Emilio Sereni: il marxismo storicista nella scuola italiana di economia agraria (Emilio Sereni: Historicist marxism in the Italian school of agricultural economics)

This paper aims to show that Emilio Sereni, unanimously considered as a great historian of contemporary (and not only contemporary) Italian agriculture, is first of all a Marxist agricultural economist, and that in his historical works he adopts the economist’s point of view. Furthermore, the paper argues that Sereni’s approach reveals strong historicist connotations, mostly due to the influence of Gramsci’s thought and of Togliatti’s leadership within the Italian Communist Party. These features explain Sereni’s use of the analytical notion of ‘economic-social formation’. They also inspire, in the 1950s, his conception of an agricultural policy aiming to give peasants access to land property. Consistently with this line of thought, in the second half of the 1960s Sereni conceptualised the model of household farming adapted to the structural evolution of the most advanced capitalistic agricultures.