On 'Local Styles' of Political Economy: The Italian Case (1850-1930)

We focus on a ‘local style’ of political economy in Italy, not in order to compare the characteristics of scholars of economics from different national backgrounds, but rather to address the actual ways in which the profession of the economist was conceived and practised in a place that represented an important cultural setting and during a period when a number of highly problematic issues were raised. Between 1850 and 1930, the predominant Italian approach to economic science would start out from synthetic premises valid for specific actual situations ; the emphasis thus turned away from the methodological precepts of the classical and neoclassical period, which held that it is necessary to start out from self-evident analytical premises. Scientific knowledge does not aspire to formulate laws ; instead, it proceeds to identification of causal mechanisms. While laws are universally valid if and only if the (usually fictitious and unrealistic) conditions from which they are derived are effectively realised, the causal mechanisms sometimes come into operation but sometimes do not. The interaction between synthetic premises, which are valid universally for specific contexts, and causal mechanisms, valid indeterminately for many contexts, gives shape to a scientific style. The exponents of this style accept a common ‘box of mechanisms’, but clash vehemently concerning the premises to be adopted and the visions such premises evoke.