[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/pshchp/978-3-030-38331-2_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

“Breaking Down the Ivory Tower”: Economic Culture in the Italian Academies Under Fascism

In: An Institutional History of Italian Economics in the Interwar Period — Volume II

Author

Listed:
  • Rosario Patalano

    (University of Naples Federico II)

  • Marco E. L. Guidi

    (University of Pisa)

Abstract
This chapter examines the role of the economists in Italian academies during the period when Mussolini’s totalitarian regime attempted to transform them into propaganda bodies for the ideology and politics of fascism. The participation of economists in the academies of science, literature and the arts in the main Italian cities was an established fact since the nineteenth century. By welcoming eminent scientists from all disciplines, the academies created an élite within the élite of scholars and, in the case of Italy, they represented an instrument to strengthen the professional identity of the economists. Fascism intervened in this reality along two parallel lines: on the one hand, it tried to overcome the particularism typical of Italian culture, creating in 1929 a national cultural institute, the Reale Accademia d’Italia, and, on the other hand, it worked to mobilise the most eminent intellectuals in support of the new regime’s aims by somehow prising them from their relatively sheltered sanctums—“ivory towers” detached from the construction of a new national culture. Decisive steps were taken in 1934 when members of academies were required to swear an oath of allegiance, and in 1938, when the purge following the racial laws struck many Jew academy members, among whom 27 affiliates of the prestigious Academy of Lincei.

Suggested Citation

  • Rosario Patalano & Marco E. L. Guidi, 2020. "“Breaking Down the Ivory Tower”: Economic Culture in the Italian Academies Under Fascism," Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought, in: Massimo M. Augello & Marco E.L. Guidi & Fabrizio Bientinesi (ed.), An Institutional History of Italian Economics in the Interwar Period — Volume II, pages 99-142, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-030-38331-2_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-38331-2_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-030-38331-2_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.