Cesare Vagge

Research Topic

"Varieties of Organised Capitalism: Technocracy and Corporatism in French and Italian Industrial Policy (1937-1958)"

This research project studies the evolution of the technocratic and corporatist institutions in charge of industrial policy in France and Italy between the mid-1930s and the late 1950s. The project’s chronology covers the crucial experiences of the Great Depression, the Second World War and the post-war political-economic "long reconstruction". This research initiative intends to study institutional change within the French and Italian industrial policy in favour of the steel industry in terms of the broader emergence of “Organised Capitalism”, which constituted a major shift from economic liberalism towards state-sponsored technocratic planning and corporatist integration of trade associations in the policy-making process. Italy and France have been chosen as country studies because of their common technocratic and corporatist experiences under Fascism and Vichy, as well as for their divergent approaches to the management of the mixed economy in the postwar period. This study intends to show how "Organised Capitalism" was rooted in the dramatic experiences of the Depression, war and fascist dictatorship, and was subsequently re-adopted by post-war "state-led democracy". The study will hence contribute to further question the already contested notion of a "0 hour Europe", arisen from the ruins of the Second World War and fully emancipated from the institutional legacies of its authoritarian recent past. 

Supervisor: Professor Martin Conway