La ‘solitudine’ di Achille Loria: positivismo, questione sociale e distribuzione (Achille Loira's 'solitude': positivism, the social problem and income distribution)

Achille Loria was professor at the University of Turin from 1903 since 1932. This period was marked by a long declining of his prestige as economist and by his ‘solitude’. However, this solitude was not originated by his ignorance of modern economic theory, for which, instead, he showed in several occasions a real intellectual curiosity. Rather, he always remained consciously faithful to a classical concept of political economy, based on the distribution of surplus, and to a vision of the evolution of society and of science strongly a?ected by positivism. Besides the basic distribution of income between productive labourers and owners of the means of production, Loria also analysed the redistribution of surplus between several di?erent social classes and groups (landowners, productive capitalists, «unproductive capitalists» and unproductive labourers). In this frame he worked out his theory of the «subprodotto», meaning that generally the e?ective product is smaller than the potential product in a capitalist economy. Loria focused his attention on the conditions of production and denied that saving could not be readily turned into investment. However he also acknowledged that his «unproductive capital» was similar to Keynes’s analysis of the ?nancial circulation developed in the Treatise on Money.