Alfred Marshall in the Lower Valdarno

While I can speak as a direct witness for most of Becattini’s activities after 1970, for the earlier period I must rely on written evidence and on what I remember of our conversations across the years. Important documentary sources come from Becattini’s personal papers which I have been surveying and cataloguing over the last two years with a view to creating a publicly accessible Giacomo Becattini Archive at the Social Science Library of the University of Florence. I take this occasion to thank Professor Fabio Sforzi with whom I am sharing the task, without involving him, of course, in the personal opinions I shall express in the rest of the chapter.

This paragraph and the next are based on the Becattini (1962) volume and the almost contemporaneous (1961) article “Scienza economica e trasformazioni sociali. A proposito di un recente volume di Paolo Sylos Labini” [economic science and social transformations: apropos of a recent volume by Paolo Sylos Labini], reprinted in Becattini (1979a, pp. 3–40).

The debate originated from the book Logic as a Positive Science (1950) by the Marxist philosopher Galvano Della Volpe, at the time an influent thinker of the Italian Marxist left. Most likely Becattini became acquainted with it through writings by Giulio Pietranera and Lucio Colletti. The latter, a pupil and, later, a critic of Della Volpe, set forth his own retrospective view of the debate in Colletti (1974).

This search for historical determinateness in the use of scientific abstraction is strictly related to other recurrent themes in Becattini’s methodological perspective, such as the idea that the “freedom to hypothesize” is the scourge of contemporary economic theory, his rejection of methodologies based on successive approximations, and more in general his dislike of the dissociation between theory and analytic technique (see Becattini 1962, p. 146). That such convictions could conflict also with aspects of Marshall’s methodology—just think of the link between ceteris paribus and successive approximations—will be discussed below in Sect. 5.

Although, it must be said, in the case of Italy the gulf between idealism and Marxism was not impassable. I have already mentioned the importance for Becattini of his early readings of Gramsci, a Marxist author who retained visible traces of the idealistic formation he had received during the course of his studies at the University of Torino. Becattini himself spoke of Gramsci’s work as having provided him with a sort of “bridge” between Marx and Bertolino (Becattini 1979a, pp. vi–vii).

Becattini (1962, Chapter 4). An English translation of that text appeared in the last issue of the Marshall Studies Bulletin (Becattini 2012).

In a long review of the book Rosario La Rosa, then a young researcher at the University of Catania, pointed out the existence of logical gaps in the argument that damaged Becattini’s case (La Rosa 1965). In private correspondence with La Rosa, Becattini acknowledged the relevance of the remark and expressed his intention of writing a rejoinder, which, however, never materialized.

Letter from Sraffa to Becattini dated 25 November 1962, Becattini’s papers. One may find it odd that Sraffa had nothing to say about the main claim of the book, namely that objectivist theories of value of the Ricardo-Marx type have lost their historical relevance in the face of contemporary capitalism. This is all the more surprising if one considers that the book contained an explicit reference to Sraffa (1960), with the remark that the circularity of the Sraffian scheme could be seen as Ricardian objectivist philosophy cast in an analytic scheme in which “the position of man … is that of an intermediate commodity” (Becattini 1962, pp. 49–50). If ever there was a direct confrontation between Becattini and Sraffa on this theme during their Cambridge meetings, no trace remains either in print or in unpublished documents. As we shall see below, it was only after Sraffa’s death that Becattini, in papers of the 1980s, would reaffirm his thesis on the historical irrelevance of the theoretical scheme set forth in Production of Commodities.

By mere chance, during the years in which they were both searching through the same archives, the paths of Becattini and John Whitaker never crossed, and they continued not to cross until the late 1980s although they knew of each other’s work. Becattini’s original plans for a collection of unpublished economic manuscripts were upset when the two-volume Early Economic Writings of Alfred Marshall edited by Whitaker for Macmillan came out in 1975. This was one of the many occasions that Becattini missed (others will be mentioned in footnote 15) because of a systematically overcrowded agenda that resulted in his realizations always lagging behind his plans.

Becattini’s sources in this reconstruction include unpublished manuscripts and the partially published Theory of Foreign Trade, all written in the 1870s. These texts are now available in Whitaker’s (1975) edition of Marshall’s early economic writings.

It is fitting here to recall the interpretation of the same historical situation by another historian of economic thought apparently at odds with Becattini. In Macchioro (1981) we find the thesis that Marxists, by accepting Sraffa’s extrication of class conflict from the labour theory of value, assented also to moving the conflict from the objective, structural plane in which Marx had embedded it to the subjective and voluntaristic plane of the trade unions’ willingness to struggle for more favourable positions on the wage-interest frontier. Be it labelled as subjectivism, with Macchioro, or objectivism, with Becattini, it is however clear that for both authors the reduction of the central social issue to movements inside an one-dimensional space amounted to a fundamental delusion.

This is based on Becattini (1983b). It must be noted that in this article the implicit target behind Sraffa was the influential neo-Ricardian economist Pierangelo Garegnani, with whom Becattini had been in close contact during the years in which the former was teaching at the University of Florence, from 1969 to 1974. There had been no lack of occasions for controversy between the two of them.

According to the non-partisan opinion of John Whitaker, see Whitaker (1991). The conference volume was edited as a two-volume special issue of the journal Quaderni di Storia dell’Economia Politica, vol. 1, issues 2–3 of 1991, and vol. 2, issue 1 of 1992.

The list of aborted projects includes an ambitious collective volume on political economy and society in Victorian Britain for the Torinese publishing house Einaudi; a coffee-table book on Alfred & Mary Marshall’s Sicilian holiday during the 1881–1882 winter, to be distributed by the Banco di Sicilia on occasion of the centenary year; the constitution of an international Marshall Society; and a biography of Marshall, plans and rough drafts of which go back to the late 1980s. Correspondence between Becattini and Peter Groenewegen reveals that the last project bounced back and forth between the two of them for a long while, until in the end Becattini had to surrender, regretfully, to Peter’s superior efficiency in self-organization.

This is slightly inaccurate, because parallel means having no intersection while in this case, as we shall see, the two research lines eventually did meet. But this happened no earlier than the late 1970s, after almost twenty years of separate development.

Although it cannot be excluded that Becattini himself intentionally contributed to feeding this ambiguity. In Becattini (1979b) the passage “now that, hiding behind Marshall’s gown, I have introduced my proposal” (emphasis added) leaves no doubt as to the origin. Yet in later reprints of this article, and also in its English translation in Becattini (2004), the whole sentence was cut out without notice.

The first edition was as a discussion paper of the Florentine Department of Economics in 1991, prior to being published as an archival supplement to Warren Samuels’ journal in 1994 (Raffaelli 1994a).

On this point, see also the chapter by Neil Hart in this volume. Perhaps an unintentional indication of the distance between Becattini and Tiziano re ID can be perceived also in the arguments that they used in discussing the ID as an environment favourable to industrial innovation. While Tiziano relied on the Marshallian cognitive scheme in terms of the pattern/creativity duality (e.g. in 2003b, Chapter 4; note also the view of IDs developed by Loasby 1998), Becattini preferred to resort to different conceptual frameworks such as those developed by E. de Bono or I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi (see Chapters 3 and 4 in Becattini 2004).

Gay was a pupil of Bertolino in the early 1960s. Differently from Becattini, he pursued an independent line of research entirely contained within the field of mathematical economics. Yet breeding did tell in the end, since with an innovative use of non-standard hypotheses he found ways to import massive doses of Bertolino’s idealistic view of society into his mathematical models.

The point was forcefully made by Marshall in a passage in Industry and Trade rightly emphasized by Tiziano (Raffaelli 2003b, pp. 56–57), according to which there could be no successful change if those who decide to put it into effect could not rely on part of the existing patterns remaining unchanged. See also Loasby’s chapter in this volume, on partial equilibrium as a necessary component of Marshall’s approach to the explanation of economic change.

This must be taken at my word, because to my knowledge this text has never been published. I am quoting from the file (dated 26 September 2007) he sent me a few days before the meeting, which I have kept ever since then.

It must be noted at this point that, because of the central role of industry in both Becattini’s and Tiziano’s interpretations of Marshall, a text such as Industry and Trade, with its rich reasoned survey of varieties of industrial systems in connection with national and local ethos, had supplanted the Principles as the main reference work for both of them (see Raffaelli 2009).

See above, footnote 4, on Becattini’s deeply rooted methodological convictions since the times of Becattini (1962). The organicist historicism that resurfaces in this Becattini (1983b) is certainly more suggestive of Bertolino than of Marshall’s mildly rationalistic (in the sense explained above in the text) approach to history.

This practice of projecting different desires on the same historical character was not an exclusive of our team, however. As the opening of Medema’s chapter in this volume suggests, something similar may also have been going on among Chicago “Marshallians” in Coase’s times.