Land reform in the 1950s in Italy and the United States: the thinking of Mario Einaudi

The article discusses the thinking of Mario Einaudi in relation to the ambitious measures with which the Italian government sought to move towards land reform in the immediate post–war period. Einaudi, an intellectual and academic, was by birth Italian but moved to the United States during the Fascist period. Like his father Luigi, the noted economist, he was convinced of the need to stimulate the free market in land in order to increase productivity and modernise cultivation methods; in his writings he repeatedly sought to develop a plan of action that would facilitate collaboration between Rome and Washington in this field, identifying the Tennessee Valley Authority approach as especially suited to the Italian case. However, while his ideas achieved a good public airing, they had a limited impact: on the political front, Cold War priorities pushed Italian and US Marshall Plan experts more towards the redistribution of landownership than towards stimulating the productivity of agricultural businesses, in the attempt to rapidly build a consensus behind the government; and on the cultural front, at the end of the 1950s the issue of backwardness in the rural South started to be interpreted in terms of cultural and social anthropology, an approach which did not directly relate to the development of political programmes.     

From Risorgimento to Il Politecnico: impegno and intellectual networks in the Einaudi publishing house, 1945

The article unveils the (dis)continuities between two post-WWII journals, Risorgimento and Il Politecnico, both published by Einaudi in 1945. By reassessing the publishing history of Risorgimento from a genealogical perspective, the article aims to chart the evolutions of the then current intellectual debate on impegno. Specifically, by analysing the relevant contributors’ correspondence and the essays that were published in the journals, the article examines the journals as sites of networking but also tension between different intellectual habitus. This will illuminate not only how the two editors-in-chief (Salinari and Vittorini, respectively) took different positions in relation to both the literary field and the PCI (Italian Communist Party), but also the opposition of editorial staffs – based, respectively, in Rome and in Milan – in relation to the publisher Einaudi.