Economic Expertise and Political Militancy Under Fascism: An Introduction

The chapter offers an introduction to Volume II that enables the reader who is particularly interested in its topics to get full awareness of the general design of the book, of the method followed and of the main interpretative guidelines adopted in it. The second aim of this chapter is to illustrate how this volume relates to Volume I and in what aspects it differs from it. The book is accordingly described as a study of the relationships between the economics profession and fascism through a systematic analysis of all the institutional loci that governed the production, reproduction and circulation of the economic science. The approach followed is that of the “institutional history of economics”, which places at the centre of research the framework of material and immaterial institutions within which economics has developed both as scientific and professional knowledge and as a patrimony of notions and languages that circulate in the public sphere. In this framework, while Volume I analyses the creeping resistance, the defence of academic prerogatives, the strategies of adaptation, the compromises that the community of economists adopted in response to the totalitarian strategies of the fascist regime, Volume II puts under the lens those institutions in which the economists—or rather, groups of economists with well-defined characteristics—collaborated with the policies and organisations promoted and hegemonised by the fascist regime.