The Economic Culture of Academic Journals during Fascism

They are: (a) Giornale degli Economisti e Rivista di Statistica. It was established, as Giornale degli economisti, in 1875 in Padua and the publication ended in 1879. The second series was run in Bologna from 1886 to 1900. The third series was run in Rome from 1900 to 1922 and the label Rivista di Statistica was added to the title. The fourth series was run in Milan, Bocconi University since 1926, from 1923 to 1938 under the direction of A. Beneduce, G. Del Vecchio and G. Mortara. On the Giornale, see Montesano (1998); (b) Annali di Economia. It was founded in 1924 in Milan, Bocconi University, under the direction of Girolamo Palazzina, see Romani (2017); (c) Riforma Sociale. It was established in 1894 and Luigi Einaudi was the co-owner since 1911 and the editor from 1908 to 1935 when the journal was banned by fascism, see Bianchi (2010); (d) Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali e Discipline Ausiliarie. It was founded in 1893 and in 1927 became the scientific journal of the Milan Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, see Nerozzi and Parisi (2011); (e) Rivista Italiana di Statistica, Economia e Finanza. It was established in 1929 as periodical of the Institute of the Economic and Financial Policy at the University of Rome in association with the School of Statistics at the University of Bologna. The editors were A. De’ Stefani, L. Amoroso, and F. Vinci.

On the history of Italian economic thought during the interwar years, see Faucci (2014, ch. 7).

On the Italian monetary policy of the period, see Cohen (1972), Barucci (1981), Marconi (1982), Cotula and Spaventa (1993), and Cavalcanti (2011).

The main supporters of the revaluation of the Lira were the so-called Benvenuto Griziotti Group, see Barucci (1981).

For more details, see Magliulo (2012, 2016, 2018).

There were 22 articles published in the Annali di Economia (AE) from 1932 to 1937; 35 in the Giornale degli Economisti e Rivista di Statistica (GDE) from 1932 to 1937; 19 in La Riforma Sociale (RS) from 1932 to 1935; 34 in the Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali (RISS) from 1932 to 1937; and 16 in the Rivista Italiana di Statistica, Economia e Finanza (RISEF) from 1932 to 1934.

The vocabulary represented in a scatterplot, which “can be regarded as a map, because the position of each [year] can be regarded as a two-dimensional position, almost like a geographical location in a region defined by latitude and longitude. We say that the scatterplot […] simply expresses the [words/segments] in a visual format that communicates […] information” (Greenacre 2007, 5). Correspondence analysis provides “ways for describing data, interpreting data and generating hypotheses” without a theoretical model or preconceived hypothesis. How should the scatterplots contained in the book be interpreted? A word/segment close to an active variable (economist, year) means that the word/segment in question connotes texts/speeches concerning said active variable. In the centre (centroid) of the figure, we naturally find the words/segments that are common to the active variables we are considering, without characterising one or few in particular. We find the “inertia” or “variance” of the figure on the two axes: the higher the inertia, the greater the variability of the lexicon concerning the active variables in question and the lower the inertia, the more homogeneous the lexicon. The analysis of the textual corpora demanded the use of specific software. We used Taltac to manage the corpus and Spad to extract the figures. The final graphical view represents the initial corpus in terms of statistical associability between elements. The software thus serves as an advanced text analysis tool for deriving high-quality information from complex corpora. Since we are studying 5 years (5 journals in Fig. 2) in this case, we obtain 4 uncorrelated axes (and 4 in Fig. 2 as well) displaying the words investigated for each author considered, and the axes can be combined to form different planes. Each plane represents a part of the variability and shows a single synthetic outcome based on the part of variability it represents. The inertia (roughly speaking, the variability of the words over the set of authors) that can be read on the horizontal and vertical axes indicates how the variability is distributed over the various years or journals. A high inertia means that each year (journal) is characterised by more diverse content.