A Scientific Basis for Fascism: the Neo-Organicism of Corrado Gini

Corrado Gini coined the therm «neo-organicism» in 1927, in the inaugural lecture of the course of Sociology at the University of Rome. In Gini’s thought, neo-organicism was not only an important revision of positivist organicism, but also the theoretical assumption of a scientific legitimation of the fascist conquest of power. On the side of the economical theory, neo-organicism implied – from Gini’s lessons at Università Commerciale «L. Bocconi», in 1923-1925 to the publication, in 1935, of Prime linee di patologia economica – a heated anti-orthodox economical nationalism. If fascist ideology ostracized Gini’s ‘economic pathology’ for its critics to corporatism, quite more considerable seems to have been the attention that social sciences, and particularly Robert K. Merton, paid to the functionalist aspects of Gini’s neo-organicism.