190; on statistics as a discipline, 145–8; position in the field, 183 Bollettino dell’Istituto statistico-economico (Trieste), 75, 137 Bollettino mensile dei Prezzi, 123 Bollettino mensile di Statistica, 123 Bollettino mensile di Statistica agraria e forestale, 123 Bologna: school of statistics, 71, 82, 128, 255; statistical institute, 68, 72–3, 75, 229; university, 28, 39, 63, 78, 87, 89, 142, 281n5 Bonferroni, Carlo Emanuele, 52, 74, 87, 90, 200 Bonomi, Ivanoe, 220, 250, 281n2 Borel, Émile, 81 Borelli, Giovanni, 106, 278n17 Borgatta, Gino, 118, 177–8 Bortkiewicz, Ladislas von, 27, 33, 36, 40–3, 135, 200, 263n5, 264n10 Bosco, Augusto, 55, 61, 168 Boselli, Paolo, 26

Index

Bottai, Giuseppe, 62, 94, 229, 233, 236, 266n5, 269n27 Bouthoul, Gaston, 259 Bowley, Arthur L., 77, 153, 165 Brambilla, Francesco, 52–3, 275n32 Bresciani-Turroni, Costantino, 30–3, 53–4, 58, 62–3, 71, 74, 76–7, 103, 106, 110, 113, 125, 127, 132–3, 141–2, 151–2, 160, 172, 257, 263n5, 274n32; debates with Gini, 41–3, 49, 200, 264n11; debates with Mortara, 44; dissidence toward Fascism, 99–100, 118–9; methodological views, 145, 157–8; on economic policy, 235–6, 241–3 Broggi, Ugo, 35 Buckland, William R., 163 Cagliari: statistical laboratory, 64–6, 72, 264n9; university, 39, 54, 63, 69, 136, 142, 264n10 Calvin, Jean, 158 Camboni, Luigi, 252 Campolongo, Alberto, 90 Canaletti-Gaudenti, Alberto, 254 Candeloro, Giorgio, 229 Cantelli, Francesco Paolo, 35, 51, 68, 74, 77, 89, 127, 137, 141, 152, 154, 263n8, 265n13, 275n5; on creating an Italian statistical society, 85–6 Cantimori, Delio, 229 Caporale, Gaetano, 103 Carli, Filippo, 189 Carnegie Foundation, 106, 180 Casalini, Enzo, 80–1, 96 Castellano, Vittorio, 8, 200, 255–7, 259, 275n5

323

Castelnuovo, Guido, 35, 68, 74, 94, 119, 153–4 Castrilli, Vincenzo, 63, 67, 71–2, 75, 78, 83, 89–90, 178, 192, 252, 257; on sociology, 175; position in the field, 132–33, 137 Cavaglieri, Guido, 172 census: 1900 and 1910 (Austria), 114; of Jewish intellectuals, 96, 269n28, 268n30; of Jews (1938), 96; 1921, 165–6; 1931, 122, 124–5; 1936, 124 Central Bureau of Statistics, 11, 121–22 Centro di statistica aziendale (csa – Center for Business Statistics), 70, 75, 137 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 184 Chessa, Federico, 75 Cianci, Ernesto, 177 Cibrario, Luigi, 178 Civiltà fascista, 229, 233, 236 Cognetti De Martiis, Salvatore, 64 Colajanni, Napoleone, 30, 55, 61 Coletti, Francesco, 54, 63, 70–1, 88, 90, 135, 137, 145, 148–9, 155, 157, 168; dissidence toward Fascism, 119; joins the Fascist Party, 99; member of the css, 126; on Bocconi’s statistical laboratory, 65–7; on Italian official statistics, 265n3; on Italy’s territorial claims, 114–5 Colombo, Giorgio, 75, 81, 85, 267n14 Comitato di Consulenza per gli Studi Sulla Popolazione (ccsp), 70, 74, 87–91, 93–5, 252;

324

Index

survey of its members’ views on Nazi population policy: 268n24 Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della Popolazione (cisp), 69–70, 74, 78–9, 87, 93, 131, 137, 190, 192, 197, 259 Comitato Permanente per le Migrazioni Interne (cpmi), 123 Commissione di indagine sulle industrie, 111, 113 Commissione per i problemi del dopoguerra, 110, 113 Commissione per la istituzione della imposta patrimoniale, 110, 113 Commissione per la riforma tributaria, 110, 113 Commission for the Study of Constitutional Reforms (Gentile Commission, Commission of the xviii), 119, 206–9, 214–6, 234, 250 Compendio statistico, 123 Comte, Auguste, 188 concentration ratio (Gini’s coefficient): 7–8, 16, 24, 46–51, 243 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 218, 219 Confederazione generale dell’Industria Italiana (Confindustria), 67, 81, 90, 126, 131–2, 137, 178, 234 Consigli e Uffici Provinciali dell’Economia Corporativa, 129, 229 Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 90 Consiglio Superiore della Demografia e Razza, 95 Consiglio Superiore dell’Educazione Nazionale (csen), 153, 161

Consiglio Superiore di Statistica (css), 12, 25–6, 57, 84, 88, 103–4, 119–21, 124–9, 131–2, 134–5, 137, 153, 160–1, 172, 199, 206, 254, 263n5 Contento, Aldo, 34–5, 40, 59, 62–3, 106, 142 Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica, 71, 75 Convegno per le Istituzioni fasciste di Cultura (Bologna, 1925), 119 Coppola d’Anna, Francesco, 90, 111, 113, 131, 177, 189, 252 Corbino, Epicarmo, 257, 278n1; attack on statistics: 56, 87 corporatism, 203, 214–5, 226–8, 232–4; and economic planning, 236–8, 240, 245–7; definitions, 234. See also statistics, corporative correlation, 22, 32, 44, 53, 55, 197 Correnti, Cesare, 26 Corridore, Francesco, 65, 172, 264n10 Corriere padano, 227 Cossa, Luigi, 26 Costanzo, Alessandro, 252, 257 Cowles Commission, 164 Credito italiano, 71, 137 Critica fascista, 233, 236 Croce, Benedetto, 119, 173, 272n17, 269n31 D’Addario, Raffaele, 63, 83, 87, 90, 200, 263n8, 274n25; member of the css, 254; position in the field, 136–7 D’Agata, Carmelo, 173, 178 Dalla Volta, Riccardo, 90, 93 Dallolio, Alfredo, 105

Index

Dante Alighieri, 158 D’Autilia, Maria Letitia, 10, 128 Dawes Plan, 110 De Berardinis, Luigi, 177 De Bono, Emilio, 226 De Castro, Diego, 63, 72, 86, 90, 131, 249, 250 De Finetti, Bruno, 77, 79, 86, 89–90, 125, 227, 230, 254, 280n11 De Foville, Alfred, 149–50 Degli Espinosa, Antonio, 78, 189 Del Bue, Annibale, 177 Della Bona, Giovanni, 27, 29 Del Vecchio, Giulio Salvatore, 27–9, 31, 57, 61, 272n2 Del Vecchio, Gustavo, 83, 88–90, 93, 127, 137, 257 Demaria, Giovanni, 77, 236, 240–1, 257; attacks corporatism: 204, 278n1 De Meo, Giuseppe, 252 democracy: critique of, 204, 206–7, 209–16, 219–25, 235 demographic statistics, 30, 123–4 demographic theory, 153–4, 187–8, 193–7. See also statistics: and demography De Novellis, Lydia, 177 de Pietri-Tonelli, Alfonso, 44, 77, 151, 154, 227, 263n6 de Polzer, Alfredo, 89–90, 132–3, 137, 149–50, 152, 177–8, 234, 252, 267n16; joins the Communist Party, 230, 248–9 De Stefani, Alberto, 48–9, 71, 75, 83, 88, 106, 112, 136–7, 200, 278n17; and Fascism, 202–3, 213–4; attacks Gini’s neoorganicism, 193–8; member of

325

the css, 126–7; minister of Finance, 270nn5, 6, 272n14, on corporatism, 234 Dettori, Giovanni, 49, 65, 90, 106, 189, 264n9 De Vecchi, Cesare, 226 De Vergottini, Mario, 177 De Vita, Agostino, 90 De Viti De Marco, Antonio, 26 Di Fenizio, Fernando, 254 Direzione generale della Demografia e della Razza (Demorazza), 95–6, 123 Direzione Generale della Statistica, 59, 134, 265n3 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 257 Donati, Donato, 98 Dore, Valentino, 86, 177 Durkheim, Émile, 173–4 Econometric society, 138, 274n32 Economia, 26, 69, 75, 79–81, 92, 96–8, 101, 136–7, 255 economic barometers, 189–90 economic pathology, 186–9, 198, 239, 241, 277n15 economic semiology, 155–6 economic statistics (statistica economica), 159–60, 275n3 economists: views toward Fascism, 118–20, 202–4, 240–1, 278n1 Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro, 32, 34, 45 Einaudi, Luigi, 57, 65, 70, 105, 110, 118–9, 133, 149, 180, 182, 203, 242, 257, 261n4, 270nn2, 3 Enriques, Federico, 37, 262n3 Ente italiano per l’organizzazione scientifica del lavoro, 135, 137

326

Index

Errera, Alberto, 28–9, 103 Ethiopia, 9, 163, 180, 201 ethos, 9, 120–1, 131, 134 eugenics, 17, 79, 92, 133, 137, 143–4, 170, 192, 239; and genetics, 256–7 Fanno, Marco, 94 Fascism: advent, 119; consolidation, 120, 122, 209; early economic policy, 119, 203, 272n14; fall, 220, 248, 253; left-wing, 234–7; loyalty oath (1931), 4, 89, 99–102, 201, 272n16; totalitarization of, 5, 10, 84–5, 197, 228–9. See also National Fascist Party Fascist Grand Council, 202, 215, 220 Faucci, Riccardo, 61 Federici, Nora, 8, 75, 78, 89–90, 173, 252, 257, 261n2; on anti-Semitism, 98–100 Ferrara, Francesco, 47 Ferrara: statistical institute, 72–3, 75, 227; university, 63, 68, 119, 126, 177–8 Ferrari, Giovanni, 78–9, 89–90, 98, 147, 149, 152, 177, 231, 267n16 Ferraris, Carlo Francesco, 27–31, 55, 104, 182 Ferrarotti, Franco, 258 Ferroglio, Gaetano, 28, 56, 61, 133, 186 field: definition, 11–14; of Italian statistics, 17–21, 118, 130–8, 178, 199–200, 205, 212, 221, 227, 238, 261n4; of political economy, 141–2, 198, 233, 243; structuring of Italian statistical,

17, 19, 23, 46, 60–4, 81, 101, 120, 125, 130–2, 139 Fisher, Irving, 159 Fisher, Ronald Aylmer, 77, 162, 164, 168, 257, 276n7 Florence: school of statistics, 69, 72–3, 75, 128, 255; statistical laboratory, 69, 72–3; university, 52, 63, 79, 81, 87, 90, 93, 119, 136, 148, 178, 258 Foglio di Informazioni quindicinale sull’Andamento della Stagione, 123 food supplies, 107–10, 270n3, 270n4 Forti, Eugenio, 26 Fortunati, Paolo, 14, 63, 68, 75, 78–9, 89–90, 93, 132–3, 137, 147, 151, 172–3, 177–8, 190, 192, 200, 257; on Amoroso’s demographic theory, 154; on Bresciani’s inequality index, 242–3; on corporatism, 234–5; on corporative statistics, 202, 205, 226–31, 244–7; on Gini’s neo-organicism, 198, 238–41; on racial laws, 99; political trajectory, 228–30, 235–8, 248; testifies at Gini’s trial, 240, 252–3 Fovel, Massimo, 227, 234–5 Fréchet, Maurice, 77, 81 Freyer, Hans, 259 Frisch, Ragnar, 210, 279n5 Furlan, Vladimiro, 47, 263n8 Gabaglio, Antonio, 27–9, 31, 103 Galileo, 163 Galton, Francis, 32, 34, 36, 170, 197

Index

Galvani, Luigi, 39, 51, 63, 77, 89–90, 107, 112, 125, 141, 152, 154, 177–8, 252; on the representative method, 165–7; position in the field, 132–3, 137, 255 Geisser, Alberto, 57 Genoa : statistical institute, 72–3, 75; university, 63, 80, 90, 93, 142, 177, 214 Gentile, Giovanni, 119, 206, 216, 229, 272n16 Genus, 8, 75, 77–9, 98, 137, 192, 256 Gerarchia, 233 Germany, 1, 4–6, 12, 206–7, 241, 246 Giannini, Amedeo, 91, 252 Giffen, Robert, 149 Giolitti, Giovanni, 59, 265n1 Giorgi, Giovanni Maria, 7 Giornale degli economisti (GDE), 11, 26–8, 30–3, 40, 44–6, 53, 59, 63, 70, 74–6, 78, 80, 83, 93, 135, 137, 148, 156, 201, 204, 236 Giornale degli economisti e Annali di economia, 75–6 Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica, 11–12, 26, 70, 75 Giornale dell’Istituto italiano degli attuari, 74 Giornale di matematica finanziaria, 74 Gini, Corrado, 7–8, 10, 12, 30–1, 33, 51–4, 58, 63–72, 74–93, 97, 103, 140–2, 147, 180–2, 200, 204–27, 230, 235, 240–2, 246, 255–9, 261nn1, 2, 262n3, 263nn4, 5, 264n9–11, 266nn7,

327

8, 267n16, 268n18, 269n1, 270n7, 274n28, 275n4, 278nn17, 18, 280n10; after 1945, 255–9; and sociology, 172–6; conception of statistics, 143–5, 149–53, 157–8, 162–4; critique of mainstream statistics, 20, 164–70; inquiry on raw materials, 115–16, 271n9; istat president and css member, 57, 120–9, 160–2, 273n23, 274n25; nominated to the Constitutional Commission, 119; on antiSemitism, 98, 102, 269n29; on neo-organicism, 10, 20, 172, 175, 186–99, 226, 238–40; on probability, 35–43, 168–70, 276n7; on protectionism, 118; on the creation of an Italian statistical society, 85–6; on the representative method, 164–70; participation in war effort, 105–13; political views, 204, 206–7, 278n23; position in the field, 42, 63–69, 131–7, 178, 265n13, 267n17; postwar trial, 250–3; signs the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 119. See also concentration ratio, economic pathology, political pathology, democracy (critique of), parliamentarianism (critique of), industrial wages Giuffrida, Vincenzo, 107, 236, 270n3 Giunta Consultativa di Statistica (gcs), 104 Giusti, Ugo, 80, 90, 106, 177, 252, 268n24 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 184

328

Index

Golzio, Silvio, 136–7, 249, 254 Gramsci, Antonio, 174 Graziani, Augusto, 61, 198 Greenwood, Major, 77 Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (guf), 228, 237 Gruppo Intellettuale Antonio Labriola, 229–30, 248 Habitus, 10, 21, 129, 137, 208, 238 Hayek, Friedrich August, 236 Huber, Michel, 81 Huxley, Julian, 257 ideology, 1, 4–6, 9, 14–6, 204–5, 262n8 Il Barometro economico italiano, 69, 75, 79–85, 88, 91, 132, 137, 183, 255 Il Mulino, 258 Il Sole/24 Ore, 258 Index, 70, 75, 80, 82, 137 Indici del Movimento economico, 131 Indici del Movimento economico italiano, 67, 75, 77, 132 inductivism, 76, 82, 175; vs deductivism, 36–8, 142–60, 182–6, 205, 227, 231, 237–8 industrial wages, 111, 113, 270n7, 274n24 inequality index (Bresciani’s), 242–3 Insolera, Filadelfo, 63, 74 Institut International de Sociologie (iis), 259 intensity of preferences, 209–12, 214–5 interdependency (Vinci’s relation of), 195–7

Inter-Allied Scientific Food Commission (isfc), 107–8 International Congress on Population (Rome, 1931), 97, 173, 192 International Economic Conference (Atlantic City, 1919), 110, 113 International Economic Conference (Genoa, 1922), 111, 113 International Financial Conference (Brussels, 1920), 111, 113 International Labour Conference (Geneva, 1921), 111, 113 International Labour Organization, 111 International Sociological Association (isa), 259 International Statistical Institute (isi), 4, 7, 25, 54, 84, 111, 121, 136, 276n11 International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (iussp), 69–70, 84, 87 irredentism, 112–15, 279n6 Istituto Centrale/Nazionale di Statistica (istat), 8–10, 12–3, 15, 39, 69, 84–6, 88, 93, 95–6, 120–31, 134–5, 137, 140, 165, 167, 173, 176–8, 189, 197, 206, 230, 243, 248, 252–4, 261n3, 273nn21, 23 Istituto di Economia e Statistica agraria, 124, 127 Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista (incf), 94, 229, 233, 235–6, 239–41, 245–6, 258 Istituto Nazionale per lo Studio della Congiuntura, 258 Istituto Superiore di Scienze Sociali e Politiche “Cesare Alfieri,” 69

Index

Italian Commission for War Reparations, 110, 113 Italian Communist Party (pci), 229–30, 237, 248, 252 Italian Debt Funding Commission (1925), 111, 113, 116, 208 Italian Technical Delegation for the Peace Treaty, 110, 113, 116 Jannaccone, Pasquale, 62–3, 65, 88, 100, 110, 133, 142, 180, 267n13 Jensen, Adolf, 165 Jevons, William Stanley, 170 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 45 Julin, Armand, 77 Jung, Guido, 81 Kendall, Maurice G., 163, 168, 276n5 and n6 Knibbs, George Handley, 77, 273n19, 275n1 Labriola, Antonio, 174, 229–30, 248 La Malfa, Ugo, 249, 280n1 Lampertico, Federico, 26, 55 Lange, Oskar, 236 La Riforma sociale, 25, 57, 59 Lasorsa, Giovanni, 63, 71, 90, 136–7 La stirpe, 233 La Vita economica italiana, 75, 78, 132, 137, 255 law of small numbers, 40–1 League of Nations, 26, 111, 115–6, 196, 203, 271n9 L’Eltore, Giovanni, 249, 252, 257

329

Lenti, Libero, 90, 135, 137, 158, 172–3, 228–9, 249, 252, 254–5 Le Play, Frédéric, 168 Leti, Giuseppe, 8–10 Lexis, Wilhelm, 38–41 liberism: and Fascism, 203–4; and interventionism, 216; and protectionism, 118–19, 195–7; definition, 271n13 L’Italia economica, 74–5 Livi, Livio, 63, 69–70, 75, 79–82, 111–13, 130, 132–3, 140, 147, 167, 175, 178, 182, 189–90, 228–9; member of the css, 126–7, 161, 254; nominated to the Consiglio Superiore della Demografia e Razza, 95–6; on creating an Italian society of statistics, 87; on creating the ccsp, 87–93; on demography, 138, 146; on Gini’s neo-organicism, 197; on Jews and anti-Semitism, 96–8, 101–2, 269n28; position in the field, 135–8, 183, 255–6, 277n13 Livi, Ridolfo, 33, 46, 106, 284n29 logistic curve, 153–4 Lombroso, Cesare, 65, 156 Lorenz concentration curve, 48–50 Lorenzoni, Giovanni, 89–90 Loria, Achille, 26–7, 94 Lo Stato Corporativo, 233 Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 211 Luzzatti, Luigi, 26 Luzzatto Fegiz, Pierpaolo, 63, 70, 75, 80, 90, 94, 178, 223, 250; joins the Fascist Party, 202; member of the css, 254; position in the field, 136–7, 267n17

330

Index

Maggiore-Perni, Francesco, 61 Malthus, Thomas, 47, 154 Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti, 119 Manifesto degli intellettuali del fascismo, 119, 206, 229 Manifesto of Racist Scientists, 6, 95–6, 101, 269n27 March, Lucien, 77, 81, 165 Maroi, Lanfranco, 63, 82, 90, 93, 110–11, 113, 127, 170, 172–3, 175, 180, 252, 257; criticized by Mortara, 181; position in the field, 131, 136–7; president of istat, 88, 254, 268n20 Marsili-Libelli, Mario, 70, 87, 89–90, 148, 178, 255 Martinotti, Pietro, 154 Marxism, 174, 190, 198, 237–9 Masci, Guglielmo, 189 mathematics: and economics, 153–4; and statistics, 22–4, 28–9, 32–43, 51–3, 55–6, 66–7, 141, 265n13 Matteotti, Giacomo, 119, 209, 249 Maurras, Charles, 213–14 Mayr, Ernst, 257 Mazzei, Jacopo, 89–90 mean difference (Gini’s), 48, 51 Medolaghi, Paolo, 77, 89–90, 106, 127, 137, 141, 151, 267n16 Meliadò, Leonardo, 78 Messedaglia, Angelo, 26, 28–9, 34, 57, 59, 61, 67, 104 methodological statistics (statistica metodologica), 17, 51, 91, 142–9, 150–2, 162–4, 199–200 Methorst, Wilhelm, 77 Metron, 7–8, 12, 26, 43, 67–8, 75, 77–8, 80, 98, 101, 116, 121,

137, 143–4, 164, 255, 261n2, 269n29, 275n5 Michels, Roberto, 172, 174, 278n2 Milan: Luigi Bocconi: statistical institute, 70, 72–3, 75; statistical laboratory, 65–7, 70, 145; university, 63, 186 Milan Polytechnic Institute, 131 Milan: Sacred Heart Catholic University, 63, 158, 177; statistical institute, 255; statistical laboratory, 71–3, 74–5 Milan: school of statistics, 72–3, 128; state university, 63, 85, 142, 155, 177, 181, 257 Molinari, Alessandro, 88, 135, 189, 249, 251–4, 273n20 Mondo economico, 258 Montalenti, Giuseppe, 257 Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, 111 Mortara, Giorgio, 26, 30–1, 33, 47, 49, 52–4, 57–8, 63, 74–7, 80, 83, 103, 107, 111–13, 125, 127, 140–1, 147, 151–2, 170, 178, 189–90, 192, 255, 267n15, 274n28; approves of Fascism’s economic turn (1926), 119; debates with Bresciani, 44; debates with Gini, 200, 264n10; declares himself in favour of Fascism, 272n14; joins the Fascist Party, 99, 201; leaves Italy (1938), 93; methodological views, 154–7; on Italian official statistics, 265n3; on Italy’s mutilated victory, 114, 202; position in the field, 42–3, 70–1, 132–3, 135–7, 148, 160, 179–82, 276n10. See also industrial wages

Index

Mühsam, H.V., 101 Müller, Johannes, 4 Mussolini, Benito, 6, 8–10, 57, 69, 81, 119–24, 143, 154, 174, 196, 209, 211, 220, 226, 236, 248, 250, 253, 272n16, 281n2; and anti-Semitism, 94–5, 268n22, 269n27; on statistics, 3, 5, 121 National Fascist Party (pnf), 95, 99, 201–2, 209, 222, 246, 250, 252 Natoli, Fabrizio, 63 Neyman, Jerzy, 164, 167 Niceforo, Alfredo, 32, 46, 63, 75, 81–2, 87, 90, 92, 106, 140, 147–8, 170–2, 175, 179, 277n14; member of the css, 126, 160–1, 254; methodological views, 151–2, 154–8, 184–5, 200; on Italy’s territorial claims, 115; position in the field, 133, 137, 268n20 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 42–3, 59, 149, 265n2, 279n6 Notizario demografico, 123 Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia, 75, 228, 233 official statistics: decline, 59, 265n2, 265n3; during Second World War and afterwards, 253–4; relations with academic statistics, 103–4, 125–9, 134; reorganization under Fascism, 120–30 Olivetti, Gino, 81, 132, 189 Opera Nazionale per la protezione della Maternità e dell’Infanzia (onmi), 123

331

opinion polls, 223 Ortu-Carboni, Salvatore, 63, 74 Ottolenghi, Carlo, 189 Padua: school of statistics, 67, 128; statistical institute, 66–73, 75, 77–8; university of, 27–8, 32, 40, 54, 57, 63, 83, 90, 94, 98, 108, 132–3, 142–3, 178, 180, 196, 230, 236, 239, 255 Paglino, Fernando, 151, 267n16 Palermo: statistical institute, 68, 72–3, 75; university of, 41, 43, 54, 63, 71, 131, 142, 177, 269n1 Pantaleoni, Maffeo, 26, 45, 54, 133, 141–2, 149, 155, 180, 182, 196 Papi, Giuseppe Ugo, 90, 252 Parenti, Giuseppe, 87, 90, 136–7, 173, 254–5, 268n18, 269n30 Pareto, Vilfredo, 26, 32–3, 44, 50, 54, 149, 170, 172–3, 182, 187, 263n6. See also wealth distribution curve Parliamentarianism: critique of, 207–8, 212–13, 218–19, 279n8 Parri, Ferruccio, 249, 280n20 Passato e presente, 258 Pazzagli, Carlo, 28–9 Peace Conference (Paris, 1919), 110, 113 Pearl, Raymond, 77, 153 Pearson, Karl, 32, 34, 36, 145, 158, 164, 197 Pellizzi, Camillo, 229 Pende, Nicola, 92 Perozzo, Luigi, 33–5, 104 Picone, Mario, 90

332

Index

Pietra, Gaetano, 49–50, 55, 63, 66–8, 75, 77–9, 84, 89–90, 107, 110–13, 141, 147, 162, 172, 177–8, 192, 242, 252, 264n9, 270n3, 275n1; member of the css, 126, 129, 254; methodological views, 151–2, 200, 238, 266n8; on anti-Semitism, 98; on corporatism, 230–1; on corporative statistics, 202, 205, 226–8, 234–6, 244–5, 280n12; position in the field, 132–3, 137, 255; report on Europe (1943): 241 Pinghini, Carlo, 177 Pizzetti, Ernesto, 252 Politica, 233 political cycles: law of, 224–6 political economy, 173; and statistics, 23–6, 32–3, 44–51, 61–2, 76–7, 128–9, 141–2, 198–9; post-1945 success, 257–8 political pathology, 204–5, 208 Polybius, 207, 226 Pompilj, Giuseppe, 257 population forecasting, 153 population movement differential equation (Amoroso’s), 153–4 population policy, 123–5, 154, 197, 212 Porru, Emanuele, 49, 65, 172, 264n9 positivism, 64, 145, 158, 173–4 probability theory and calculus, 17, 22–3, 25, 29, 33–43, 51–3, 164–70 protectionism, 26, 118–19, 195–7 Prospettive economiche, 71, 75–6, 137, 156, 179

Quaderni di sociologia, 258 Quetelet, Adolphe, 24, 28, 36, 108, 170, 262n1 Quilici, Nello, 79, 227–8 race: debates about, 92–102, 268n23 Rassegna delle scienze sociali, 59 Rèpaci, Francesco A., 83, 90, 137, 177–8, 252 Ricci, Umberto, 34, 49, 105, 118, 142, 196, 200, 270n2 Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica, 76, 80, 82, 89, 137, 256 Rivista italiana di economia demografia e statistica, 82, 91 Rivista italiana di scienze economiche, 75, 83, 160, 255 Rivista italiana di statistica, 71, 75, 82–3, 137, 158, 196, 255 Rivista italiana di statistica, economia e finanza, 75, 83 Rivista italiana di sociologia, 59, 171 Rivista mensile di statistica, 131 Rocco, Alfredo, 196, 233 Rome: faculty of statistics, 8, 68–70, 161, 255; institute of statistics, 68, 72–3, 75, 77–80, 132; school of statistics, 39, 128; university of, 26, 28, 32, 35, 63, 87–8, 93–4, 98, 108, 136, 142, 151, 153, 155–6, 160, 177–8, 186, 249, 263n6 Royal Statistical Society, 85, 121, 167 Rugarli, Sincero, 172 Rugiu, Giulio, 176–8 Russell, Bertrand, 157

Index

Saibante, Mario, 75, 77–8, 81, 89–90, 177–8, 190, 198, 252; member of the css, 254; on statistics and social science, 140; position in the field, 132–3, 137 Salvemini, Tommaso, 175, 252 Salvioni, Giovanni Battista, 27, 29–31, 36, 42, 56–7, 61, 63, 272n2 sampling methods, 164–70 Savorgnan, Franco, 49, 63, 77, 88, 90, 93, 106, 111, 172–3, 175, 177, 180, 200, 257, 271nn8, 11; istat president and css member, 125–6, 253, 273n20; on Italy’s territorial claims, 113–14; position in the field, 133–4, 136–7; signs the Manifesto of Racist Scientists, 95 Scientia, 114, 262n3 Serpieri, Arrigo, 119, 124, 126–7 Shotwell, James, 180 Siena: statistical institute, 72–3; university of, 54, 63, 171 Sighele, Scipio, 213 Sitta, Pietro, 119, 126 Società italiana degli economisti, 258 Società italiana di demografia e statistica (sids), 60, 74–5, 83, 88–9, 91, 94–7, 136–7, 241, 251–2, 255, 268n19 Società italiana di economia demografia e statistica (sieds), 91 Società italiana di genetica ed eugenica (sige), 79, 133, 137, 256–7 Società italiana di statistica (sis), 7, 20, 52–3, 60, 68, 74–5, 79,

333

83–4, 88–91, 97, 99, 132–3, 137, 164, 173, 178, 206, 228, 240–1, 249, 251–2, 255, 257, 268n21 Società italiana di sociologia, 79, 133, 137, 172–3, 253, 258 Società italiana per il progresso delle scienze (sips), 33, 46, 58, 74, 84–6, 93, 141, 149–50, 163, 235 Sociologia, 258 sociology, 140–1, 170–6; after 1945, 258–9 Solingen, Ethel, 5 Somogyi, Stefano, 90, 93, 276n8 Sonnabend, Enrico Haskel, 259 Sorel, Georges, 213–4 Sorokin, Pitirin, 259 Spallanzani, Alfredo, 178 Spearman, Charles, 170 Spencer, Herbert, 188 Spirito, Ugo, 62, 233–5 Squillace, Fausto, 171 Stalin, Joseph, 3, 201 Starace, Achille, 246 Starling, Ernest Henry, 108–9 Statistica, 14, 68, 75, 77, 79, 82, 89, 99, 137, 223, 228–30, 249, 253, 255, 261n4 statistical journals: and racial laws, 96–101 statistical textbooks, 11, 22, 28–30, 32, 34–5, 146–8, 154, 156–7, 171, 176 statisticians: and anti-Fascism, 235–7, 248–50; and postwar problems, 111–16, 270nn5, 6; views toward Fascism, 118–20, 195–7, 201–5, 228–9. See also war effort

334

Index

statistics: and demography, 9–10, 15, 18, 80–1, 88, 91–100, 128, 136–8, 146, 159; and econometrics, 138, 274n32; and mathematics, 22–4, 28–9, 32–43, 51–3, 55–6, 141, 265n13; and political economy, 23–6, 32–3, 44–51, 128–9, 141–2, 159–60; and sociology, 170–6; and totalitarianism, 1–6, 9–10, 13, 21, 231–2, 237, 244–6; as science or method, 25–32, 34, 40, 43, 54–6, 58–61, 66, 144–5; corporative, 202, 205, 226, 230–2, 234–8, 243–7, 280n12; definitions and partitions, 27, 30, 39, 52, 58, 145, 148, 162, 184–5; emergence as a discipline, 7–8, 11–13, 17–20, 22–3, 28–9, 32–3, 37, 40, 43, 50–7; field of, 11–14, 17–21, 23–5, 31, 34, 37, 40, 42, 44–6, 50–7, 130–8, 178, 199–200, 261n4; history of Italian, 7–10; meaning and extent, 143–9, 238–9; teaching of, 58–9, 61–7, 72, 98, 127–9, 160–2, 254–5, 266n9; university chairs in, 11, 59–64, 72–3, 88–90, 133–4, 142. See also Germany, ussr Stuart, Verrijn, 165 Studi politici, 258 Sturzo, Luigi, 174–5, 259 Supplemento statistico, 68, 75, 77, 79, 89, 228 Suvich, Fulvio, 80–1 Tagliacarne, Guglielmo, 84–6, 88, 90, 131, 177, 274n25

Tammeo, Giuseppe, 28 Tempi nuovi, 229, 248 Tivaroni, Jacopo, 177–8 Todhunter, Isaac, 218 Tomasi Della Torretta, Pietro, 251 Tosi, Vincenzo, 149 totalitarianism, 84–5, 101, 197, 204–5, 245; and science, 1–5 Trattato elementare di statistica, 176–9 Tremelloni, R., 178 Treves, Anna, 10, 96–7, 100–1 Treves, Renato, 258 Trieste: statistical-economic institute, 69–70, 72–3, 75, 79–80, 130; university of, 63, 94, 136, 178, 250 Tschuprow, Alexander A., 77 Turin: political economy laboratory, 64; statistical institute, 72–3, 249; university of, 63, 81, 86, 110, 131, 156, 267n13 Ufficio Demografico Centrale, 95 Uggè, Albino, 63, 67, 89–90, 93, 137, 175, 178, 252, 255 University of Berlin, 40–2, 144, 239 University of Catania, 34, 55, 63, 100, 177, 250 University of Modena, 63, 69, 78, 136 University of Messina, 63, 70, 72, 136, 156, 181, 255, 264n10, 269n1 University of Naples, 56, 63, 72, 90, 156, 177, 198, 257 University of Pavia, 28–9, 32, 63, 65, 142, 257 University of Perugia, 32, 63, 172

Index

ussr, 1, 4–5, 12, 245–6 Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, 184, 277n14 Vinci, Felice, 44, 63, 67, 75–7, 87–8, 90, 92, 107, 111–12, 140, 178, 190, 192, 241, 249, 263n6, 277n12; criticizes Gini, 196–7, 200, 275n4; member of the css, 126, 254; methodological views, 146–8, 151, 154, 157–60, 275n3; position in the field, 71, 82–3, 133, 135–7, 182–3 Venice: statistical laboratory, 71–3, 263n6; university of, 63, 90, 178, 193 Vianelli, Silvio, 83, 136–7, 147 Virgilii, Filippo, 27, 29–32, 54, 59, 63, 72, 88, 90, 106, 142, 171, 175 Vito, Francesco, 177–8 Volterra, Vito, 32–3, 40, 153–4 Walras, Léon, 170, 263n6

335

war debt, 116–18, 271n8 war effort, 104–10, 112, 270n2 wealth distribution curve (Pareto’s), 24, 44–50, 83, 199, 242–3, 263n8 wealth (estimation of), 149–50, 275n1 Weber, Max, 173 Westergaard, Hans, 43, 77 Worms, René, 188 Yule, George Udny, 34, 163, 168, 276n7 Zahn, Friedrich, 4, 268n24 Zangrandi, Ruggero, 228 Zingali, Gaetano, 57, 88–90, 106, 108, 111–13, 177, 276n8; arrested by Allied forces, 250; joins the Fascist Party, 202; member of the css, 126; on anti-Semitism, 100 Zizek, Franz, 165