Corporations and Economic Growth (eleventh-eighteenth centuries). Between Division of Labour and Market Building

A deep revision of the old wisdom on guilds has been carried out in recent decades. A unified series of essays on guilds and growth, starting with this article, builds new dimensions in this essential relationship.

Corporations have been seen as the opposite of the market. This essay sees them as fundamental instruments in building a market of imperfect competition.

Guilds are a fundamental means for guaranteeing quality, and thus for spreading the exchange and division of labour in a society characterized by fraud, distrust, self-consumption and low specialization. Guilds defend and consolidate the independence of the sphere of production from the influence of – or attack by – religious and political powers endowed with strong normative and extractive strength. Guilds build a field of isonomy and stable rights in a world structured by privileges and heteronomy. Guilds fight for the expansion of local privileges, but the systemic result is an expansion of the rights of producers.

The implications of these functions are crucial. Guilds build a bulwark that allows the division of labour to be deepened, productivity consequently to increase over the long-term, and exchanges to be developed, with major related phenomena to be examined in other essays.

Medievalism and the Great War in Italy

Medieval themes and symbolism featured heavily in the public discourse during the First World War. The case of Italy, however, is somewhat unique since the prevalence of medievalism was much lower than that of the other belligerent nations (as discussed in the previous essay – Medievalism and the Great War, in «Studi Storici», 2015, no. 1, pp. 49-77). Medievalism – a key mythical driver for political culture during the Romanticism of the nineteenth century – only played an important role in Italy for the Catholic Church, which saw medieval civilization as a role model for contemporary society. To the contrary, the values of the Middle Ages were refuted in or even absent from the rhetoric of the times. Indeed, Futurism frowned upon anything resembling «traditionalism», the celebration of Italian unification (the Risorgimento) created new contemporary heroes, and there was a resurgence of the myth of Ancient Rome, calling for a new united and powerful nation.

The Roman Mediterranean between «Connectivity» and «Fragmentation»

The Corrupting Sea by Horden and Purcell, with its ecological perspective, has been guiding the debate on Mediterranean history over the last fifteen years, especially in the English-speaking world; however, it does not seem to have had a similar impact on Italian historians of the ancient world. Against the idea of a never-changing history until modernization, Italian historiography insists on discontinuities and breaks characterizing the evolution of Mediterranean space from antiquity to contemporary times. In particular, it is important to emphasize the impact that its political unification had on «connectivity» – something that occurred only once in Mediterranean history, although lasting for seven centuries. It is indeed during this long period of stability when the whole Mediterranean basin enjoyed a level of prosperity not to be attained again prior to modernization.

An «Acute Sense of Reality»: Togliatti, De Luca and Erudition

This article analyses one aspect of the relationship, thus far overlooked, between Palmiro Togliatti and don Giuseppe De Luca: their alleged shared understanding of «scholarship». The starting point is a commemorative piece on De Luca, which was written by Togliatti for «Rinascita» on 15 June 1963 – that is, more than one year after De Luca’s death (19 March 1962). Two passages from this very well-known document have not been sufficiently clarified: Togliatti’s definition of «scholarship» (erudizione) as an interest that he shared with De Luca, and an implicit quotation from Augustine. Did the secretary of the West’s most important Communist Party and the learned priest from Lucania, who was interested in cultural politics, really share an interest in scholarship? Did the discussions about Augustine convey a different type of communication between the two, in the form of an exclusive and «elevated» dialogue? This essay shall attempt to answer this question by focusing on an image published to illustrate Togliatti’s commemorative article.

Togliatti and De Luca

On 15 June 1963, Togliatti published in «Rinascita» an emotional commemoration of don Giuseppe De Luca, who had recently died in Rome. In the article, he remembered meetings and conversations with his late friend, stating that he had discovered, through dialogue with him, «something that was deeper than ideologies, more valid than systems of doctrine»: a «common humanity» to believers and non-believers alike. This paper reconstructs their human and intellectual relationship and focuses on Togliatti’s last writings and speeches. The contribution aims at outlining a turning point in the report at the Ninth Congress of the Italian Communist Party (30 January 1960), and analyses the famous speech On the destiny of man (20 March 1963), with the maturation of a new attitude towards the religious dimension. Togliatti’s meditation showed signs of the new climate inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council, but also revealed deep connections with De Luca’s investigation of the history of piety.

Notes on Social Control in Communal Italy. Notes, Techniques and Instruments in Siena between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

The essay analyzes the central role of social control as the main means for exerting power in the Italian city-states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, focusing on a case-study: Siena during the age of the «Nine»: 1287-1355. Siena in fact offers an ideal workshop to understand the wealth and contradictions of a process that came to fruition between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. That very phenomenon, whose seeds were sown at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, was looking to create new political and social order along a progressive, and sometimes disorderly, growth of disciplinary initiatives and regulation.

City, Autonomy and Monarchy in late Medieval Southern Italy. Observations on the Case of L’Aquila

Autonomy and freedom have been leading concepts for the historians of late medieval towns of the Kingdom of Naples, since their model of political development was the communal independence of northern Italian cities. This essay analyses the reasons and paths of this cultural tradition for the city of L’Aquila, one the most important in the Kingdom. The idea of freedom was constitutive of urban identity since the town’s foundation in the mid thirteenth century. But liberty had to be reached through submission to a monarchical power, seen as a superior guarantor. Despite that, after the fifteenth century historiography created a global vision of L’Aquila marked by richness, military power and antimonarchical feelings, based upon two impressive revolts in the 1460s and 1480s. An in-depth analysis of some Renaissance historians reveals that other specific elements were underscored to point out the nature of L’Aquila, such as the leadership of the Camponeschi family and the political attitude towards the papacy. These views have been often recalled by modern historiography in simplistic ways, feeding the idea of a de facto autonomy. The systematic study of the sources leads instead to focusing on different leading concepts, such as negotiation, plurality of local powers and the persistent idea of freedom under a sovereign.

Jansenism, Rebellious Lower Clergy, and Bishoprics in Late-eighteenth-century Venice. The Conegliano «Club»

This paper opens a window on the relations between Rome and Genoa during the Castro crisis in the 1640s. The war between Rome and an alliance of Italian States underscored Genoa’s complex positioning in the Italian geopolitical context. On the one hand were the private interests of Genoese groups tied to the Barberini, pushing for an alliance with Rome; on the other was observance of a traditional neutralism of the Republic, which had no significant military forces and no direct interest in war. Between official neutrality and the active involvement of private groups, Genoa was a political and diplomatic battlefield animated by secret movements in support of Rome and the Barberini (even after the end of the pontificate of Urban VIII), and by ambitious propagandistic strategies implemented by both sides to push the Republic into war. The production of pamphlets and the activism of a prince directly involved in the conflict, Francesco d’Este, encouraged communication with regard to political issues of importance to the Republic (the recognition of the royal honours), which was subjected to the Spanish protectorate and had to use private and informal instruments of negotiation with extreme caution.

Jansenism, Rebellious Lower Clergy, and Bishoprics in Late-eighteenth-century Venice. The Conegliano «Club»

This essay sheds light on a rebellious act which can be identified as a case of proto-Jansenism in the Venetian Republic in the late eighteenth century. The starting point was a trial mounted by the State Inquisitors in Conegliano (diocese of Ceneda): some members of the low clergy, others from the popular class, and Bishop Pietro Antonio Zorzi were involved. In that context of pressing religious needs and social demands for change, all taking place in the atmosphere of the French Revolution, the dynamics and balance of powers inside local churches, as well as the bishoprics’ role in influencing civil government and ruling the communities, may be seen. The case presented in this work regards the dispute over a heterodox catechism introduced in the diocese of Ceneda, revealing the existence of a tendency towards Jansenism; however, this was not so much a matter of theology and doctrine (so lively in the Venetian area), since there were political and social overtones related to the policies of Bishop Zorzi, who was certainly attempting to model himself after Scipione De Ricci. The Jansenist movement was nevertheless destroyed by the repressive machinery of the State.

Mortgage and Industrial Credit at the Time of Cavour

In 1852, when Cavour became Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, many bankers proposed to him the founding of mortgage credit bank. Since Cavour’s experience and competence in financial matters were well known in the international arena, it was reasonable to expect significant innovation on Piedmont’s banking landscape. Unfortunately, the various projects submitted by French, Italian, and Swiss bankers were rejected, because Piedmont’s legislation was lacking in that field, and the local economy could not sustain institutions that required long-term credit. The mortgage credit bank was only to come into being after the Unification of Italy.

Cavour also dealt with another branch of credit, changing the statutes of Turin’s bank of trade and industry (Cassa del Commercio e dell’Industria di Torino) with the support of James Rothschild, and launching Piedmont’s first industrial credit bank in 1856. This institution had a troubled existence: the sudden death of Luigi Bolmida, its director, and some high-risk investments which were settled in fixed assets, brought the industrial credit bank to the brink of bankruptcy. A heavy reduction of capital by 40 to 10 million lire was inevitable. The difficulties encountered demonstrated the vitality and the limits of Italian finance, which was at any rate to play a leading role among the Kingdom of Italy’s first lenders.

An Intellectual History of the French Revolution

This critical review analyzes the volume by Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas. An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre (Oxford-Princeton, 2014), drawing comparisons with Israel’s previous works – starting with Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 in 2001 – and in general with the latest historiography on the Enlightenment.