The Ideological Turn: Amoroso as Corporatist Economist

This chapter reconstructs Amoroso’s participation in the Italian fascist regime. Amoroso’s path can be divided into two different phases. In the early 1920s, the first phase, he considered, like many other Italian intellectuals, the new regime to be the only means of restoring social peace in Italy. His open support for the new authoritarian regime was based on a vision of society that was ethical and religious rather than economic and was characterized by a deep criticism of economic liberalism. Amoroso’s corporatism rested on two pillars: authoritarian regulation of labor relations to overcome class conflict and affirmation of the essential role of the state in the economic sphere. After the crisis of 1929, which demonstrated the limits of the capitalist economic system, Amoroso attempted to create a genuine economic theory of corporatism, extending the traditional categories of economic reasoning from statics to dynamics. Other economists from the Paretian circle, such as Arrigo Bordin, Eraldo Fossati, and Giulio la Volpe, made efforts to establish a corporatist economic theory in the 1930s. For his support of fascism, Amoroso suffered a trial but was almost immediately completely rehabilitated.