Corrado Gini's economic anthropology

Abstract

Corrado Gini was a key intellectual in the Fascist establishment. His scientific programme included statistics, demography, eugenics, economics, and sociology, as well as occasional forays into political thought and anthropology. Historians have focused on his statistics and eugenics, in connection with his spell as head of the Italian bureau of statistics. This article, integrating economics with the other threads of Gini’s programme, takes economic anthropology as a standpoint to reassess the inspiration behind his whole oeuvre. That anthropology consisted of two parts: the criticism of economists’ ‘economic man’ and the attempt to replace it with an instinctual economic agent, inspired by the nationalist rhetoric of ‘young peoples’ bound to conquer the world. Once the perspective is enlarged, the usual definition of Gini as a technocrat proves insufficient, for his science incorporated essential pieces of Fascism’s political ideology and cultural legitimacy.

Introduction

Corrado Gini (1884–1965) had a brilliant career. When he was appointed to the chair of statistics at the University of Rome (1923), he had already devised the famous index of economic inequality named after him. He headed the Italian bureau of statistics from 1926 to 1932, advising Mussolini on demographic issues (Leti, 2016). Having begun as an economic statistician, eugenicist, and demographer, after World War I Gini devoted himself to economics and sociology as well, not to mention occasional forays into philosophy, political thought, and anthropology. His multifaceted expertise shined in collaborations with several Italian delegations to international organizations, most notably the League of Nations. His espousal of Mussolini’s regime was unreserved, albeit combined with an invariable claim to scientific independence. Gini penned a famous eulogy of authoritarian government in general and Italian Fascism in particular, appearing in Political Science Quarterly in 1927. He became a scholarly ambassador of Fascism, as he gave either courses or lectures in 26 institutes of higher education abroad, including the London School of Economics, Harvard (which awarded him an honorary degree), the University of Minnesota, and other nine institutions in the United States. His main contact there was none other than Harvard sociologist Robert K. Merton. ¹ Gini’s scientific output amounted to over 800 papers, some of which appeared in major international journals such as Economica, The Economic Journal, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. As founder and editor of Metron, an international statistical journal (1920–), Gini interacted regularly with prominent colleagues all over the world; Genus (1934–), devoted to population sciences, was a sister project. Thus, there is no doubt that Gini was a leading figure in the social sciences on a global scale between the wars – not many Fascist intellectuals operated on as wide a scene, and not many were given the accolades he received abroad. Gini was impeached in 1944 for supporting Mussolini’s regime; his endorsement of Nazi geopolitics between 1938 and 1943 (heralded from the pages of Italian as well as German reviews) made for damning evidence. Gini was first condemned to a slight penalty, and then acquitted (Cassata, 2004). He continued to exert a substantial influence on Italian social sciences until his death.

In spite of his fame and achievements, Gini’s oeuvre is something of a puzzle. ² Historians have focused on his contributions to specific disciplines, but what Gini built year after year, paper after paper, was nothing less than a general theory of civilization, although he refrained from assembling its parts together. The basis of that theory was a vision of demographic evolution that he advanced before World War I; afterwards, he added an unorthodox political economy, an organicist sociology, and an anthropology based on instincts. If this article cannot provide a thorough analysis of Gini’s grand theory for lack of space, it aims nevertheless to identify a primary thread running through it: the appraisal of ‘man’ in relation to the economy. Gini’s most comprehensive book, putting many of his ideas together, was an economic monograph – Prime linee di patologia economica, appearing in 1935 – in which the criticism of ‘economic man’ fed on a distinct anthropology. Economics, that is, provided a disciplinary setting for Gini’s reflections on character. Far from being a corollary, the issue of peoples’ and groups’ traits was central to his oeuvre, in tune with the regime’s attempt to construct a Fascist ‘new man’ through a comprehensive educational project, resting on decades of criticism of the Italian character. ³

The goal of this article, therefore, is to throw light on the gist of Gini’s work by integrating economic anthropology into his social scientific programme. The next section deals with the kind of homo œconomicus the mainstream Italian economists, whom Gini challenged, adopted after World War I; the third section addresses Gini’s demographic cycle, around which his vision of civilization revolved; the fourth expounds his proposal for reflation in the 1920s, and introduces the centrality of instincts; the fifth focuses on his 1935 book; and the final section questions the typical portrait of Gini as a technocrat of chequered fortunes. The date ad quem is 1943. Since Gini has been studied in some detail in recent years, only the main lines of his statistics, demography, eugenics, and sociology are recalled here. Economic technicalities are kept to a minimum. The rest of this section explains how and why economists dealt with people’s attitudes and character traits.

Gini’s policy recommendations during and after World War I differed from those advanced by the neoclassical current, which was dominant in Italy at the time (Barucci, Bini, and Conigliello, 2021). Faced first with the needs of war production and then with a problematic return to normalcy, Gini justified inflation, protectionism, and governmental direction of the economy, whereas the Italian neoclassicists recommended deflation, free trade, and the unshackling of production from the state. The latter recipe rested on a socialized homo œconomicus, who was not only a systematic saver and a tenacious worker, but also a family man and a custodian of tradition, ready to sacrifice himself in favour of future generations. The flesh that Luigi Einaudi, Umberto Ricci, and Giuseppe Prato – the neoclassicists dealt with in the next section – put on the bare bones of the economic man was distinctly conservative, conjuring up a portrait resting on Victorian values (Barucci, 1974; Mattei, 2017). Gini’s recipe too presupposed a specific view of ‘man’, but one that was different from and even opposite to that of the neoclassicists. He devised an instinctual and adventurous economic agent, in fact, by developing the nationalist rhetoric of ‘young peoples’ bound to conquer the world. He found the economists’ ‘man’ too rationalistic and cautious to be of any use in the turmoil of the 1920s. As is well known, the very embodiment of reflation between the wars, J. M. Keynes, held an unorthodox moral philosophy, which was non-hedonistic, questioned the rationality of human nature, and denounced the ‘over-valuation of the economic criterion’ (e.g. Skidelsky, 2009: 133–53). There was an ocean of difference between the two writers, of course, but Keynes’s case strengthens the view that advocating reflation – variously clashing with free trade, the gold standard, and even the balanced budget – involved a departure from the Victorian Weltanschauung.

It is possible to generalize. The conceptualization of the economic agent has often served as a back door through which the moral and political biases of economic science could pass. Economists would often put forward economic men who were ‘thicker’ than the Millian or Robbinsian prototypes. ⁴ Two remarks are in order, keeping in view the evolution of the discipline in the 19th and 20th centuries. First, the chief definitions of economic man accorded with definite philosophical frameworks. J. S. Mill’s version reflected utilitarianism. In the second half of the 19th century, the intention to widen the reach of the economic man – displayed by Alfred Marshall, for example – resulted from the advent of the social evolutionary perspective, entailing a conception of human nature that was much more instinctual and composite than that of the utilitarians, and was to be grasped within society as the norm-giving environment proper to mankind (Medema, 2015). Lionel Robbins’s famed definition of economics originated from the Austro-German debates on instrumental rationality and the method of the social sciences (Howson, 2011: 166–293). Paul Samuelson’s revealed preference formulation of utility showed the influence of operationalist and Vienna Circle epistemology (Backhouse, 2017). As for Gini, the instinctual economic actor he depicted was inextricably linked to organicism in philosophy and sociology.

The second remark is that assessing the performance of real people was a common feature of the policy discourse – namely, when economists were ‘in their unofficial capacity as human beings’ (Pigou, 1923: 1). The ‘men’ of policy were unashamedly normative, as indicated by a series of lines of argument, including the following. First, complaints about people’s deficient rationality were frequent from Malthus (denouncing reproductive habits) to Pareto, Robbins, or Mises (deploring electors’ statism in democracies; Romani, 2022). Second, it was common for economists to assume that the citizens of different countries displayed distinct attitudes, which were more or less conducive to growth. ⁵ Third, many economists supported eugenic measures, resting on a normative view of the appropriate character (Aldrich, 2019; Leonard, 2016). Fourth, accounts of racial heterogeneity resulting in different capacities for optimization were often embraced (Leonard, 2016; Peart and Levy, 2005). Finally, economists sometimes devised peculiar human types, like Joseph Schumpeter’s entrepreneur, Ludwig von Mises’s bureaucrat, or the Fabians’ man of the future. Gini, a committed eugenicist whose worldview included discriminatory ideas about non-white races, an enthusiasm for American people and culture, and a belief that emigrants were energetic and courageous, was a case in point. Economists’ anthropologies clearly dealt with collectives – peoples, classes, groups, races – thus introducing seeds of holism alongside the individualistic essence of the discipline, which the economic man was often taken to signify.

An anthropology of deflation

A moral and psychological component was part and parcel of Italian neoclassicism after the war. Like so many in Europe, Einaudi, Ricci, and Prato argued that the war had altered people’s desires and behaviour. People had grown impatient, resentful, and undisciplined – everybody seemed to long for a change of some kind. Such an attitude, largely suppressed during the war, was exacerbated by post-war inflation. Not only had inflation induced unbridled consumption when in fact saving was needed, but it had triggered social conflicts, eventually creating an unstable and uncertain world in which the wrong human types flourished.

Einaudi, a regular editorialist of the influential newspaper Corriere della sera, insisted the most on the ethical side of policy. He repeatedly denounced the ‘general inquietude’, the ‘psychological suffering’, and even the ‘mental disorder’ brought about by inflation. To him, a stable currency equivalent to a certain amount of gold was the prerequisite for people’s working and saving, and, more generally, for an ordered world. Savers were envisioned as family men who felt responsible to future generations. And Einaudi’s ideal entrepreneurs, far from going into debt, practised abstinence from consumption and invested their own money – their wealth was nothing but the delayed consequence of ‘virtue’. In contrast, inflation allowed what he considered to be the most undesirable elements to emerge. A class of nouveaux riches, who had amassed wealth thanks to the cheapness of bank credit and special connections to the state, comprised ‘the silly, the rascal, and the proud’ (scemi, farabutti, superbi). Significantly, while the groups ruined by inflation complained feebly and ineffectually, those who had gained from it relentlessly pressed the government for more support. ⁶ Einaudi therefore pleaded for severe deflationary measures, which would not only dispose of the ‘adventurers’ and the sly (furbi) among the entrepreneurs, but also re-establish ‘discipline’ and ‘contentment’ among the insatiable workers. Not unlike the Tories of the previous century, Einaudi evoked the necessity of a proper ‘atonement’ (mortificazione) through frugality, combined with a cautious, small-scale investment strategy (Einaudi, 1932a: 77; see also Hilton, 1988).

Ricci and Prato agreed with Einaudi that the mixture of inflation and statism had determined a pathological state of mind, labelled ‘universal folly’ (Ricci), ‘paroxysm’, or even ‘waves of suicidal dementia’ (Prato). The ‘fever’ of insatiability was a ‘poison’ corrupting behaviour, with the workers, lacking taste and culture to consume appropriately, feasting on ostentatious spending. As entrepreneurs had become speculators, Prato complained, their morality and psychology had worsened. There had arisen a personality that was rebellious, impatient, unstable, and focused on exploiting the government’s purse (Prato, 1919: 176; 1925: 125–6, 142; Ricci, 1921: 80). Other Italian economists shared this moral perspective. For example, Alberto De Stefani, who as a minister in 1922–5 carried out much of the neoclassicists’ programme, turned corporatist in the 1930s, but continued to speak on behalf of hard-working, methodical, parsimonious and family-oriented businessmen (De Stefani, 1932: 238–42). ⁷

These Italian economists were extreme in their moralization of the economic man, but it was common for all neoclassicists to endow the saver with ‘thick’ virtues. The American Irving Fisher is a fitting example. In discussing the individual’s ‘rate of impatience’ and its effect on the rate of interest, Fisher sided with the ‘patient’ disposition – namely, with ‘men who possess foresight, self-control, habits of thrift, confidence in length of life, and altruism with respect to posterity’ – against the ‘impatient’ character. The former disposition entailed a willingness to pay for present enjoyable income that was less than that entailed by the latter disposition (quoted in Peart, 2000: 180). Ricci drew a similar contrast: the ‘subjective’ discount rate was low for provident and disciplined individuals, who were thrifty and loved their offspring, while it was high for the improvident, the selfish, the weak, and the prodigal (Ricci, 1926: 85). It emerges, in conclusion, that the neoclassical ‘man’ was a judicious bourgeois – he was ‘old’, so to speak. To those aiming to fulfil the dream of a great Italy, the qualities of the young seemed necessary instead.

The demographic cycle

Gini gained recognition before World War I for technical and quantitative work on the variability of biological characters, the calculation of the wealth of nations, and inequality (Gini, 1908, 1909, 1912b, 1914). Nevertheless, at all stages of his career he coupled this kind of analysis with the pursuit of preconceived theses fitting his nationalist and Fascist beliefs. For instance, being an advocate of war in general and of World War I in particular, he first dismissed the gravity of war damages in Italy chiefly on the basis of conjectures, and then went to great lengths to challenge the thesis of the eugenic disadvantages of war. ⁸

Gini changed his mind on almost nothing as the decades passed by. Once his scholarly status was established, he used footnotes chiefly for self-referencing. The already mentioned Patologia economica, which is over 700 pages long, includes no apparatus of any kind, except for a list of the author’s own works. A writer more than a reader, Gini was impervious to disciplinary constraints and requirements. He regularly addressed challenging issues in texts devoid of real rigour, but always professing scientific objectivity. Gini’s strategy of persuasion consisted in deftly mixing the inferences that could be drawn from the quantitative or historical evidence he presented, with further deductions that were often generalizations, introduced as probably true but lacking specific evidence. Significantly, the kind of statistical analysis he commended, and which characterized the Italian contributions, in his view, depended on ‘intuition’ and ‘wide experience’ – in practice leaving ample room for bias (Gini, 1926: esp. 707–8). The matrix of his whole social scientific construction lay in the ‘demographic cycle’, a grand theory, first put forward in 1912, making numbers the key to the rise and fall of nations since antiquity. Then, he acknowledged that the available pieces of evidence were impressionistic and defective, but he proceeded nevertheless. ⁹ That Gini’s demographical cycle served a political cause was obvious to contemporaries. ¹⁰

National power and wealth were dependent on a large population, Gini argued. Key to this were the lower classes, whose reproduction rate was higher than the elites’ due to certain environmental factors affecting the ‘germinal elements’. ¹¹ Hence, a large number of people constantly attempted to climb the social ladder, but, if the higher ranks did not shrink and make room for them, demographic pressure mounted. Either emigration or war followed. The period of ‘demographic exuberance’ came to an end once emigration and war, having been carried out unduly, had depleted the lower classes; this, together with the enjoyment of greater wealth, reduced the procreation rate of the nation. As the population grew older, in fact, there spread an eagerness to consume, prompting people to move from the countryside to the cities. Urbanization and other factors led to the senescence of the genetic heritage. Finally, society collapsed due to lack of workers and consumers, inflation, and an increased concentration of wealth (he devised his famed index in connection with this issue). An ageing society was likened to a ‘sick’ one. Societies and peoples were not like organisms, Gini commented: they were organisms, going through phases of youth, maturity, and senescence, depending on the current procreation rate of the lower classes. ¹² Gini substantiated such a model in ingenious detail, although most of the evidence was gleaned from only two case studies: ancient Rome and contemporary France.

Granted that at the time there were ‘old’ nations, like France, and ‘young’ ones, like Italy, the model’s chief implication was to legitimize the expansion of the latter. A young people felt the urge, hence had the right, to migrate, to colonize, and to redraw the national boundaries by war, in obedience to natural laws. The expansive peoples in Europe, Gini wrote in 1915, were the Slavs, the ‘Teutons’, and the Latins, each of whom corresponded to a particular ‘civilization’ whose roots lay in specific ‘racial’ traits, now intermixed to a certain extent. The underlying reason for World War I was the potency of the ‘Slav tide’ (Gini, 1921[1915]: 47).

Gini’s demographical cycle included a contrast of character traits. The fertile lower classes, whose quest for vital space was the moving force of history, were energetic, impulsive, generous, brave, and enterprising – the attributes of the young. Emigrants were particularly endowed with these. These traits shaped national life when the reproduction rate was high, but when the population declined, the dispositions of the old gained the upper hand: people became calm and reflective, selfish and routinière, peace-loving and cosmopolitan. The role models of a young nation – the pioneer and the soldier – were replaced by the small saver and the state bureaucrat. It is worth remarking that the shift from the quantitative (numbers) to the qualitative (character traits) was unproblematic for Gini, as he failed to bring up the issue altogether. ¹³ He then subscribed to a view he would later revise, namely, that the course of civilization weakened instincts – in particular those of procreation and wealth accumulation for the benefit of one’s descendants – in favour of enhanced consumption. A comfortable life allegedly undermined the physiological foundation of reproduction, although the expansive peoples displayed ‘inner forces of evolution’ that were powerful enough to constrain the desire to fulfil higher needs (Gini, 1912a: 43–4; 1914: 547–50).

Gini’s model assembled a series of previous themes and viewpoints. Its rationale dated back to Tacitus and Montesquieu, to name but two, who had argued that wealth debauched and, conversely, that overcoming difficulties strengthened character. Gini reshaped this age-old idea via a scientific apparatus, demographical and biological (the germinal plasma), and also via a concern with degeneration and decline – a Europe-wide fear, tackled by a host of writers from Nordau to Spengler. Pareto’s theory of the circulation of elites was probably a major influence (Maccabelli, 2008). The general inspiration, however, came from Italian nationalism, to which the nexus between population growth and Italy’s expansionism was commonplace. Enrico Corradini, for one, made numbers the reason for colonial conquests, and regarded war as the indispensable means of moral regeneration. Like all Italian nationalists, Corradini was an organicist, extolling the pristine energy of the populace and equating national decline with senescence. It was not by chance that Maffeo Pantaleoni, a rabid nationalist and the second most influential economist in Italy after Pareto, bestowed praise on Gini’s cycle. ¹⁴ Finally, the effect on character of low fertility had been highlighted before, mainly in France. For example, the economist Paul Leroy Beaulieu, then an authority on colonization, put forward as the most important consequence of a stationary population that children reared in small families became self-indulgent, timid, and reluctant to embark on risky ventures like innovative businesses or colonization (Leroy-Beaulieu, 1896: Vol. 4, 628–31).

Gini’s organic economics

Gini’s economic oeuvre has not attracted much attention so far, but it deserves a place in the history of Italian economics. He formulated a thorough rationale for inflation in the aftermath of World War I, a rationale that later formed the basis of an ambitious critique of neoclassicism. Both the organicist sociology underpinning the economics and the Fascist brand of his interventionism account for the neglect of his economic thought, which was idiosyncratic also because it was developed regardless of corporativismo, the peculiar economics matching the creation of professional corporations by the regime. Yet Gini’s criticism of the abstract and reductive economic man was fully in tune with that literature, discussing how to revise economics in the face of class conflict and recurrent crises (Barucci, Bini, and Conigliello, 2018; Cini, 2022). He was acquainted with the international debate in the 1920s, but afterwards he proclaimed the originality of his views and refrained from referring to anybody else. It is remarkable, however, how often his economics reminds the reader of Keynes’s. Patologia economica included the idea of underemployment equilibrium as well as a rejection of Say’s law, not to mention that Gini’s non-rational instincts have a fair amount in common with Keynes’s animal spirits (Gini, 1935a: 478–86, 524–7, 550).

Gini deemed the measures introduced during the war and continued afterwards – in particular the printing of inconvertible money and large state borrowing – necessary and unavoidable. Inflation served to transfer wealth from savers to producers, and also to relieve the burden of public debt, given that higher taxes were politically unfeasible. Significantly, in his view the reason for wartime inflation was not a lax monetary policy but an unprecedented volume of demand, which continued after 1918, while production lagged. Gini complained that the economists urging deflation ignored the demand side, and therefore viewed money printing and bank loans as the causes, rather than the effects, of inflation (Gini, 1921b: 453–72, 33–54, 127–44). The fiscal measures he recommended in the early 1920s were aimed at avoiding constraints on accumulation and production. He favoured taxes on consumption and especially on luxury goods, opposed denting war profits, and welcomed a lesser rate on the taxation of inherited wealth if it had been amassed through the testator’s work and savings. ¹⁵

Contrary to Einaudi, Gini did not indulge in value-laden depictions of the various economic actors – he was no public moralist. Under war and post-war inflation, the capitalists footed the bill, while the wages of the working class adjusted to prices, albeit with a delay (the problem with the workers was that they spent too lavishly; Gini, 1921b: 143–4; 1935a: 482, 555–6). As for the entrepreneurs, Gini was positive that they were the ‘moving force of production’, so that it was sensible for the government to foster their activities. They were not given any moral praise, however; all that counted was their function. On a deeper plane, it is clear that the entrepreneurs were the ‘young’ element – namely, the daring and enterprising one – that the demographic cycle predisposed him to appreciate. Conversely, he shed no tears for the savers, who arguably were the ‘old’ element – passive creatures of habit (Gini, 1921[1918]: 210). When in later years he envisioned the future economy, he advocated something like Keynes’s ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, resulting from the socialization of accumulation and the primacy of work (Gini, 1935a: 700–5).

Gini’s economic analysis made much of the view of society as an organism. Inflation was not an illness proper but a manifestation of it, as fever was to the human body; and the losses inflation caused to certain classes and groups corresponded to the reduced nutriment that, appropriately, certain organs of the body obtained during an illness. Society consumed wealth reserves in a crisis, as the body consumed fat reserves. The interest of the whole predominated in either system, dictating a penalty for the organs of lesser ‘utility’ (Gini, 1923a).

Gini qua economist cultivated a grand project: extending the boundaries of economics by dealing with the ‘pathological’ situations, defined as those disequilibria that, if protracted, would lead to the disgregation of society. Such a project, developing out of his analysis of post-war policy, culminated in Patologia economica. ¹⁶ The focus on critical situations went hand in hand with the censure of economics for failing to acknowledge essential facts of economic reality, like protectionism. The chief reason Gini advanced for economists’ ‘dogmatism’ was their obsession with the wholly rational economic man, whereas real ‘man’ was driven by instinct (Gini, 1923b: 8–9). He demonstrated the primacy of instincts by analysing ‘human capital’, namely the abilities possessed by a person, stemming from expenses on his/her education and training as well as from unpaid work carried out in the family. ¹⁷ The return on human capital was only partly included in the wages and stipends earned by the grown person, he claimed, meaning that the ‘production of people’ occurred at a loss. The reproductive instinct, therefore, was economically non-rational. Had people followed reason – if they had been economic ‘men’ – the fertility rate would have been much lower than it was in reality (Gini, 1924b: 256–9).

In fact, to Gini all types of investments were usually rewarded at a rate below the long-term rate of interest, a fact entailing that the very instinct for capital accumulation was uneconomical. If to Einaudi saving was a virtue, to Gini it was a biological reflex, and as such devoid of moral value, although saving stemmed from solicitude towards descendants. He believed that the very existence of society rested on instincts conflicting with economic calculation – besides those for reproduction and accumulation, he referred to the instincts for command, for fame, and for solidarity, among others. But, as he indicated in 1929, the progress of civilization was weakening instincts. There followed the need for state action, going from shielding family and property to backing saving and charity (Gini, 1929).

Gini’s economic perspective was unreservedly ‘organic’. If a Martian landed on Earth, he claimed in 1940, its inhabitants would look to him/her like ants or bees looked to humans: instinct-dominated creatures, whose behaviour depended on species class. Societies were becoming ever more ‘organized’, namely, more dense, centralized, and ‘reactive’, thus intensifying their organic essence (Gini, 1926–7; 1940a: 24). Gini’s notion of the ‘biological’ citizenry was in tune with his interpretation of Fascism as the government of a committed minority imposing its will on a passive majority; the minority was cognizant of, and implemented, the policies required by the social organism as a whole (Gini, 1927b).

Challenging the economic man

Gini could ultimately ignore disciplinary divides because he believed that, in consequence of the organic nature of society, the subject matter of science was unitary (Gini, 1935b). Unsurprisingly, then, a comprehensive standpoint characterized his most thorough economic work, the treatise Prime linee di patologia economica. The edition of 1935, which will be dealt with in this section, followed three much shorter editions appearing in 1924 and 1925 as lithographed lectures compiled by students. The book focused on inflation, financial speculation, and crises – subjects that, Gini argued, revealed the shortcomings of economics. The anthropology of instincts provided decisive ammunition to his polemic. He even identified a new kind of homo: the homo americanus.

To Gini, the economists’ ‘men’, maximizing satisfactions relative to sacrifices, inhabited the economic realm only, in spite of Robbins’s detection of a generalized logic of choice. ¹⁸ But even so limited, economic man was ‘dead’ and ‘buried’. It had suited a phase of calm and prosperity like the century from 1815 to 1914, but it had lost importance over the turmoil of the previous 20 years, when actions that were non-rational economically had become ‘essential’ (Gini, 1935a: 22, 611, 624–5). Actual economic conduct was in fact governed by instincts (or ‘impulses’), ‘affections’, and violence. Moreover, the economists’ concept of utility was inadequate. First, it ignored the pathological situations in which the utility of the whole clashed with that of some individuals; second, utility could be ‘diffuse’ (when not completely appropriated by the owner of the good), or ‘indirect’ (when the consequences of certain exchanges affected the whole community); finally, the utility sought by economic man was purely individual and momentary, ignoring objective, a posteriori evaluations. This last limitation was a major problem because the goal of economic activity was an increase in one’s ‘happiness’, so it was the ‘ultimate’ (definitiva) utility that counted (ibid.: 25–6, 69ff., 190, 526, 614, 620–2, 662–7).

Gini continued by arguing that actions resulted from either impulses or desires. While the former were ‘organic stimuli’ inducing actions regardless of reason, the latter took two forms. There were ‘spontaneous’ desires that occurred when an impulse was not met immediately and a need arose as a consequence, as well as ‘rational’ desires, born out of reflection (for example, a sick person might wish to undergo surgery in spite of instinct). Economics studied desire-motivated conduct only, by applying the principle of lowest cost and highest satisfaction, under the hypothesis of concordance between means (the goods) and ends (the satisfaction). The problem was that economics left out essential parts of human behaviour, and it was not a matter of division of labour between instinct and reason. The role of the latter was ancillary in all areas of life for Gini, who argued that even ‘rational’ desires ultimately sprang from a biological instinct (as revealed by following the chain of motives in reverse), so much so that reason did nothing but justify instinctual drives (Gini, 1935a: 584–92). In short, economics was utterly off the mark because its underlying anthropology was faulty – in a later contribution, Gini advocated an ‘integral’ political economy through the addition of an ‘economic sociology’ (Gini, 1942b).

Contrary to previous statements, in Patologia economica Gini denied that instincts were bound to weaken as civilization advanced. The strength of instincts simply varied in peoples, depending on an unspecified ‘progressive selection’. Capital accumulation, reproduction, science and art, social traditions, politics, and charitable work were all matters of instinct (Gini, 1935a: 592–4, 614–19). And then there was violence, whose function Gini never really clarified, but which played a ‘capital’ role in social life. Not only did he indicate its ubiquity, especially in backward countries, but he also legitimized it, in agreement with Georges Sorel and Italian nationalists. In the course of this argument, he justified popular violence against the Jews, albeit obliquely (ibid.: 20–1, 602–5, 625–7).

Some economists had already paid heed to instincts and impulses. Gini certainly knew Marshall, who had not only adopted the biological metaphor but also held a broad view of ‘man’, far removed from that of a purely self-interested agent (Medema, 2015). Gini was also familiar with the two economists exerting the greatest influence in Italy, Pareto and Pantaleoni. Both moved on to sociology and participated in the political debate, revising the economic man in the process. Pantaleoni associated its utility-maximizing behaviour with the instinct for the preservation of the species, while Pareto relinquished hedonism in the 1906 Manuale di economia politica (Bee and Desmarais-Tremblay, 2023). In addition, both writers viewed the use of force in the acquisition and maintenance of power as a key requirement for an effective elite. Yet Gini took issue with Pareto, who had distinguished between ‘non-logical actions’, carried out outside the economic realm and stemming from ‘sentiments’, and ‘logical’ actions, resulting from utilitarian maximization and characterizing the economy. Gini instead classified Pareto’s logical actions into ‘rational’ and ‘rationalized’. The former resulted from desires and were the province of economics, whereas the latter were determined by habit, with reason assisting only a posteriori, and fell outside the purview of economics (Gini, 1935a: 20, 597–9).

Instincts were also at the root of the global crisis that began in 1929. This crisis was one of overproduction, in Gini’s view, and was worsened by some built-in rigidities (of wages, industrial organization, trade, and circulation), but its underlying cause was the advent of a new biological impulse: a psychology of work for its own sake (Gini, 1931b; 1932; 1935a: 549–52). Gini argued that although economics regarded work as a sacrifice, work had actually become a pleasure to many in the United States (a country Gini visited seven times); in Europe, this attitude was so far shared only by leading entrepreneurs. Never afraid of a sweeping statement, he maintained that this heralded a change in human nature. He identified three types of ‘man’: the homo orientalis (who abhorred work), the homo europæus (who worked to consume), and the homo americanus, who was the model of the future. The psychology of work-loving Americans resulted from various favourable circumstances, but the crucial one was the ‘innate’ courage and entrepreneurship of the European immigrants belonging to the working class, who were the product of centuries of breeding and selection (Gini, 1935a: 594–7, 731; 1940a: 4–5).

A different kind of capitalism would reflect and regulate the new attitude to work. Rather than believing in Mussolini’s middle-way corporazioni, Gini envisaged a ‘collectivist’ state charged with the organization of production and the accumulation of capital – a state that had already materialized in the United States and the Soviet Union, allegedly, and which was in the offing in Italy. Monetary rewards would lose importance relative to the ambition to excel and lead, while consumption would be reduced due to a lack of free time (Gini, 1935a: 16–17, 638, 694–708). The psychology of work became the vehicle for a stadial model of the evolution of civilization, which Gini devised after 1945 (Gini, 1956; see Cassata, 2006: 149–64).

The instinct to work honed Gini’s ambitious attempt to rebuild economics on an ‘organic’ basis. In 1942, he combined the criticism of the economic man with the demographic cycle. He posited the principle that ‘not only do we desire to live, we desire to live intensely, and to feel we are living. We desire, in other words, to fulfil our personality and experience passions [emozioni].’ In particular, the young and the enterprising longed for passions, whereas the old and the tranquil opted for pleasure – the same associations applied to nations, with the idealistic, warlike, and enterprising peoples contrasting with the epicurean, pacifist, and laid-back ones. Therefore, if the search for pleasure was not the single spur to action, economics as ‘the science of hedonistic choices’ should be complemented by a ‘vital economics’ of passions. It was not by chance, Gini continued, that the former had been developed in the previous century by the ‘bourgeoisie’ (Gini, 1942b: 602–3). With England in mind, he claimed that the bourgeoisie was spiritually ‘dead’, because it had sacrificed the reproductive instinct to hedonism – its materialistic side, fully displayed in classical political economy, had eventually gained the upper hand. The bourgeois was a man of the past, he contended, for he was an individualist, a hedonist, and a quietist, whereas the new man was idealistic and patriotic. Both Germany and Italy were waging war against this ‘bourgeois spirit’ (Gini, 1943; see Treves, 2009: 205–6).

Conclusion: Gini and Fascism

The goal of the previous sections has been to demonstrate, first, that economics was Gini’s vehicle of choice for his qualitative assessments of ‘man’; second, that those assessments were not occasional, but an integral part of his social scientific programme; and, third, that he came to develop an ideology of Fascism as a timely agent of civilization, replacing liberalism. Gini the demographer turned into a political writer in his own right by taking into account not only the quantity of people but also their quality. This section elaborates on this argument.

Sure enough, a skilful use of numbers seemed to guarantee, if not the political neutrality of Gini’s oeuvre, at least a scientific habit borrowed from the natural sciences. But quantification hardly exhausted his production. For example, his sociology as well as large parts of his economics – including his 1920s essays on rent, protectionism, unemployment, and so on, and the final chapters of Patologia economica – were entirely abstract and theoretical. Not to mention that Gini, a member of the ‘Commission of Eighteen’ charged with the task of altering the constitution in the light of Fascism in 1925, devised a political thought of his own, and a brilliant one at that. Besides the justification for minority rule already referred to, he anticipated social choice theory by tackling Condorcet’s paradox of voting, in the process discussing the intensity of voter preferences, intergenerational fairness, the problematic definition of the common good, and other issues that are relevant today. ¹⁹ (Generalizing, though, was an urge Gini could not resist even qua political philosopher. He identified a ‘political cycle’, to the effect that a historical phase in which power was concentrated was supposedly followed by a phase in which it was diffuse, to be followed by one in which it was concentrated, and so on; Prévost, 2001; 2016: 158–63).

In 1945, to rebut the accusation of complicity with the Mussolini regime, Gini claimed a degree of independence from Fascism on the grounds that he had conceived his Weltanschauung before its advent. He contended that the endorsement of the Axis ideology in particular rested on previous assumptions, like the claims of young peoples to colonies and raw materials, or the usefulness of war. This was basically true, as it is true that some autonomy of thought and judgement is discernible in Gini’s anthropology. A first instance is his own brand of eugenics, which emphasized the utility and necessity of ‘racial crossings’ (albeit not in all cases: mixing between Whites and Blacks, in particular, was to be avoided). When the regime enacted laws banning miscegenation, he was subjected to journalistic attacks. ²⁰ Another example is a Harvard lecture in 1936 that established a causal relationship, on the one hand, between the Anglo-Saxons’ enterprise and self-discipline and their democratic and ‘individualist’ government, and, on the other, between the moral and intellectual shortcomings of other peoples and authoritarian government. Gini’s goal was to account ‘scientifically’ for Fascism, but the impression remains that he deemed Italians still undisciplined and passive after 14 years of Fascism (Gini, 1940b: 264–5, 275–6). Finally, he maintained as late as 1940 that Americans were leading civilization, materially and spiritually (Gini, 1940a: 26).

Although Gini was a Fascist who usually thought with his own head, he made a gradual turn to propaganda from the late 1930s onwards, as again the anthropological themes demonstrate. In an article appearing in a top American journal in the wake of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, Gini claimed that ‘the progress of mankind’ required that Western nations on the rise demographically, like Italy, be given their share of colonies for population and economic exploitation. The needs of ‘inferior’ and ‘immature’ peoples should take second place (Gini, 1937). When, in the early 1940s, Gini promoted the German strategy of Lebensraum, he seasoned his argument with qualitative assessments of the European peoples, on the grounds that a certain homogeneity of feeling and psychology was key to the future superstate. ²¹ These assessments were little more than Fascist commonplaces. He contrasted the egotism of the English, the ‘satiated’ people par excellence, with the full-blown Angriffsgeist and craving for power and wealth of young peoples (although a few years before he had praised the Anglo-Saxons, as just indicated, and argued that the Germans were not young any more). Since the English mentality had little in common with that of the other European peoples, in his view, Britain was unfit to participate in the new post-war order. ²² The bourgeois temperament would soon be replaced in the Axis countries by a sense of solidarity and self-sacrifice, combined with an exaltation of work. In the meantime, since the Germans excelled in organizational talent, they deserved the leadership of the coming European superstate (Gini, 1942a: 95; 1943: 310–11). Thus, however large Gini’s degree of independence was, it faltered in the face of Italy’s colonialism and war.

The contention that Gini provided the regime with substantial political legitimacy, different in kind from technical expertise, rests mainly on his demographical cycle, with its qualitative assessments of ‘men’. To follow up on Francesco Cassata’s interpretation of the cycle as a ‘philosophy of history’, it is appropriate to categorize Gini’s model as one of those grand constructions that, from Spencer’s onwards, spawned a political anthropology by somehow linking the natural and biological with the social and cultural (Cassata, 2006: 17–22). All-encompassing theories like those of Spencer, Albert Schäffle, Vacher de Lapouge, Otto Ammon, Benjamin Kidd, Gustave Le Bon, Alfred Fouillée, or William McDougall (to name but a few) culminated in the identification of national or racial dispositions from an allegedly scientific standpoint. Gini’s enterprise as depicted in this article – other reconstructions may be possible – finds its proper antecedents in this politico-psychological evolutionism, which came indifferently from either Lamarck or Darwin. ²³

An example is necessary. Gini had read the French ‘anthroposociologist’ Georges Vacher de Lapouge, whom he referred to before World War I with regard to the social dynamics of the brachycephalic and the dolichocephalic (Gini, 1909: 64–6). Lapouge’s racism was essentialist, whereas Gini’s was ‘historical’ – he regarded the major races as ‘fusions’ (Gini, 1930b) – yet they shared a common perspective. Its crucial feature was an unproblematic shift from the quantitative to the qualitative, namely, from cranial measurements and demography to mass psychology. Gini shrugged off any possible difficulty by declaring himself in awe of nature, which had established a ‘secret harmony’ between the quantitative variation of peoples and their character traits – with the result that a growing population was resolute, enterprising, and warlike, for example (ibid.: 29). Both writers assumed that ‘human beings can be classified like insects’, to use George Orwell’s words; je ne crois pas beaucoup à la liberté humaine was Lapouge’s understatement. If he termed his beloved homo europæus ‘a zoological race’, Gini spoke of nations that were both biological and historical, yet driven by effective natural laws. ²⁴ What counted was the relative size of the various human herds. Lapouge, who equated the dolichocephalic with the creative social elite and the brachycephalic with the masses of ‘innate slaves’, was not as skilled a demographer as Gini, but he estimated the size of both groups in each country in order to speculate about their growth trends. ‘The clash of large nations is a natural necessity’, Lapouge averred in full consonance with Gini, for there would come a time when population surpluses could no longer emigrate. (Both authors believed that emigrants were of a particularly strong and daring character, and Lapouge credited the dolichocephalic with a marked tendency to migrate.) To Lapouge, the biological struggle for existence was the matrix of an argument for remaking the world, along lines accounted for by the psychologies of the Aryans, the Jews, the homo alpinus, or the homo mediterraneus (Vacher de Lapouge, 1899: 422–6, 501). Another common feature of the two writers was the advocacy of transformative, rather than conservative, policies. Both supported Nazism, eventually, although with reservations and different emphases. ²⁵ Their political evolutionism was radical, for science ruled out religion and traditional morality (implicitly in Gini, explicitly in Lapouge), in the name of a global struggle that was viewed as the best possible eugenic policy (Hecht, 2003: 168–210).

To conclude, Gini’s politics had two dimensions. The first resulted from his role as advisor to the government qua demographer, economist, and eugenicist, while the second was that discussed in this article, stemming from his politico-psychological evolutionism. The former dimension has been heavily studied in recent years, leading historians to depict Gini as a technocrat. ²⁶ He certainly ascribed a key role to social science in general and to himself in particular – he aimed to lead Mussolini instead of being led by him – but the label fails to capture the complexity of his contribution. Moreover, the two parts of Gini’s politics – different as they were in origin, substance, and inspiration – should not be taken in isolation. The totalitarian nature of the regime (Gentile, 2009) made a distinction between technical advice and political ideology inconsequential, as science was integral to Fascism (Saraiva and Wise, 2010). The politicization of society and culture turned all categories of intellectual workers (teachers, doctors, artists, scientists, etc.) into militants, concerned with legitimizing, developing, and thus ‘creating’ Fascism (Bernhard and Klinkhammer, 2017). Multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity stemmed quite naturally from such a context. Gini’s programme was therefore unitary, and deeply political in all its parts, if assessed from this standpoint. ²⁷

During the ventennio, quantitative social scientists became an esteemed kind of public intellectual, addressing a public beyond their academic peers when writing about natality, colonization, autarky, or race (Treves, 2009: 215–17, 231–7). From the creation of the Italian unitary state onwards, however, working with data did not entail an apolitical or anti-political bias as a rule – quite the contrary (D’Antone, 2000). Pareto, for example, had blended the persuasive force of numbers, both economic (the general equilibrium model) and statistical (the income curve), with an all-consuming political drive. Pantaleoni – so passionate about politics as to look deranged at times – intensified Pareto’s approach. Both welcomed Fascism, with Pantaleoni as a deputy even defending Mussolini in the wake of the killing of Matteotti. Other Italians who practised statistics, economics, demography, and sometimes eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Rodolfo Benini and Giorgio Mortara, were in the same mould (Lanaro, 1979: 51–8, 68–9, 166–70). To take up a suggestion made by Charles Maier (1970: 44), Gini’s peculiarity in this regard may be said to lie in the exposure of scientific rationality to the ‘vitalist source of energy’ provided by the instinctual and ‘proletarian’ Italian people.