Stuart Woolf

Statistics and the Modern State

“Lies, damned lies,” the possibly apocryphal comment of a British political leader on statistics about the unemployment consequences of his economic policy in the 1920s, sums up the impotent, frustrated acceptance of the ubiquitous presence of this tool of modern administration. We have slipped into living with statistics as we have with television or computers, even into accepting the assertions of value-free neutrality of its more brash exponents. The study of statistics is integral to the development of the modern state and modern society. Hence the relative paucity of studies of how statistics became what they are today is somewhat surprising, not least because its history offers insights into so many aspects of modern life, from the self-perception of society to the internal history of the exact and medical sciences, from the relationship between state and citizen to the social implications of the production of knowledge.

Europe and its Historians

Histories of Europe have a long genealogy, whose origins can probably be found in the defence of Christian Europe, above all in humanist circles, against the threat of Muslim Ottoman expansion.1 In the course of the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic years, earlier elements that were regarded as characterising all Europe crystallised into a sense common to European elites – described as ‘civilisation’– of the distinctiveness and superiority of Europeans and Europe from all other regions of the world. If we analyse what was understood by this ‘idea of Europe’, as I have argued elsewhere, we can identify a number of constituent elements of Europe’s progress that, for their authors, explain its distinctiveness, particularly when compared with the historical experiences or contemporary condition of states and societies elsewhere in the world.2 These elements can be summarised as: (i) a secular cultural tradition, originating in classical antiquity, that revived (after the ‘barbarian’ interlude) with the Renaissance and culminated in contemporary France; (ii) individual entrepreneurship as the motor of European economic dynamism and strength; (iii) liberty as the defining quality of governance; (iv) the balance of power between a limited number of leading states; and (v) civilised manners, or civilites, understood (in Norbert Elias’s sense3) as publicly accepted regulatory mechanisms of the forms of social relationships. The Restoration, as Federico Chabod has clarified, extended this corpus of values attributed to Europe through a recovery of the Middle Ages and Christianity.4 ‘Civilisation’, a noun that entered French and English usage in the 1760s,5 was synonymous with Europe, as was ‘progress’. The two words incorporated the different

On University Reform in Italy: Contradictions and Power Relations in Structure and Function

Recent attempts at universityreform in Italy have proved dismal in thecontext of higher education policy in WesternEurope. The pervasive power of academicmandarins, technocratic methods of reform, andthe recurrent expectations that import offoreign models will resolve contradictions thatare deeply rooted in Italian power relations,provide some insight into the problem.

Napoleon and Europe revisited

This article outlines the main themes of my book Napoleons Integration of Europe (1991). Napoleonic France and Europe constituted an inseparable whole, through the ambitions of the French political class to impose an administrative prism of rational, modernising reforms on what were perceived as less developed societies. Such a study implied a dual dimension: the ideals and practices of the Imperial administration, and their impact on the subject populations. Criticisms of the book are grouped into four categories which are addressed in turn: the importance attached to Napoleons personality and role; the implications, for analysis and interpretation, of the choice of archival sources-prefectoral and civil administration rather than police or judicial records; the influence of the Napoleonic model of administration beyond France, particularly in Germany; the possibility of treating the Grand Empire with its dependent states as a single phenomenon. Finally, it is worth noting that in the decade since publication of the book the deeper legacies of the Napoleonic model have barely attracted the attention of historians.

Claudio Pavone, una lezione di moralità

In the Contemporary Historians section Michele Battini, Mariuccia Salvati and Stuart Woolf discuss the collection of Claudio Pavone’s principal articles in a recent volume to reflect on his role as a historian and an archivist. The two roles cannot easily be separated or summed up, except in the words of his fundamental and renowned book of 1991 on the Resistance as a lesson of morality.

John Rosselli (1927–2001)

John Rosselli died in Cambridge on 16 January 2001. Son of Carlo Rosselli who was murdered with his brother Nello in June 1937 by French Fascists acting for Mussolini, John carried the honour and burden of a family name distinguished in Tuscany and Italy since the Risorgimento: a relative was in the 1849 Venetian government,another gave shelter to the dying Mazzini; Amelia Pincherle, John’s grandmother,was a noted writer (as well as cousin of Alberto Moravia); his sister was a poet. John was deeply conscious of the historical and symbolic importance of his father’s role as the most effective exponent of anti-Fascism in exile in the 1930s (founder of Giustizia e Libertà, organizer of Italian participation in the International Brigade in the Spanish civil war). He never shrank from his sense of responsibility for the family name, was generous and open in the publication of Carlo’s writings, and towards the end of his life acted as a discerning guardian of the memory of the fratelli Rosselli against facile political usage. But John was anything but just a custodian of the family name, a role that he accepted, I suspect, with reluctance and certainly never exploited. Trilingual, with an English mother,a Parisian upbringing (family friends of Elie Halévy and Louis Joxe), and a first degree from Swarthmore College, he left his mark, with characteristic discretion, in three very different fields: as leader writer and feature editor of the Manchester Guardian, as an early nineteenth-century historian and immensely conscientious academic at the University of Sussex,and as a historian of opera. As a historian, his research for long concentrated on a leading figure of English liberal reforming imperialism,Lord William Bentinck,to whom he dedicated two elegant and important studies, on Bentinck’s occupation of Sicily 1811–14 (Rosselli’s Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Herbert Butterfield, published in 1956), and on his subsequent Indian career (Lord William Bentinck: the Making of a Liberal Imperialist 1774–1839, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), for which he learnt Bengali as a necessary path to studying the impact of British reforming zeal on Bengali society. His passion for opera then led to a remarkably productive flow of books and articles that opened up a new area, the economic and social history of opera: The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: the Role of the Impresario (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Music and Musicians in Nineteenth Century Italy (Amedeus Press, Portland, 1991), Singers of Italian Opera: the History of a Profession (Cambridge University Press,

Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541-1789.

Introduction 1. Sixteenth-century municipal plans for poor relief 2. Civic charity in the age of state formation 3. Motivations for charity 4 Charity and gender 5. Hospitals and poor relief in the age of absolutism 6. The state system of relief Conclusion Bibliography.