RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

PROFESSIONS AND POWER IN EARLY MODERN AND MODERN ITALY

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di BOLOGNA - DISCIPLINE STORICHE - ()

Research Unit Leader

Maria Malatesta

Description

Italian professions distinguish themselves through their capacity to conserve a strong political representation at both a national and local scale. The presence of Italian professionals in politics is evident in data collected over a long term, so that one could maintain that Italian professional power is still composed by two fundamental elements: a power that is intrinsic to the professions’ practice and a power implied in political or institutional posts that comes along with the practice of profession without substituting it.
The Research Unit of Bologna intends to carry out an exhaustive large-scale verification of this national peculiarity. Four inquiry lines will be articulated within this project. The first of them will focus on the Risorgimento as the crucial moment of the definition of the relations between the bourgeoisie of professionals and the construction of the political elite.
In fact, after the birth of the Italian Nation state, the existence of a national parliament allows the ruling class, composed primarily of professionals, to become the locus of the synthesis amongst the different national and local elites.
Through the transition from Italy in the age of Liberalism to Fascism, first, and then to the Republic, the transformation of the elites’ selection process takes place within a context in which the State builds its own political image through the party-institution. Even if the elites’ selection process transforms itself from a process based on old notables’ categories to political professionalism of the elites, the “liberal” professions afford to maintain a very significant representation.
In the Italian case, politics emerges as one of the fundamental tools of professional elites’ reproduction. This modality of reproduction comes alongside that still evident modality of the family to serve as the primary locus of the elaboration of strategies that make it possible to transfer the same intellectual profession through generations.
The degree of this rooting of the professional power in the society will be “sized” by two contributions, the first focussed on a study of juridical and accounting professions in the economic and financial sectors, the other, on the presence of professionals in public bodies’ boards of directors from the Unity to 1975.

The Risorgimento
The Unit of Bologna will provide for a research fellowship for a specialized scholar to whom a wide and very articulated research on the age of Risorgimento will be assigned.
Risorgimento will mean the liberal-national movement, from the very beginning of the Restauration to 1870. It will be analysed through a social history perspective in order to trace back the origin and status of hundreds of phisicians, lawyers, technicians who in different ways made their entrance into the patriotic memory, as well as the discursive modalities with which professions’ representatives legitimated themselves as spokesmen of the new national community. This reconstruction will be characterized by a national-scale precision never achieved before. The presence of professionals in places and events that marked the political process as well as the reasons of belonging to the different fronts – from the moderates to the democrats and socialists – will be identified through “classical” works of compilation (such as the Dictionary ed. by Rosi, the Dictionary ed. by Ercole, the "Dizionario biografico degli Italiani") cross-checked with regional dictionaries and more specific sources. The prosopographical analysis will allow us to attribute to professionals (as well as to categories that in that time were ambivalently defined as veterinarians and architects-artists) a quantitative and ascertained location, considering both the particular career of every single profession and their appearance as a collective presence from the general context of the bourgeoisie. Above all, particular attention will be paid to the forms of self-representation, traced back through contemporary biographies, autobiographical works, designations in academic elections, university affiliations, participation in administrative and consultative bodies and parliaments, intellectual and high skilled persons’ meetings, subscriptions and petitions.
“Network” methodology will be privileged in order to map those relationships in which professionals interacted with other social and political actors or that grew as national-scale relations based on a “body” identity.
The second aspect analysed will be that of the influence affected by professions in power, through an inquiry conducted on: restaured States; the Regno delle due Sicilie (Realm of the Two Sicilies) during the “nonimestre costituzionale”, constitutional monarchies of 1848, Democratic Republics of 1848-49, governments of the “Second Restauration”, and the Realm of Sardiny during the “decennial of preparation”. On one hand, we will follow the protagonists’ voice, expressed through academies and associations, local councils, and scientific congresses, a huge publishing activity that is still neglected. On the other hand, the concrete influences of those pressures in terms of legislative reforms, regulation of higher education, the creation of new institutions and consultative bodies, but also in terms of symbolic recognition (for instance the “cavalierato”). Moreover, the inquiry aims to trace back the cultural transfers that linked Italian professionals with each other and with the European context.
This research will be conducted on different typologies of sources: a) the works focussing on these topics published until 1871; b) “encyclopaedic” reviews before and after 1948; c) “specialized” reviews that flourished during the Risorgimento (of which, for the first time, an exhaustive map will be traced); d) memories and correspondences of some professionals-patriots; e) legislative repertoires of restaured States; f) publishing inherent to the projects of university reforms from 1816 to the mid of the 1850s.

Professions in Parliament from 1861 till today
The research will be conducted by Cammarano and Piretti. In order to study the world of parliamentarians as a class in itself it is not possible to set apart the study of a biographical/parliamentary biography of the individual representatives and of their background in the sense of both training and social class.
Tracing this kind of radiography of parliamentarians allows us to understand better the dynamics of ruling power. It allows us namely to understand how hierarchy is reconstructed again and again inside the Parliament, the same hierarchy that in the civil society selects the notables who rule the classical patronage relationships in 19th century society and who, in fact, have been put in a difficult position by the outburst of the Second World War that announced the transition from a politics of notables to a politics ruled by parties.
The study we want to lead intends to investigate the parliamentary class in the different phases of Italian history: the deputation of the Realm; those elects of the Fascist twenty-years; the professionalism of the “resistents”, related to the republican representation.
In reference to every single period, we will pay the highest attention to the following aspects: a) temporary aspect (the age of the single parliamentarian and the temporary shift in which he took up the parliamentary post); b) geographical aspect (province in which he was born and electoral college in which he won the election); c) role and importance assumed by the Parliament with respect to the other State bodies (inside the whole government and inside the Parliament itself [parliamentary commissions]); d)educational degree; e) prior profession. Clearly the multiplicity of professions considered will be very large and range between the classical juridical professions [lawyer, attorneys, notaries, magistrate] to the so-called free professions [engineers, doctors, architects, veterinaries, pharmacists, agronomists], to the professions related to education [teachers, secondary and high school professors, university professors], to the employees of different nature, to political professionals [trade-unionists, political cadres] and, finally, to the non-professionals who during the 19th century were defined by their parliamentary card as nobles or propertied person.
To interrogate these data-bases, in order to combine the different information contained in the parliamentary biographical profile, will allow us to underline some of the macro-phenomena in reference to three particular variables:
1.how the world of parliamentarians is changing over time, in reference to a) the professions practiced before the parliamentary career; b) the age and the kind of professions practiced;
2.how the world of parliamentarians under inquiry is changing from a geographical perspective, i.e. if there is a territorial connection between the profession of lawyer, engineer, etc. and the geographical area of origin of the parliamentarians;
3.possible (spatial and temporal) relations between the two phenomena.
Alongside this analysis, whose inquiry field is on the deputation of the Nation’s representatives, it would be relevant to approach some peripheral case-studies, in order to clarify over a long time period the existing relation between political professionalism in the central bodies of the State and political professionalism in the local governments, i.e. which directives we can highlight studying the relation between professions and territorial representation (municipality, province, and, only after, region), and if that presents elements of continuity-discontinuity with the study on the different phases of the national political history.
The research will be based prevalently on: 1) primary sources: parliamentarians’ card available at the Archivio storico della Camera dei deputati (historical archives of the house of representatives); official statistics; the «navicelle» [biographical dictionaries]containing the parliamentarians’ profiles; repertoires; 2) secondary sources: micro-historical studies; memoires.

Reproduction strategies
The research that will be developed by Malatesta, will be concerned with the issue of reproduction inside intellectual professions. The research methodology adopted refers to French sociological and historiographical studies as its privileged point of reference, so that it will be based on archival research on serial sources and statistical data. In particular, Malatesta will use the data-base referring to Bologna and the period between 1860 and 1940, created looking through the succession sources, the registers of phisicians, lawyers, engineers, the “Indicators of the city of Bologna”, the Anagrafe (register of births, marriages and deaths) of the Municipality of Bologna and several private archives of still practicing families of professionals.
The research will highlight which strategies, depending on the kind of profession and on the historical-political context, have been leading the social reproduction inside Bolognese families of lawyers, phisician, and engineers. This local sample, verified in a systematic way, will be compared with national data currently available in order to reassemble a long term perspective on the vexata quaestio of the “familism” as an ambivalent device of the Italian ruling class’ reproduction.

Professions, economy and public bodies
Cantagalli will investigate the role played by the juridical and accounting professions’ elites, constituted by business jurists, accountants, lawyers specialized in commercial law, in Italian economy and finance from the 1890s to the 1960s. This elite occupies roles of power thanks to the combination of skills and inter-organizational linkages. This becomes more evident in the case of accountants and commercial lawyers who did not enjoy the status of the traditional liberal professions and did not belong permanently to the notables’ cast.
For the professionals of the juridical and accounting disciplines the technical know-how and the social know-how appear to be closely intertwined. Their juridical, administrative and accounting counselling to private and public patronage, such as local governments, justice bodies, big companies, and banks, and the consequent relationship of trust that have been the tool for the construction of a capillary network within the economic and political world. Using its own professional knowledge, the juridical-accounting elite played the strategic role of the intermediary between two worlds, that of industry and finance and that of politics, that were often the expression of strategies and powers in an instable reciprocal balance.
A plurality of sources will be analysed, in order to make the economic, political, and social dynamics – in which juridical-accounting professionals were protagonists – emerge. First, archival sources will be consulted, among which municipal, charitable institutions, banks and private archives appear as fundamental. Moreover, the study of a huge array of printed sources, such as for instance professionals’ registers, specialized journals, city’s “Indicators”, the lists of town and province mayors and councillors, the lists of the city clubs and cultural associations’ members will be useful to trace the network, connections and bonds that juridical-accounting professionals have been able to intertwine.
To finalize the research, an analysis of some representative biographies is intended. Inquiries on individual cases will be conducted so that issues, otherwise eluded in an aggregated observational level, will be made to emerge fully.
Sofia and Giorgi’s research will aim to identify the professionals’ presence within the public bodies, and the role played there by them. It will be essentially based on the data-base constructed by Sofia on behalf of the Direzione generale dei beni archivistici del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali (Ministry of culture’s General department for the archives), “Enti pubblici e organismi affini, 1861-1975”, that collects the profiles of the around 44.000 institutions recognized as “public” by the Italian juridical system during the period considered.
Some issues will be put under particular attention: amongst them, there will be the professionals’ presence within the board of directors of national public bodies (economic public bodies, National Insurance corporations, etc.), as well as of the major public companies. Indeed, if it is true that the presence of professionals within the Parliament’s sessions tends to diminish as the liberal age came to an end, until now it has not been verified if this trend has been compensated by their presence in the financial circuits massively introduced by Fascism and was an indelible feature of the economic and political history of the republican age. In this case, the analysis should be focussed on those bodies classified by Cosi-Pugliese 1978, of an annual expense of beyond 51 billion liras, while in the case of the public companies, a “sample” inquiry on those under the Iri and Efim’s control should be hypothesized.