ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: When crises became economic: an analysis of Italian journals and literature in the 19th century
Author: Poettinger Monika
What emerges from a preliminary survey of Italian literature of the nineteenth century is mostly a vague perception of the momentous change from a traditional society largely based on agriculture to a society centered in cities and divided in new classes. How much the latter depended on the economic cycle was a question posed and answered even at the end of the century only in economic journals and academic writings, but not in literature at large. The life of the common man was still much more influenced by famine than economic turmoil. Crises found their definition abroad. Gerolamo Boccardo so derived the general structure of the voice on Crises of his Dictionary of political economy from French antecedents . Crises were “more or less deep perturbations of the social interests”, momentarily perturbations, by definition, otherwise they wouldn’t be mere crises but a chronical malady capable of bringing society to its death. Less than ten years later, in 1864, Francesco Ferrara introduced the fourth volume of the second series of the Biblioteca dell’Economista with a lengthy essay on economic crises. Definition and taxonomy perfectly corresponded to Boccardo’s Dictionary. Ferrara vividly described economic crises as distresses of nations’ economic life, quite similar to a physiologic disease: an epidemic menacing the orderly functioning of the economic body. The crisis had three main forms of appearance: insufficient production, excessive production and scarcity of money. A change in terminology and taxonomy was proposed, in 1878, by Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis in his essay on Shapes and Laws of Economic Perturbations , published on Giornale degli Economisti. Cognetti ignored the term crisis and spoke only of perturbations. He introduced, though, the concept of cycles as defined by Clément Juglar. On the base of longtime empirical observations, he even ventured to identify a precise law regarding the cyclical nature of economies. “The perturbations of the economic currents — concluded Cognetti — are phenomena, like any other of the cosmic order, natural and in their irregularity regular. They have their reason of existence and their laws and so it is possible to construe a scientific theory on them”. Crises, though, were not popular among Italian economists, not even at the end of the century. Shun by literature, tolerated, with few exceptions, by intellectuals and economists, crises were much more thrilling in countries like England and France, where their repetitive and destructive recurrence sparked the most remarkable theoretical advancements and many literary recollections and representations. A closer scrutiny of the main periodicals of the nineteenth century, till Italy’s unification, though, with the aid of the taxonomy proposed by Boccardo and Ferrara, permits a more precise appraisal of how and if, in Italy, economic crises were perceived by intellectuals and even common men: a worthwhile research object. In Italy the most recurrent form of crisis for the whole century remained famine and as such was widely discussed and represented in literature as in journals (paragraph 1). The idea of overproduction crises, instead, almost unknown as a contemporary reality, came to coincide in the imagination of Italians with the idea of England itself, a nation rich and powerful as any, but plagued by a diffused misery, unknown in such measure on the Continent (paragraph 2). Some conclusions will be drawn from this study, hinting at how the repeated financial and economic crises at the end of the century spread among intellectuals and in popular periodicals the idea of economic determinism (paragraph 3). After a century of struggles for political independence and unification, Italians learnt that they still had to pay for it.
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