“Breaking Down the Ivory Tower”: Economic Culture in the Italian Academies Under Fascism

This chapter examines the role of the economists in Italian academies during the period when Mussolini’s totalitarian regime attempted to transform them into propaganda bodies for the ideology and politics of fascism. The participation of economists in the academies of science, literature and the arts in the main Italian cities was an established fact since the nineteenth century. By welcoming eminent scientists from all disciplines, the academies created an élite within the élite of scholars and, in the case of Italy, they represented an instrument to strengthen the professional identity of the economists. Fascism intervened in this reality along two parallel lines: on the one hand, it tried to overcome the particularism typical of Italian culture, creating in 1929 a national cultural institute, the Reale Accademia d’Italia, and, on the other hand, it worked to mobilise the most eminent intellectuals in support of the new regime’s aims by somehow prising them from their relatively sheltered sanctums—“ivory towers” detached from the construction of a new national culture. Decisive steps were taken in 1934 when members of academies were required to swear an oath of allegiance, and in 1938, when the purge following the racial laws struck many Jew academy members, among whom 27 affiliates of the prestigious Academy of Lincei.