RICERCA ITALIANA     

PROFESSIONS AND POWER IN EARLY MODERN AND MODERN ITALY

Università degli Studi di Bologna

Abstract

The features of this project on Professions and power in early modern and modern Italy can be grouped in three key-elements:
1. Long term. Intellectual professions are conceptualized and analysed for the first time in an all-inclusive dimension, overcoming the traditional caesura between early modern and modern ages.
2. The concept of power and that of engagement. The long term analysis will be conducted through the concept of power as a heuristical tool: the power exercised by professions through their knowledge and that gained through conquered political and economic positions. The analysis read through the lens of power will be added to that through the lens of apathy and engagement.
3. Crossing limits. The project represents a chance for overcoming those disciplinary limits that produced a set of different and unconnected histories of free professions, of intellectual professions, of the public administration and of public employment, of bourgeoisies, of cultural institutions, of women. Assuming an historiographical perspective sensitive to sociological suggestions (and thus able to compare some aspects of occupations and professions), the project wants to focus attention not only on classical liberal professions, but also on some intellectual professions of functionary character and economic professions.

Within this general orientation, the Unit of Milan will undertake the study of the professions of the Ancient Regime. Relating to the transfer between modern and contemporary ages the original role of the professional colleges during the 18th century will be investigated, roles that re-emerged in new forms after the Napoleonic fracture and directed towards a process of modernization after the period of apparent deadlock of the Restauration. And it is, indeed, during the 19th century that the ancient colleges established the foundations of the evolution towards the modern professional orders. <br />In this sense, the frustration experienced by doctors, in particular, as well as those who exercised juridical professions in pre-unitary decades, due to the reduction of job opportunities and of the slowness of advancing careers, increased the opposition to Austrian domination, privileging their participation in the Risorgimento. The Unit of Milan will be concerned with profiles and respective competences that professions were assuming during the phase of manufacturing and industrial development, highlighting the Milanese peculiarities, first the absence of an university, that was established only in the fourth decade of the 19th century, and secondly, the delay of technical education.

The Unit of Florence as well, will conduct its research on a multiplicity of profiles and professional subjects, studied along a chronological arch that includes the age that stretches from the first half of 19th century grand-ducal Tuscany to the republican age. Themes approached are multiple: Knowledge and power – Analysis of the sites of the professionals’ training; power of professions – The attention will be concentrated on the study of social status, professional mobility, and the representative bodies of professions’; Spaces of (professional) power – Analysis of the location of professionals depending on the urban architectural configuration of Florence; in the service of public power - Analysis of the relationship amongst professions, central (Grand Duchy of Tuscany until 1859) and local (the Municipality of Florence) power; Professions and economic power – We will give an account of the close intertwining between professions and the economic and enterprise world in Florence between 1852 and 1972; Professions and political power – The presence of Tuscan professionals in local and national representative and governmental bodies will be investigated; In search of power – the “conquest of power” by women will be studied taking Tuscany as a case-study.

The Unit of Bologna will be concerned with professions in modern Italy at the national level, employing as an interpretative criteria a view able to compare the direct evidence of the power of the professions (at the political level and in relation to the economic world) with engagement or unconcerned action. The political choice made by professionals during the Risorgimento has primarily been ideal, meanwhile the professionals’ political engagement during the liberal and the republican ages depended often on the interest to gain or enforce notables’ positions.
Nevertheless, none of these behaviours appears as a consequence of a univocal orientation, but rather as the effect of a permanent intertwining between ideal and practical motivations. Familiar strategies of the hereditary transmission of professions as well, were directed to safeguard the cultural and economic capital but also satisfied the desire to leave an “immaterial heritage” perpetuating the profession’s values over generations. <<<

Principal Investigator

Maria Malatesta Università degli Studi di BOLOGNA

Research Objectives

The Program will provide for both common aims with the other units and aims inherent to specific research. Common aims are represented by the publishing of a collective volume dedicated to the history of professions between the early modern and modern ages; by organizing a conference, and by putting on of several expositions.
The volume will give room to research done at the national level and those elements that are consistent with and clarified by the local research on the crucial themes; the development of this analysis is of undoubted novelty and importance for the history of Italian elites (for instance, familism, women, etc.); and analyses of case-studies at the regional-local level that, compared with the national panorama, should contribute to both a more exhaustive and problematic understanding of the history of professions from the Ancient Regime’s crisis to the 21th century.
In the collective volume cartographic displays will be provided for: indeed they are essential to the “translation” of the quantitative results of opinion polls’ into an analytical map of the “Italy of professionals”. The preparation of the maps will be done at a second moment, after developing prosopographic databases that are expected to be filled in different phases of three units’ research consistently with the exigencies of the scientific representation.
In view of a consolidation of the relationship between academic research and the world of professionals the presentation of the collective book is expected also to be done at professional orders and the public offices of associations. These orders and associations, in fact, showed in the last years the interest and the need of recovering a scientific and not merely celebratory and erudite memory of their own past.
At the international conference the research results will be discussed and presented to the scholars’ community that, through multiple disciplinary approaches, attends to the more updated debate on the binomial categorization of professions/powers (this community is composed of sociologists, historians of institutions, historians of economy, historians of the early modern and modern ages).
Always in view of a wide and differentiated diffusion of the research results, a series of exhibitions will be organized at the headquarters of the three units’. The valorisation of each analysis will be constitutive of these exhibitions, and it will be done through a set of iconographies selected with the advice of archivists and other specialists.
The collective book will be accompanied by a remarkable series of results, published as books, essays, and sources editions inherent to the more specific research threads of each unit. Moreover, for those databases that appear particularly exhaustive and largely interesting, we hypothesize to publish them on-line or in specific digital editions.
Among the themes that will be privileged in this sense, we can already locate an articulated reconstruction—in the form of a collective volume—of the relationship between professions and powers in 19th and 20th century Tuscany; the results of the national enquiry on the age of Risorgimento and those of the research on Parliament; Lombard polytechnic culture between early modern and modern age; the crucial issues of history of university and history of legislation. <<<

First Results

Inside the international panorama of the study of professions, Italy occupies a respectable position. Since the 1980s, in our country as well, the research on professions took over. It has coincided, as it did it abroad, with the analysis of social composition of ruling elites [A.M. Rao, L’ordinamento e l’attività giudiziaria della Repubblica napoletana del 1799, Napoli 1974; A. Musi, Disciplinamento e figure professionali: articolazione della medicina nel Mezzogiorno spagnolo, Bologna, 1990] and of university students in the early modern and modern era [G.P. Brizzi e A. Romano (eds.), Studenti e dottori nelle università italiane: origini-XX secolo, Bologna 2000; M.T. Guerrini, Qui voluit in iure promoveri: i dottori in diritto nello Studio di Bologna 1501-1796, Bologna 2005]. Meanwhile studies on medical, engineering, and legal professions in early modern and modern ages were flourishing [F. Tacchi, Gli avvocati italiani dall’Unità alla Repubblica, Bologna 2002; L. Blanco (ed.), Amministrazione, formazione e professione: gli ingegneri in Italia tra Sette e Ottocento, Bologna 2000; M. Minesso, Tecnici e modernizzazione nel Veneto: la Scuola dell’Università di Padova e la professione dell’ingegnere 1806-1915, Padova 1992; A. Ferraresi, Stato, scienza, amministrazione, saperi: la formazione degli ingegneri in Piemonte dall’antico regime all’Unità, Bologna 2004; G. Vicarelli, Alle radici della politica sanitaria in Italia: salute e società da Crispi al fascismo, Bologna 1997] when still there was rarely any comparative approach [M. Malatesta, Professionisti e gentiluomini. Storia delle professioni nell’Europa contemporanea, Torino 2006]. For a long time a powerful coordination between research groups spread out between Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Naples, has been lacking, and in contrast to other countries, France in particular, there has not been any close relationship with sociology. The result has been a remarkable thematic and conceptual dispersion, effecting undoubtedly the related marginality of this specific research theme within our historiography.
That project set a very ambitious aim consisting in disaggregating and aggregating the research field of professions along new lines in order not only to give it the visibility it deserves and that until now had been denied to it somehow within our historiography, but also to open a communication with professional bodies. This final result will be pursued through a synergy between methodological strategies and concrete acts.

1. Connection amongst research schools. To create for the first time an organic connection between the research schools of Bologna, Milan, and Tuscany so that existing forces, research methodologies and available sources can be integrated.

2. To think professions as a whole. To set for the first time a research striving to conduct a long-term analysis of the theme of professions, overcoming in this way the caesura created at the moment of the creation of the nation State that is still at work today. The fact that the current professions do not have anything to do with those operating in the Napoleonic age or, even more, with the liberal arts of the Ancient Regime is undeniable. Nevertheless, as the neo-functionalist sociology affirms today [D. Sciulli, Continental sociology of professioins today:conceptual contributions, “Current Sociology”, vol. 53, n. 6, november 2005], there is an essence of professions that persist in time and space, and that constitutes their mark for identification within every context. Through the concept of “power” as fil rouge that connects the Lombard colleges in early modern era to our days, the project will highlight the long, but today forgotten, tradition of intellectual professions, and its “constitutional” function within the Italian society.

3. Local and national. To combine the level of the national discourse with improved or completely new analysis of local realities.

4. Publishing and diffusion of sources and tools. Members of the research group aim to finalize a set of tools useful to the knowledge and appreciation of particularly rich and important sources of funds and spread them diffusely at both the national and local level. The publishing of resources such as inventories, bibliographical catalogues, descriptions of funds will be made through an instrument whose potentiality as a point of reference for a large international and national community of scholars and amateurs has been already proved: the “Centro di ricerca sulla storia delle professioni” [Center for the History of the Professions] web-site, created at the Department of History (University of Bologna) and directed by Maria Malatesta (CEPROF:www.ceprof.unibo.it): inside it a special archive will be created for the presentation of these research products. In addition to these tools, interesting documents, as well as often forgotten or neglected already published books will be published or re-published on-line. Amongst other things, an on-line re-issue of the biographical dictionary Ignazio Cantù’s L’Italia scientifica contemporanea (Milan 1844) is already expected, a work that represents an extraordinary source for the analysis of the educational training, of choices and problems related to the exercise of professions, of social and cultural networks of professionals within Italian society in the age of Risorgimento.

5. Expanding array of professions. One of the most important results from the point of view of this project’s methodology is that of constructing an unitary discourse able to encompass professions interacting directly with the sphere of economy as well as the functionary professionals such as teachers and magistrates into the “classical” professions (lawyers, engineers and architects, physicians). The main originality concerns the first point. Until now, professions of economic disciplines (accountants, commercial lawyers, stoke-brokers, entrepreneurs, etc.) have been objects of distinct studies within specific disciplines (history of accounting, sociology, economic history, history of juridical system) but they keep being marginalized or even excluded from the studies of the history of professions. Our aim on the other hand is precisely that of analysing the contribution given by these professions to the economic development of the country and to the creation of networks of power.

6. Institutionalisation of the research field. The project should be concluded with a sort of institutionalisation of a particular research field, through determining fluid chronologic and thematic frames, able to re-define themselves consistently with new spurs and in that way to overcome the weaknesses engendered in the fragmentation of the themes.

7. History of professions and society: a bridge between academic research and professional bodies. The project aims to stimulate the relationship between academically trained historians and professional bodies. In recent years the demand for historical inquiry made by some (provincial and national) orders has sensitively grown, as has been proven by initiatives undertaken by some national orders and councils in order to increase studies on the history of every single profession. The project, finally, proposes to respond to this demand with a collective response able to encompass every single contribution and, instead, to present itself to professional bodies as an internally articulated research field endowed with a highly structured and recognizable profile: a point of reference for those who in the future will undertake new research on these issues. In order to build a relationship between academic historical research concerned with the history of professions and the world of professionals, the group wants to promote systematically the results of its research. The books and the exhibition, the latter conceived as a significant vector of communication of the group’s research will be presented to the local professional orders, national councils as well as to public bodies such as banks, State’s archives, Municipalities. In this way, the public visibility of the group’s work and results will be eased and a research within the humanities will be concretized and made operative within the society. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

To make the point about the state of historiography of professions is a very arduous duty. Indeed, it concerns contending with a production that, at the international level, has grown increasingly since the 1960s, incorporating a multiplicity of themes and disciplinary fields: the history of the organization of professions and their relationships with the State, the history of the sciences that constitutes their theoretical foundations, the history of institutions in which they have been trained, the composition of professional elites, their family culture and strategies, their presence in the urban context, and finally the power exercised in professional, political, and symbolic terms [M. Malatesta, Uno sguardo agli studi sulle professioni, in A. Varni (ed.), Storia delle professioni in Italia tra ‘800 e ‘900, Bologna 2002].
It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a single primary concept within a research field crisscrossed with and by other research fields. Power has been and still is one of the few concepts able to function as a main theme amongst different periods and as a heuristic tool of the research. It came along with the sociology of professions from its very beginning and is in its definitive rise. From Max Weber, the nexus between professions and power has been at the core of the debate in social sciences.
For Talcott Parsons, to whom is indebted the paternity of the functionalist approach to professions, these latter played a decisive role in the rise of middle classes in the United States. Their power consists in their possessing an esoteric knowledge as well as in their capacity to regulate themselves. Their position in the market is defined by their possession of these credentials, to which is added the possession of ethical values that render them competitive [T. Parsons, Professions, in “International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences”, New York 1968]. The Anglo-American critical sociology of the Seventies with neo-weberian overtones, continued to privilege the study of the “classical” professions, particularly medicine [P. Friedson, Professions and medicine: a study of the sociology of applied knowledge, New York 1970] to highlight their position of power with respect to society.
Differently from the Parsonsian approach, neo-weberians stressed the notion of interest and domination, rather than that of ethics and competence [M. Sarfatti Larson - A. Abbott, The system of the professions, Chicago 1988; W. Tousjin (ed.), Sociologia delle professioni, Bologna 1979]. The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu for his part denounced, beginning in 1968, the mechanisms of power reproduction of the elites implicit in the French school system [P. Bourdieu, La noblesse d’Etat, Paris 1989].
Historiography and historical sociology of professions born in the 1980s have been influenced by this sociological revisionism, inasmuch as they put the relationship between professions and elites at the core of their inquiry, a relationship considered as crucial in the analysis of the Ancient Regime’s as it is of contemporary societies [E. Brambilla, Genealogie del sapere: università, professioni giuridiche e nobiltà togata in Italia, XIII-XVII secolo, Milano 2005; W. Prest, The rise of the barrister: a social history of the English bar, 1590-1640, Oxford 1986; Ch. Charle, Les élites de la République, Paris 1987; L. Blanco (ed.), Amministrazione, formazione e professione. Gli ingegneri in Italia tra Sette e Ottocento, Bologna 2000]. The analysis of the relation between professions and power resulted turned out to be decisive in order to enlarge and renew the study of the totalitarian systems between the two World Wars and of the ways in which they rooted themselves in these societies [G. Turi (ed.), Libere professioni e fascismo, Milano 1994; K.H. Jarausch, Th unfree professions: German lawyers, teachers and engineers, 1900-1950, Oxford 1990].
In the last years new issues have arisen that dominate the international scene. First of all, the entry of women in professions from the pioneer phase in 19th century to the feminization in the Eighties of 20th century [F. Tacchi, Dall’esclusione all’inclusione: il lungo cammino delle laureate in giurisprudenza, “Società e storia” 2004; G. Vicarelli (ed.), Donne e professioni nell’Italia del Novecento, Bologna 2007; M. Malatesta, Professionisti e gentiluomini, Torino 2006, chapt. VI]. We need to mention the new current of French sociology current, author of the confluence of the sociology of engagement with the sociology of professions, focussing the analysis of professional agency in the notion of politics understood as a strong commitment emerging, in particular, when society undergoes a crisis [L. Israël, Robes noires, années sombres. Avocats et magistrats en résistance pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale, Paris 2005].
Nevertheless, many theoretical questions are still open, and a further extension of the enquiry field is needed. Historical and sociological research privileged a “high” understanding of the term “profession”, i.e. that of skilled and highly-educated occupations endowed, from the Middle Ages, with a doctoral title and special statutes, such as doctors and lawyers in the English case or professionals who gained through the centuries a status - that is parallel to that of the oldest professions (notaries, engineers etc.) - and endowed with powers of self-government. Most of the time, it is this particular, originally medieval, model that is at the core of the interest of the study of professional power over both society and the political system, because of those professions’ historical capacity to be represented within the governmental bodies. Other, less important professions or professions characterized by a status of civil servant, remain in the dark, i.e. those professions that are not without difficulties paralleled by sociology of the great intellectual professions, i.e. those endowed with the status of “free” professions. These minor or functionary professions have themselves exercised, sometimes very great power, as in the case of magistrates, other times more limited, such as the case with teachers, but they are still quite important in the structuring of society. Particularly, it is this “second universe” of professions to which a new attention ought to be paid in order to reconceptualise the entire field of professions welcoming and relocating the high number of scattered studies already produced. <<<