The Purging of Fascist Economists in Post-war Italy

This chapter analyses the purge processes of thirty-nine economists who were opened after the fall of the fascist regime by the provisional government of liberated Italy. The study is based on personal trial files kept at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, in the funds of the National Commission for the Purge of University Personnel. While documenting each personal case in the main details, the analysis focuses on the invariant elements of defensive strategies, considering the trial memory as a language of convention. In this way, it can be demonstrated that economists, in this complex cross-section of recent Italian history, experienced situations similar to those of all the disciplinary classes that were subject to trial, repeating defence strategies that ignored their specialist knowledge. What emerges is a conceptual framework that outlines the purge as a sort of rite of passage towards the new Republic, which in fact ended in a general acquittal or amnesty, which did not hinder the progress of the careers of even the economists most aligned with fascism. There were many economists who also adopted the rhetoric of fascism as a parenthesis, under the illusion that history could proceed without touching them. The paralysis of the purge highlight the fact that a democratic state can condemn acts of violence and discrimination, but not ideas professed with coherence and intellectual conviction. If acts of injustice were not committed, if indeed the accused helped or protected persecuted students and colleagues, membership of the National Fascist Party or the oath of allegiance could not in themselves be taken as reasons to condemn an academic.