The persistence of tradition the economists in the law faculties and in the higher institutes of business studies

The economists in the Italian universities formed influential schools which produced the country’s elites. An examination of the relationship between these schools and fascism reveals a varied, complex picture, quite apart from the single economists’ varying degrees of support for the regime’s ideology. Despite the particular features due to fascism, the development of the Italian system of university education did not differ from that in other European countries. The investigation conducted in this chapter on the universities’ transition from the liberal era to the fascist age enables us to give a description of the salient episodes marking the relationship between the economists and the regime. The reconstruction of the institutional and theoretical aspects, accompanied by a careful study of the political and social context, forms the basis for an attempted interpretation of the history of Italy between the two world wars