1 Introduction
āI was one of those consulted about [the project of the Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall] ā¦ For that [editorial] team the first name on my list was Raffaelli, and believing that managing this project would need a good deal of extensive discussion, and recalling the observation (whose originator I cannot recall) that āAlfred Marshall is alive and well and living on the banks of the Arnoā, it was easy to add two other namesā (Loasby 2016, p. 20). This long quotation bears witness to the fact that around the year 2000 the international community of Marshall scholars was aware of the existence of an Italian research team of three people operating in Tuscany and of the leading role in it played by Tiziano Raffaelli. The other two names mentioned by Loasby refer to the late Giacomo Becattini (1927ā2017) and to the present writer. The habitual residences of its members place the team āon the banks of the Arnoā between Florence and Pisa, an area commonly known as the Lower Valdarno.
The present reconstruction of the story of the team is aimed at illustrating the context, phases and motivations of a research programme that was less coherent and homogeneous than may appear from the outside. In the story, which for me began in 1970 and, for Becattini, dated back to at least ten years earlier, Tiziano made a relatively late entry around 1987. His entry, however, marked a substantial discontinuity quite soon. While the intellectual leadership of the first and longer phase belonged unquestionably to Becattini and Tizianoās ideas determined a change in direction that in my case was slowly absorbed and internalized, this was not so with Becattini, who hailed it with sympathy but continued along a line of his own. In the initial acknowledgements of the Italian version of Becattini (2000), his thanks to the other two members of the team were accompanied by the remark ā[they] have followed paths of historical research to a large extent parallel to mineāāmeaning no overlaps, although no great distance either. Since the atmosphere in the team was of close-knit friendship, our divergences remained a matter of private discussion and were never displayed in public if not implicitly. Looked at in retrospect, this internal dialectics seems to be mainly the effect of the generational gap between us, a gap that reflected differences in intellectual and political contexts between the post-war Italy in which Becattini received his early formation and the years around 1970 in which Tiziano and I trained as young researchers. A part of the explanation is also due to changes in the general trend of economic theory during the last quarter of the century, changes to which the two of us, again I think for generational reasons, were more responsive than Becattini. It is because of this āspirit of the timesā feeling that, being the last survivor of the team, I resolved to lay bare the internal differences among us in the hope that this is of some interest, at least from the point of view of the history of historiography.
Given the chronology, Becattini inevitably will have the lionās share in this reconstruction, which starts (Sect. 2) from the origins of the Marshall project in the loads of questions that crowded his mind around 1960 and the reasons that pointed to Marshall as being the most likely help in trying to answer them. In Sect. 3 the next stage of the research: an image of Marshall as a protagonist of the demise of the classical model of capitalism in the Victorian era was reconstructed and defended in the face of the classical resurgence that characterized the Italian academic and political scene in the 1970s. As the end of the century approached, however, this political contextual pressure gradually lost strength, and Sect. 4 documents the taking over of two different concerns. On the one hand, there was Becattiniās progressive absorption in a line of applied research that was based on the concept of industrial district, with the Marshall research becoming instrumental to it; on the other, Tiziano entered the team with a new agenda centred on Marshallās cognitive evolutionism and the way in which this could be shown to bear upon all his economics. As explained in Sect. 5, from this point on and scarcely visible from the outside but perfectly clear to the three insiders, the Lower Valdarno became host to two historical characters who shared the name Alfred Marshall and other external features butāso to speakāhad different souls. This difficulty did not prevent our collaboration in the Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall and other projects. In fact, I think it taught us to regard historical research with a sense of greater detachment and humility, or, at least, this is as much as I feel inclined to argue in the brief conclusive reflections of Sect. 6.
2 Origins of a Research Programme
Formally speaking, a historical research project on Marshall was launched by Becattini in 1970 in the form of an application to the Italian National Research Council asking for financial support for a small team of researchers, among whom this writer and a few others who dropped out at rather early stages. But that was not the beginning, nor was it by chance that, of all economists, Marshall was chosen as the target. A few years earlier Becattini had dealt at length with Marshall in a book (Becattini 1962) dedicated to an inquiry, midway between economic theory and the history of economic thought, into the evolution of the theory of value from the classical Ricardo-Marxian position to the theories of imperfect and monopolistic competition that were still an active research area at the time. The questions that prompted this investigation were those of a young would-be academic eager to participate in what he perceived to be the renovation process of the Italian economic culture, a process that was pervaded with politics in a country still in the recovery phase from fascism and the war. Re-examining these questions in their context helps to understand where Becattiniās interest in Marshall came from and why he developed his later research in the way that he did. In fact, the 1962 book shows us more than that: a wellspring of fundamental problems to which Becattini was to return periodically throughout his lifetime, it holds the key to the general evolution of his ideas and the role played by the interpretation of Marshall in it.1
Becattiniās main concern2 at the time was the approach to economic science that he indicated with the term āobjectivismā, meaning by this the assumption that whatever economists are interested in can be studied in the same way as objects of the natural sciences, i.e. as an entity with a structure and laws of behaviour of its own to be discovered by means of the same methods used in the natural sciences. Objectivism in this sense chimed for him with āmechanicismā, ānaturalismā, ādeterminismā, all terms that imply an underestimation or the utter exclusion of free human intentionality from the factors that determine economic phenomena and, at the same time, a rejection of the ideaāreduced to the state of illusionāthat these phenomena reflect to a significant extent the purposes that drive human agents to action. The question is whether or not a theory based on such an abstraction is sufficient to cope with actual social issues or, instead, misses some essential factor without which any grip on reality is barred. Here, Becattini borrowed his terminology from a philosophical debate on Marxās approach to scientific explanation that had been going on in Italy since the early 1950s3: for an abstraction to be adequate for the purposes of social science it needs to be ādeterminateā or ārealā, which in this particular case can be taken to mean that it must reflect the actual absence of the entity the theory is abstracting from in the situation to which the same theory is supposed to refer. Thus, assuming as we must that human intentionality can never be entirely suppressed, objectivism can be a determinate or real abstraction on condition that it is applied to historical situations in which there are forces operating in such a way as to nullify or distort the intended effects of human action.4
For Becattini the locus classicus of determinate abstraction in economics was the capitalist society as described by Marx, and by Ricardo as interpreted by Marx, namely a society in which workers and capitalists are alienated alike, both being stripped of effective human purpose and reduced to the role of mere means to ends that are not of their choice: workers, because the proletarian condition bars access to the possibility of conceiving, not to say of realizing, purposes of their own beyond mere subsistence; capitalists, because the necessity of reproducing capital acts on them as an impersonal coercion from which they are unable to cut themselves off. In Becattiniās perception, however, this picture represented an early model of capitalism that in present times had been superseded. In mature capitalism, intentionality rules ubiquitous: the very fact that, thanks to the spread of the Marxian message, workers have developed class conscience transforms them, and capitalists for reaction, into agents having the power, limited though this may be, to conceive independent intentions and to transform them into fact. This later model of capitalism was evidence of the crisis of the classical, Ricardo-Marxian one: no longer a pure accumulative mechanism, it had outgrown its original features and tended to evolve into still indeterminate directions. For the Becattini of 1962, then, objectivism was no longer a determinate abstraction, and the task of economic theory was to look for abstractions of a different kind, ones able to account for the part played by the subjective element in determining economic outcomes. In this task, he saw the source of theoretical innovations begun a long time ago in the post-classical age and still under way in the 1960s. At that time, economic subjectivism was still a shapeless perspective for him.
A few biographical details will help to set these concerns in context. Family origins and traditions rendered Becattini a natural member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), in which he was operative for a few years in his early youth and where he began his readings of the works of Marx and of Antonio Gramsci. Possibly the problematic Marxism of Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks began to be published in the late 1940s, inoculated him against the dogmatic, Soviet-style official doctrine of the party. As a student at the economic faculty of the University of Florence, however, he met a professor of political economy, later to become his mentor, Alberto Bertolino, whose ideological background was based on the Italian neo-idealist philosophy of Croce and Gentile, and whose political ideas leaned towards the āliber...