ABSTRACT
The 1890s were a period of notable social and intellectual turbulence in Italy. Here, as background to our main concern, it is only possible to recall a handful of examples. Thus our period saw a state of siege in Sicily and Lunigiana in 1894, ‘exceptional laws’ against socialist and anarchist activity, the banning of socialist and workers’ conferences and the founding and temporary disbanding of the Italian Socialist Party. May 1898 brought serious disturbances in Milan, while in 1900 King Umberto I was assassinated. Within the fluid world of ideas, socialist, anarchist, liberal, ‘social’ Catholic and other streams of thought jostled with both a growing attention to Marxism and the development of sophisticated – and relatively formal, mathematical – Italian presentations of marginalist economics. (With respect to this last, one need only recall such names as Pantaleoni, Barone and Pareto.) In 1895 Antonio Labriola complained of the ‘immaturity’ of Italian Marxism (Leipziger Zeitung, 4 May 1895; see Macchioro, 1989, p. 11) but, whether because of any such immaturity or despite it, the ‘crisi del marxismo’ was already much talked of in our period, not least with respect to value theory. 1
