Douglas J. Forsyth

The crisis of liberal Italy : monetary and financial policy, 1914-1922

Part I. Giolittian Italy, 1901-1914: 1. The political economy of Giolittian Italy: the dilemmas of welfare, warfare and development Part II. World War I, August 1914-November 1918: 2. The collapse of the Italian fiscal system 3. The limits of state borrowing capacity 4. Monetary policy and the banking system 5. International accounts: Italys loss of financial independence Part III. The Post-War Crisis, November 1918-October 1922: 6. A difficult readjustment: the political economy of the Orlando and Nitti governments, November 1918-June 1920 7. From Giolitti to Mussolini: monetary and financial stabilisation, and political collapse Conclusion.

The peculiarities of Italo‐American relations in historical perspective

Abstract This article proposes an explanation for two peculiar features of the Italo‐American relationship during the Cold War: Italys extraordinary subservience to the United States on security policy and most other issues; and its toleration of an extraordinary level of US intervention in its domestic affairs. These peculiar features of the postwar relationship are all the more remarkable when one considers that prior to 1945 Italy entertained foreign policy ambitions greatly in excess of its means, whereas since 1945 it has played a far lesser role on the world stage than its economic importance, size and geographical position would appear to warrant. Fear of Communism, the author notes, may well have constituted a motive for American intervention, but it does not explain the willingness of Italians to tolerate that intervention. Despite differences between Liberal, Fascist and Republican Italy, the author argues that the peculiarities of the Cold War bilateral relationship have deep roots in the past...

Storia dell'IRI, vol. 1, Dalle origini al dopoguerra, 1933–1948

nineteenth century; they were wary of taxonomies that negated the role of individual responsibility in favour of psychiatric pathology. At first, the medical community rejected the tenets put forward by Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia, PA: F.A. Davis Company, 1897). Gynecologists, for example, saw love between women as the result of anatomical abnormalities. But later on ‘sexologists such as Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson recognised the important role Ellis had played’ (p. 216). Almost half of the text deals with four ‘case studies’, or profiles, of men who wrote about inversion: Cesare Lombroso, Pasquale Penta, Havelock Ellis, and William BlairBell. The choice of Lombroso over Paolo Mantegazza, one of the fathers of sexual medicine, seems particularly curious, and the depiction of the criminologist comes across as sketchy at best. Beccalossi writes that in 1863 Lombroso began ‘climbing the academic hierarchy at the University of Pavia’ after finishing his military service, during which he was posted in Calabria, and that in 1874 he became chair of legal medicine (pp. 119–120). In fact, Lombroso spent about three months in the south and ended his career in uniform at Treviso in 1866 following a campaign not so much fighting the Austrians for Venice as keeping the cholera epidemic at bay. He returned to civilian life as a non-tenured professor of psychiatry at Pavia. He made his name internationally as an expert on pellagra, or the sickness of smarting skin. His researches on the condition led to the most enduring scientific achievement of his life, but the controversies that ensued caused him to leave the academy to run the insane asylum at Pesaro. He came back to the University of Pavia, again as a probationary professor. The book is riddled with generalities and omissions of this sort.

La fine dell'uguaglianza

and references typical of the Communist Party. Catholic culture had to deal with an apparently non-ideological Italian version of the myth of the American Dream that was growing across the nation. It was widespread through communication channels very different from those traditionally associated with the construction of identity politics. Its success had important consequences, such as the strong attenuation of Catholic criticism towards individualism, materialism and capitalistic immorality associated with the protestant United States in the name of the defence against the common threat posed by communism. In the end, the anticommunists’ message could be built only as a set of symbolic references and a language that conveyed a negative image of communism. Yet, this was the only political expedient to bring together under one banner a diverse and, at times, contentious opposition. Defending the religious and moral traditions of the Italian people, the spirit of national belonging conceived as opposing an internal or external enemy, and western-style economic development interpreted according to the American example, became the cultural structure of the universe in which conservative public opinion operated. This essay by Andrea Mariuzzo is extremely interesting for all those who study the political, social and cultural history of Italy. The argument is presented in a complete and very informative analysis, and the book is ultimately an enjoyable read.