Нов български университет

Andrea Mariuzzo

 

 

Introduction: Some notes on Einaudi’s youth and education

The name of the Italian-American political scientist Mario Einaudi[1] is not well-known in intellectual and historical studies, even though someone should know that the Cornell University Center for International Studies, in Ithaca, N.Y., is entitled to him. Mario Einaudi’s name is not even famous in Italy, even though his father, Luigi, was probably the most important twentieth-century Italian economist (and the first president of the Italian republic), and his younger brother Giulio founded a major publishing house, becoming one of the most significant left liberal intellectuals. So, the name of Mario Einaudi seems to have been somewhat obscured by his father’s and brother’s popularity.

Mario Einaudi was born on September 8th, 1904, in Turin, and he graduated in Law in 1927 at the local university, defending a thesis on the relation between history and theory in Edmund Burke. His supervisor was Gioele Solari, professor in Philosophy of Law, probably the most important Italian specialist in Eighteenth-century political thought. More in general, in the first decades of the twentieth century in Turin, and mostly in the faculty of Law of its University, the most lively political debate about the destiny of Italy in the new century flourished. Some of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy, such as Palmiro Togliatti, Antonio Gramsci and Angelo Tasca, were living there as university students, lecturers and journalists, while Piero Gobetti, the author of the most penetrating reflections of post-world war Italian situation[2], was Einaudi’s good friend ad scholl-fellow. All these young political activists and thinkers had been influenced by the most innovating reflections in European political theory at that time, since both Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, two of the founders of the elite theory in the analysis of ruling classes’ composition, had a teaching post at Turin, as well as Robert Michels, the most outstanding scholar of the oligarchical effects of the development of modern party organizations and Mario Einaudi’s father-in-law from 1933[3]. Right after the end of World War I, Turin was also the center of Italian reception of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive internationalism[4]: since 1914, Luigi Einaudi supported Italian intervention in the conflict along with Western democracies, and Mario could remember when, in 1919, he could meet Wilson with his father when he visited the University of Turin during his Italian trip[5].

Moreover, during his university studies Mario Einaudi could have an unusual (at that time) international experience. While the overwhelming majority of promising students in social thought were completing their training in Germany, in 1926-27 Einaudi finished his dissertation on Edmund Burke[6] at the London School of Economics, attending Harold Laski’s courses and absorbing his pluralist method of analysis for the relationship between society and political dimension[7]. Afterwards, from 1927 to 1929, he worked between Harvard and the Library of Congress in Washington, through a Rockefeller Foundation junior grant, taking advantage of the increasing collaboration between the New York philantropic institution and his father, at that time one of its most authoritative European advisers[8].

In conclusion, Mario Einaudi grew up and shaped his intellectual orientations in some the best cultural environments to develop the most advanced conceptual tools for political analysis, and through a secure reference to the most relevant international liberal and democratic trends in educated public opinion. For this reason, unlike almost all the Italian intellectual of his generation, he could avoid to be influenced by the powerful figure of Benedetto Croce and his effort to promote the revival of idealist approaches in history and social thought which characterized Italian culture in the early Twentieth century; following his father’s example, Einaudi would always be aware of the international development of social sciences based on the methods and theories matured whitin late-Nineteenth-century positivist trends.

Furthermore, even though several intellectuals in the 1920’s Turin (such as Robert Michels himself) considered the rising Fascist regime an adequate solution for Italian crisis, Mario Einaudi never shared such opinions: Since the very beginning of the regime, he was in touch with the underground liberal opposition to fascism which was active among the students of Turin; later, in London, he cooperated with some influential émigrés, such as don Luigi Sturzo and Gaetano Salvemini, and could become acquainted with their activity for the circulation of underground publications in Italy, and their interventions in the international debate with English books and articles regarding the actual political, social and cultural situation of Italy under Mussolini’s regime. Even Einaudi’s family would always be clearly hostile to fascism: his father Luigi, for instance, had to stop his contribution to the most important Italian newspapers and scholarly journals, while Mario’s younger brothers were arrested more than once by Italian political police[9].

In spite of this, with the support of his father-in-law Michels Mario Einaudi could find a teaching position at the University of Messina; however, he refused to enter the Fascist National Party as it was required for all young Italian university instructors, and in 1933 the close relation he could establish with the Rockefeller Foundation during his fellowship proved to be essential for his future life and career. In fact, in that year he definitely emigrated to the United States, being one of the few Italians entering the program of assistance for European refugee scholars established by the Rockefeller Foundation in collaboration with the New School for Social Research[10]. He would actually try to enter the institution hosting Alvin Johnson’s ‘University in Exile’ repeatedly, but Italian political police threatened retaliation against his family in case he began to work for such an outspoken anti-fascist institution[11]. Therefore, Einaudi would be instructor of Government at Havard until 1937, ant later assistant professor of History of Political Thought at a less ‘comprimised’ institution, such as Fordham, the Jesuit University in New York.

 

Mario Einaudi’s life and thought in the United States between World War II and the Cold War

Einaudi’s story shows that he represented an unusual kind of Italian inter-war political émigré[12]: in general, Italian twentieth-century exiles in France, Britain and the US (not to mention the Communist leaders living in the Soviet Union) were high- o medium-level anti-fascist political activists or pre-fascist political personalities, while Einaudi was mostly an academic intellectual, and he came to the United States to continue his teaching and research career, in an environment assuring the intellectual freedom Fascist Italy had almost completely denied since the end of the 1920’s. Not by chance, Einaudi would not come back to his native country after the War, becoming an American citizen and pursuing his academic activity at Fordham and, from 1945 until his retirement in the early 1970’s, at Cornell.

By and large, Einaudi rapidly and fully integrated whitin American intelletcual system, as his opinions on American political development in the Thirties can easily show. Since his very first articles written from America for his father’s journal La Cultura, Einaudi became an enthusiast for the New Deal, feeling it was the proof that a country was achieving equal economic redistribution and social justice saving democratic institutions and free private economic initiative. Even more than individualism, for him the essence of the American way of life was represented by the common sense of opportunity, the equality of any person in his/her social starting point, the chance everyone had to improve their social conditions through talent and application. Restoring such conditions after the shock of 1929, Roosevelt was to be considered as the heir of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln and Wilson[13]. Such positive attitude can be explain taking in consideration some different reasons: firstly, at that time liberal and demcoratic intellectuals who supported Roosevelt’s action were much more willing to involve foreign scholars in their debates and political project; than conservative milieus; furthermore, the atmosphere of the New Deal was characterized by a strong confidence in the importance of a good knowledge of social and political dynamics for the realization of good policies, and a social researcher could find wide consideration and important professional gratifications; finally, comparing the American reaction to economic crisis with what happened in Italy, Germany and Russia, Einaudi found that the United States could become an example, for the whole Western World, of establishment of new social economic relations and preservation of freedom.

During the Second World War, Einaudi’s political options would strongly influence his profile of scholar. He became an American citizen in early 1941, and since the end of the previous year he could find a much more visible position in American political debate. At that time don Luigi Sturzo, one of the most renowned European anti-fascist opinion leaders and one of the most authoritative speakers of democratic Catholicism, emograted from London to the United States; Einaudi had met Sturzo in Britain more than ten year before, had remained in thouch with him during the 1930’s and in the US soon became his close collaborator, introducing him into the most important American ‘think tanks’ for international affairs and taking advantage of the new situation to rapidly acquire reliability in federal warfare offices as one of the best prepared expert in Italian political and economic matters.

Therefore, in 1944 Einaudi could organize with the Office for War Information the translation and the distribution all over Italy (with the support of the publishing house directed by his brother[14]) of some relevant American writings, such as TVA: Democracy on a March, written by the director of Tennessee Valley Authority David Lilienthal[15], and other books written by influential members of the establishment of Roosevelt administration[16]. From 1943 Einaudi also became a collaborator of American war institutions at different levels: he was instructor at Fordham at Cornell for future American officers in European occupied countries within the Army Specialized Training Program[17], and prepared memoranda on Italian post-fascist transition for the Council of Foreign Relations and the Economic Commission of the State Department[18].

Such dedication to the study of current political problems during the World War would not be a short parenthesis of civil commitment among a lif of studies focused on Eighteenth-century classic political thought: after his war courses, Cornell hired Einaudi as professor of Comparative Governments and Political Theory in 1945, and he would keep on teaching and doing research on contemporary European political systems for almost thirty years. In a moment when a civil engagement seemed to be requested by the importance of the events, Mario Einaudi felt he could not separate the two main aspects of political science (its theoretical dimension and the effort to promote the positive development of concrete reality)[19], and tried to plan a research approach concerning the explaination and the evaluation of current European political and economic situation. Such feeling would not disappear after the end of American commitment in the European front of the World War: on the one hand, after the victory the United States would cooperate with European countries for a sound moral and material recovery; on the other hand, right after the Axis powers surrendered the US would be involved in a new vital competition.

 

 

The French-Italian Inquiry

In the postwar context, characterized by the passage from the World War great alliances to cold-war international struggles, Einaudi elaborated his most mature research project, the French-Italian Inquiry. He proposed the idea for a collection and critical elaboration of the updated information on Italian and French political and economic situation to his contacts at the top level of Rockefeller Foundation in mid-1948, using the following, significant words:

 

Amidst the great, and justified, attention paid to contemporary Russian and German political and economic problems, little attention has been given to the problems of France and italy. Yet this area, ambracing more than 90,000,000 people, is emerging as one of the more sensitive and important European sectors. Far-reaching constitutional, political and economic changes have occurred, and are occurring, often along strikingly similar lines. Knowledge of these changes and of their meaning would add significantly to our understanding of the times in which we live.

From the American point of view, the importance of the two countries has been greatly increased by the Marshall Plan. A serious study of some of the major recent developments in the two countries hase become necessary, for in more than one way France and Italy are at the core of that Western European tradition, whose maintenance has become one of the primary purposes of American policy. […]

Viewed as a whole, the inquiry would not be purely constitutional, or political, or economic, but would attempt to cut across these three fields and to highlight what is important in each of them form the general point of view of the future of the two countries and of their relationship to the problems and the broad stream of Europe as a whole. […]

Of the several problems discussed above, those relating to political parties and nationalization are to be taken up first. The choice is dictated chiefly by the fact that the issues concerning the structure and proframs of political parties and management of nationalized industries have ripened to a point which makes them the obvious initial targets of the proposed inquiry. […]

Professor Einaudi is particularly anxious to stress that the research assistance sought from Europe is conceived in a sense broader than the usual one of help given in the assemblance of data. One of its main purposes would be the establishment of a fruitful, possibly permanent, collaboration with institutions and young scholars of France and Italy. In obtaining from a number of competent European scholars and publicists a series of contributions, the inquiry will acquire the benefit of a ‘native’ feeling for the problems considered. A careful selection of the individuals of the various areas is probably not possible except as a result of personal contacts to be establishedby Mr. Einaudi next summer. […]

While it is difficult to give at this point too precise an indication of the names of the correspondents and of the specific contribution of research among them, it is nvertheless possible even now to list a few names and to indicate what some of the fields are in which the support of the research correspondents could be sought.

In France Mr. Einaudi would seek the assistance of François Goguel, a member of the staff of the Council of the Republicone of the main contributors to Esprit, and author of a history of French political parties under the Third Republic. M. Goguel is a member of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques […], a group with which a profitable collaboration could be established. […]

In Italy it is planned to call upon the help of such persons as Dossetti (a leader of the left wing of the Christian-Democratic party, a distinguished jurist and scholar), Gerbi (a political scientist and economist of outstanding merit, politically independent), Garosci (a Socialist, a leading member of the late Action Party, journalist and historian).

These are all young men who have participated directly in the events of our times and who are yet sufficiently independent to be able to appraise critically and objectively the issues about which they would be asked to write. The correspondents mentioned could undoubtedly offer the most capable collaboration in the study of nationalization, political parties, and press.[20]

 

The problems expressed in Einaudi’s project statements fully explain the exent of the changes in American and international situation between 1945 and 1948, and show to what degree the Italian-American political scientist could grasp them. Right before that period, by working at one of the most important projects for undergraduate textbooks in comparative politics edited by the German-American researcher Fritz Morstein-Marx with the collaboration of the most authoritative academics from a number of American universities, Einaudi had become clearly conscious of the crucial role played by European émigré scholars in the shaping of American university political teaching from the interwar period, and found that while in the Thirties a number of central-European intellectuals could provide a relevant set of updated data and reflections on Russian and German current situation the knowledge of other main countries of continental Europe was still very weak, since the French and Italian colonies were much smaller and in general not interested in the achievement of permanent positions[21]. Such distorted image of European situation was not suitable for the management of the impressive American intervention on Old Continent planned by the European Recovery Project.

Therefore, in 1948 Einaudi propose to the Rockefeller Foundation to involve young Italian and French intellectuals in American debates on European politics, and between 1949 and 1955 could direct the publication of a series of collective volumes dealing with the main political and ideal trends of post-war Italy and France (especially communism and christian democracy), some aspects of state intervention in economic life (one of the book would be devoted to a comparison of French, Italian and British nationalization policies) and the new democratic constitutional systems, supported by European collaborators such as the former leader of the anti-fascist organization ‘Giustice and Liberty’ Aldo Garosci, Jean-Marie Domenach, member of the editorial board of Esprit, François Goguel and Maurice Duverger, leading figures of the new generation of French political scientists, and the two economists Ernesto Rossi and Maurice Byé[22].

For those who have worked on the French-Italian Inquiry so far, Einaudi is almost exclusively the editor of Communism in Western Europe, the first book of the series, published by Cornell University Press at the end of 1951[23]. In fact, as the first intervention in an overall analysis of Italian and French situation, this book (and specifically Einaudi’s essay in it) introduced issues regarding the general vision of European situation Einaudi matured since the World war. Furthermore, much more than other interventions planned within the French-Italian Inquiry, the essays in Communism in Western Europe dealt with a topic (the American attitude toward communist expansion) that was crucial in political debate in the years around 1950. As I already mentioned, Communism in Western Europe was composed by three distinct essays: Garosci and Domenach dealt with the Communist Party history, institutional composition and social presence in their own countries, while Einaudi introduced their essays with an overall analysis regarding the current situation of the two parties. This general essay was basically planned to update Garosci’s and Domenach’s papers: the works written by Einaudi’s European collaborators were ready in December 1949-January 1950[24], but from the beginning of 1950 to the end of 1951, many things happened. I am not only talking about French national elections and Italian local elections, whose results had to be exposed to readers; in the months when Communism in Western Europe was elaborated and published crucial changes occurred in the attitude of American public opinion toward the problem of Communism itself.

In the very first period of cold-war struggle, American intervention in Europe was mostly focused on the support of economic and productive recovery and on the guarantee of growing living standards. The economic relief and recovery programs planned and realized by the American government for Europe were founded on the idea that any revolutionary turmoil could be avoided avoiding social discontent and pursuing a stable social modernization, according to New Deal’s trends Einaudi shared with the first Truman administration. With the breakout of the war in Korea in mid-1950, but even more significantly after the communist victory in China in 1949, and with the renovation of the fear for the ‘Red Scare’ within national institutions interpreted by senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and their anti-communist crusade, this approach seemed to be outdated toward the new situation. From the American point of view, the struggle against communism in Europe had become part of a worldwide conflict whose main fronts were elsewhere, a conflict that had to be fought according to military and strategic schemes, even though Soviet-American ‘cold war’ was  not (at least not yet) a traditional military conflict.

In the intellectual debate, the most extreme and explicit expression of this military-strategic interpretation of the cold war in that period was the former trotzkist (then conservative) political theorist James Burnham, author of The Struggle for the World in 1947[25] and of The Coming Defeat of Communism in 1950[26], where he stated after the experience of total war in the early Forties it was not possible to employ traditional criteria distinguishing war and peace periods, soldiers and civilians. In the last period of Truman administration and at the beginning of Eisenhower’s presidency, such attitudes seemed to widespread among government and administration officers, and it had consequences on the US agenda for Europe: the second part of the European Recovery Program became a rearmament contribution for Western European countries; the creation of common defense structures became a priority of any other form on Western European integration; between 1950 and 1952 the Department of State elaborated plans for the exclusion of communist party members from public administration and for the exclusion of communist trade union organizations from social negotiations in European countries[27].

Toward the development of such trends, in his 1951 intervention on Western European Communism, Mario Einaudi expressed an apparently ambiguous position, somehow influenced by the way Arthur Schlesinger jr. reshaped liberal tradition toward cold-war challenges, in his 1949 The Vital Center[28]: «To defeat the communist conspiracy for the conquest of the world, the unyielding resistance and the military might […] are the essence. […] But the fact remains that the elimination of communism as a fifth column in Western Europe does not eliminate the political and social problem posed by communism. Communism as a military threat may be counterbalanced by military strength […]. But the social, economic and political issues remain and with them the impressive scope of Communist power to act as a disintegrating and corrupting element within our society»[29].

For its positions, Einaudi’s essay in Communism in Western Europe has generally been considered as a mere reproposition of the ‘New Dealist’ interpretation of Italian and French communism as an outcome of poverty and social and economic bacwardness, opposed to the wider and wider success met by the strategic-military interpretations of Bolshevik danger proposed by conservative political theorists. It is undoubtedly true, at least in part. However, Einaudi’s effort should find a more careful evaluation, which takes in account the whole series as a unitary project. As any liberal intellectual, Einaudi thought the success of European communism was the symptom of a social pathology, but in order to understand their inner dynamics of development he tried to place western communist parties in the context of the political systems in which they operated. For this reason, Einaudi was one of the first scholars in the United States to present and apply some concepts and categories elaborated by Maurice Duverger in Les Partis Politiques[30]. More specifically, Einaudi elaborated an interesting operational definition of ‘mass party’ which fitted the specific situations he was anaysing. From this point of view, it can be useful to consider the presentation of the most recent European contributions in the study of political parties Einaudi gave at the 1953 Annual meeting of the American Political Science Association,

 

One can get a step close to a useful definition of mass parties by pointing out that often we think of mass parties ad being those whose membership and popular support are to a large extent draw from those social groups which until the beginning of the twentieth century, or until the advent of the universal suffrage, were either cut off from political life or regulated to insignificant participation. […] Under this definition the communist and some christian democratic parties would qualify […].

Another useful concept in the definition of mass parties is undoubtedly that of the military discipline imposed upon party members […] [and] the party’s elected representatives. […] This is undoubtedly one of the important developments which have altered the nature of parliamentary government by transferring parliamentary and constitutional responsibilities to extra-parliamentary and extra-constitutional bodies. The phenomenon is associated with the rise of socialist and communist and in some countries of christian democratic parties.[31]

 

Therefore, for Einaudi mass integration parties were not simply characterized by a wide electoral success or social presence: they rather collected and organized sectors of society and public opinion originally excluded from state institutional life, such as the working class, or the catholic social movements, in countries where institutional modernization occurred within a struggle against the church. Postwar mass democracy had brought such parties to power, although they had previously developed outside of the ‘legal’ institutional framework, imposing to their militants their own values and ideal points of reference and a strong mutual fidelity. Such closed and rigidly organized forces inevitably employed state institutions as tools for their own advantage. The best example was the running of nationalized enterprise: Einaudi and his collaborators showed that the Italian and French experiments for the establishment of a state-owned economic sector substantially failed any achievement of positive economic results, for hiring policies and managerial criteria were rather oriented to the enforcement of a strong presence and control of party personnel.

In conclusion, even more than different political opinions, by his work Einaudi tried to propose to American scholarly debate of the Fifties a different perspective for social analysis: in a moment when the model of totalitarianism looked like the most effective way to take in consideration any aspect of Communist phenomenon in the world[32], he decided to take in consideration the Italian and French Communist parties as what they really were, that is to say, mass parties meeting a good electoral success and developing a deep social presence in democratic and competitive political arenas; while American political science was being almost completely changed by the huge diffusion of the behavioral sciences founded on a study of individual patterns of choice and behavior and a major role played by prerational attitudes[33], Einaudi decided to look at the European tradition of studies on political parties ad social and collective actors, taking in consideration the latest developments of Duverger’s proposal and his early critics[34] in the light of the classic critical approach to organized parties expressed at the beginning of the Twentieth century by Michels’ Political Parties[35]; unlike his European theoretical models, looking for universal ‘iron laws’ for the birth and development of modern parties in any context and political system, Einaudi used his analytical framework as an ‘operational tool’ whose validity was limited to the area considered in his inquiry. This attitute may explain why the 1953 methodological paper would never be published, and Einaudi would limited his work to a description of political and social dynamics of some relevant European national communities. During his career, Einaudi would never believe in the creation of a proper ‘political science’ founded on fixed social laws, and would interpret his discipline as Government, that is to say, as a description an comprehension of concrete political facts in order to elaborate the best policy[36].

Only after this complex comparison with Anglo-Saxon democracy, managed on rigorous intellectual bases, Einaudi realized that Italian and French backwardness was social and political as well as economic. Higher living standards were not independent of access to political participation, full exercise of rights and education to responsibility and autonomous choice; the difficult economic development was essentially due to a retarded and imperfect inclusion of masses into democratic institution, and in general to the confusion between state institutions and private interests; Communist parties were successful because they could propose themselves as the only soundly organized force of opposition to the traditional establishment. Therefore, for Einaudi the American efforts to promote the economic integration of Western Europe within the Marshall Plan were to be significantly re-oriented to the creation of a wide area of free trade and free modern development by a regulation in the composition of prices of raw materials and the promotion of new modern plants. The establishment of super-national agencies for economic regulation and intervention would finally reduce state power of social intervention, definitely weakening the relavance of  traditional nation-based dominant positions distorting the action of continental governments and public institutions.

 

Mario Einaudi and the transfert of American academic model in Europe

In the review of Communism in Western Europe presented on International Affairs, the scholarly journal published with the support of British Foreign Ministry, Denis Healey, at that time a young Labour party cadre and Councilor of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, expressed a strongly positive opinion of Garosci’s and Domenach’s essays, valued as precious and informed introductions to communist party life in Italy and France for a foreign readership, but ended:

 

Their precision and objectivity contrast strongly with the […] generalizations of the introduction by Mario Einaudi […]. It is not helpful to urge that Communism would be weaker in France and Italy if Frenchmen and Italians were more like Englishmen and Americans[37].

 

Such example, choosen within a text written by one of the harshest British cold warriors in the pro-Atlantic wing of the Labour Party, is probably the most outspoken critic of Einaudi’s approach to the problems of Cold-War Europe. The following volumes of the series, for instance, were more warmly welcomed by the scholarly readership, probably because a complete reconstruction of European Christian-Democratic movements or a comparison bertween different forms of pulbic intervention in the economic life of several industrialized countries were much less easy to find on the ‘market of ideas’ than an overall analysis of the communist problem. However, it could fully express what other readers and less negative reviewers thought reading the Inquiry, especially in Western government offices.  In his attempt to offer to the government of Washington a more advanced overview of Italian and French social dynamics, Mario Einaudi would not be immediately successful: the US officials who managed Euro-American relations ‘on the field’ could not elaborate such a radical program of long-range reform of the Continent, having to achieve immediate results in the consolidation of anti-communist coalitions; the years of the ‘roll back’ were not a good moment for any improvement of ‘new dealist’ approach to international policy.

Anyway, cold-war American foreign policy also had a cultural dimension conducted by what has been recently defined a «state-private network»[38], and though failing in influencing the general orientations of Washington Department of State Einaudi played a relevant role in developing Euro-American intellectual and academic exchanges. According to his suggestions the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the major agencies for the promotion of research and advanced training in the world, employed a relevant part of its funding budget in the re-foundation of Political Science in Italy[39].

In the carrying out of the Italian part of his Inquiry, Einaudi cooperated as economists, journalists and highly edutcated political activists, since Fascism had wiped out the earlier advanced tradition in political studies. After 1945, the Rockefeller Foundation had concluded its specific programs of financial support of individuals and research projects, and has focused its efforts in developing areas such as East Asia and Latin America; however, Einaudi rapidly understood that the recreation of an academic tradition in Political Science in Italy under American influence would be a great chance for Rockefeller’s cultural policy, and during the Fifties and the Sixties (until his retirement in 1972) he detected some Italian research groups who definitely deserved to be supported for the potentially outstanding level of their intellectual profiles, and helped establish single funding agreements between the foundation and two newly instituted Italian university multidisciplinary research centers in politics: the Institute for Political Studies in Turin, directed by Norberto Bobbio, and the Faculty of Political Sciences in Florence, whose main contact for Rockefeller officers would be Giovanni Sartori. Their research projects would be prepared with the assistance of Einaudi himself and other American specialists, and their students and graduates would spend study and training periods in the best American colleges[40].

In the end, in 1971, when the first permanent university teaching post in Political Science was instituted in Italy, almost all the Italian scholars devoted to such field had received an American training and their approach was almost entirely based on the acceptance of some institutional and social parameters (privilege for individual and rational choice in the analysis of political behavior, check and balances, two-party system, limits to government’s action, stability, social cooperation, ect.) which could be decected through a favorable comparison of the situation of the United States with the European one. In conclusion, such process of development of Political Science in Italy constituted a major vehicle for the diffusion a soft, yet clear, ‘Atlantic’ political identity among relevant sectors of Italian intellectuals and academics, that is to say, into environments whose relationship with society was strongly shaped in those years by Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and where the influence of leftist anti-americanism was significant[41].

 

Conclusions

At the end of my esposition of Mario Einaudi’s biographical notes, let me explain why I decided to focus my studies on an almos unknown (at least so far) single figure of intellectual whose influence in Twentieth-century political thought has not been decisive. The first reason can be expressed by the following quotation:

 

I propose to concentrate on his professional activities with the aim of using them as a window to the world(s) in which he operated. The hope is to discover how the individual and the context in which he worked interacted and mutually influenced one another. The advantage of this approach would seem to be that the primary focus is not on the inner workings and psychology of Stone’s mind, but in the milieu in which he was an actor. At the same time, and given the complexity of the environment, this limited ‘biographical’ approach lessens the danger of producing a study so multi-layered and so opaque that it is difficult for the reader to see the wood for the trees. The professional and intellectual trajectory of the individual provides the thread along which the analysis proceed.[42]

 

Volker R. Berghahn used these words to present his project of a biography of Shepard Stone, Director of International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1952 to 1967 and later leader of other important international cultural institutions. Probably, Mario Einaudi did not directly play the same role of Stone’s in American and world culture, but his commitment in several fields and contexts of cultural organization and in scientific development allows to understand the complex relations between cultural institutions and international politics in its deepest mechanisms, getting out from any form of general considerations.

Moreover, the choice of a biographical study on Einaudi can be an important test for a more advanced approach to intellectual history: until little time ago, this field of studies was interpreted as a form of history of the creation and diffusion of ideas and social doctrines; at this time, the development of the history of intellectual institutions and the application of some aspects of sociology of organizations and social history to the academic enviroments is slowly changing intellectual history in a history of academic and intellectual careers[43]; from this point of view, a reconstruction of Einaudi’s professional life can be an ideal case study. Through the spectrum of his biographical trajectory, the ideas of ‘internationalization’ and ‘denationalization’ of science and academic culture acquire a more concrete aspect, and such phenomenon looks like less ‘modern’ than many scholars who lack in historical perspective think.

moreover, within a conference devoted to the relation between intellectuals and politics, the example of Mario Einaudi can give a significant original contribution. In fact, excluding a temporary and non decisive support to Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign in 1956[44], Einaudi’s figure did not correspond to the traditional model of engagé intellectual, whose political commitment often obscures or at least deeply influences any reflection on social phenomena. On the contrary, his life can represent the example of a new model of interaction between intellectual research and politics, showing how and to what degree for several professional intellectuals political opinions and preferences can be influenced by the results of their studies.

 

 

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