Chapter Twenty-One - “A Sublimely Stupid Idea”: Physiocracy in Italy from the Enlightenment to Fascism

Summary

La storia del passato

ormai ce l'ha insegnato

che un popolo affamato

fa la rivoluzion.

Rita Pavone, Viva la pappa col pomodoro, RCA Italiana (1965)

Stockholm Syndrome

In the fall of 1857 the proverbial lid was about to blow on the motley crew of polities contained in Petrarch's “Italia mia,” that land which the “Apennines divide, and Alps and sea surround.” Giuseppe Garibaldi had already left cosmopolitan New York for the barren island of Caprera, whence he would launch his final bid for national unification, and the peninsula was seething with clandestine networks such as the Carbonari. What exactly a unified Italy might look like remained anyone's guess when the ebullient Sicilian libertarian Francesco Ferrara (whose nuanced mantra was “liberty for everyone in everything”) sat down in Turin to write a letter on the study of economics in peripheries to his former Sardinian student Giuseppe Todde, recently elected Professor at the University of Sassari. “In Sardinia,” Ferrara mused, “the study of economics will find a more fertile ground,” for “dominated and abused countries have always felt the need to understand the principles and take their application from dominating ones.” Writ large, the same sentiment characterized Ferrara's approach to the future of Italian political economy in relation to the great European powers, and his argument echoed a venerable trope in the history of political economy: theoretical advances often happen when laggard countries emulate their superiors in an effort, in Moses Abramowitz's phraseology, to “catch up.” This was certainly what “Italy” long had needed to do, but the peninsula's unique history of rises and declines profoundly inflected the reception of foreign theories among its political economists, and in few cases more acutely than in the case of Physiocracy. It was namely to the “scientific” Transalpine canon emanating from Physiocracy, rather than from the home-grown traditions of political economy derived from Renaissance reason of state, that Ferrara argued Italy should look in order to overcome its contemporary crisis, and his tireless editorial campaign in favor of this vision would mark the development of economics—and the historiography of Physiocracy—in Italy to this day.