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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>