Policies of Public Intervention in the Economy in Italy and the United States between the Wars: Alberto Beneduce and David E. Lilienthal

Starting from an analysis of the Italian State’s intervention policies to finance and support the economy, this article highlights the many similarities with what was happening overseas in the same period. The ideas underlying the establishment of the so-called «Enti Beneduce», and subsequently of the IRI, are linked to Nitti’s meridionalism understood from a national perspective to the indispensability of industrial development as a lever to reduce the gap between North and South. The activity of Alberto Beneduce, a key man in the creation of a system of financial bodies that allowed the gradual extension of what would later be defined as the «entrepreneur state», was based on completely new methods of action. An extension of state intervention which did not respond to an ideal form of statism, but was part of a plan of social, economic and financial policies, which in many respects recalled the project for the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority desired by Roosevelt, whose first chair, David E. Lilienthal played a fundamental role in its promotion and development