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6. a total science

7. This page intentionally left blank

8. ATotalScience
Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy
jean-guy prévost
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston
LondonIthaca

9. © McGill-Queen’s University Press2009
isbn 978-0-7735-3539-8
Legal deposit fourth quarter2009
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is100% ancient forest
free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine-free.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences,
through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds
provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also
acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada
through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program
(bpidp) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Prévost, Jean-Guy,1955–
A total science : statistics in liberal and Fascist Italy / Jean-Guy
Prévost.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-7735-3539-8
1. Statistics – Italy – History –20th century.2. Statisticians – Italy –
History –20th century.3.Fascism–Italy–History–20th century.
4. Gini, Corrado,1884–1965. 5.Science and state – Italy – History
–20th century.i. Title.ii. Title: Statistics in liberal and Fascist Italy.
ha37.i82p74 2009 314.509’04 c2009-901708-3
Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in10.5/13Sabon

10. Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction3
1The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics22
2Entrepreneurship and Rivalry: Statisticians in the Academy58
3The Politics of Expertise: Statisticians and the State103
4Form and Substance: A Science of Architectonics139
5The Theory and Practice of Totalitarianism201
Conclusion248
Notes261
Bibliography283
Index321

11. This page intentionally left blank

12. Acknowledgments
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences,
through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme. The research
on which it rests was made possible by two sshrcgrants
(410–97–0412and410–2001–1374) as well as initial financial sup-
port from the Programme d’aide financière à la recherche et à la
création (pafarc) of the Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam).
Conducting the research and writing the book would not have
been possible without the help of a number of people. Paolo
Garrona, then Director General of the Istituto nazionale di Sta-
tistica, and Paola Geretto, director of theistatlibrary and a very
fine historian of Italian statistics herself, have been especially wel-
coming and helpful. Luisa Montevecchi, of the Archivio Centrale
dello Stato (Rome), has provided judicious advice. Thanks to Piero
Garbero, I was able to make use of the resources of the Pasquale
Jannaccone library, attached to the Political Economy Department
of the University of Turin. Mauro Reginato introduced me to the
Diego De Castro library, also at the University of Turin, but
attached to the Mathematics and Statistics Department. Giacomo
Cuva, then a student in history at the University of Rome, collected
various data for me, notably on the holders of statistical chairs.
Over the years, I have also worked at the Biblioteca Alessandrina at
the University of Rome La Sapienza, at the Biblioteca Nazionale
and the Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, also in
Rome, as well as at the Fondazione Einaudi in Turin. I sincerely
thank the personnel of all these institutions. I have also frequently
overcome distances thanks to the Interlibrary Loan Service of the

13. uqamlibrary (Alix Évrard and Donald Dunleavy deserve special
mention here).
During the years I devoted to the preparation of this book, I was
able to discuss various aspects of it with a number of colleagues.
Besides those already named, I must mention Rosa Gini, Monica
Pratesi, Sandro Rinauro, Luidi Di Comite, Enrico Castelli
Gattinara, Éric Brian, Alain Desrosières, Bruno Marien, Robert J.
Leonard, Robert Nadeau, and Dalie Giroux. Jean-Pierre Beaud,
Gilles Dostaler, Yves Gingras, Giovanni Favero, Giovanni Maria
Giorgi, Dora Marucco, Francesco Mornati, Filippo Sabetti and
Francesco Cassata all read and commented on an earlier version of
the manuscript. The two anonymous reviewers chosen by McGill-
Queen’s University Press to assess the manuscript also made
encouraging and helpful remarks. I am also especially grateful to
Elise Moser, whose advice and queries have significantly improved
the style of this book.
A very early draft of the introduction was published by the Cen-
tre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie
(cirst) as a research note in2000–01, under the titleScience et
fascisme: le champ statistique italien. An earlier and much shorter
version of chapter 1 was published in2002as “Genèse particulière
d’une science des nombres. L’autonomisation de la statistique en
Italie entre1900et1914”inActes de la recherche en sciences
sociales, no.141–142(March):98–109. An earlier version of the
first part of chapter5was published in2001as “Une pathologie
politique: Corrado Gini et la critique de la démocratie parle-
mentaire” inRevue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no.13:
105–128. Presentations dealing with material now in this book
were made on various occasions: at the Société québécoise de sci-
ence politique1999annual meeting (Ottawa); at the Social Science
History Association1999annual meeting (Forth Worth, Texas); at
thecirst“Friday Seminars” (2000); at the Hayek Conference held
at Cerisy-La-Salle (2000); at the Dipartimento di statistica e
matematica applicata all’economia at the University of Pisa (2003);
at the Dipartimento d’economia of the University Ca’Foscari in
Venice (2005); and at the Dipartimento di Economia Politica of the
University of Turin (2006).
On a more personal note, I wish to express all my gratitude to my
friend Enrico Castelli Gattinara and his family, who offered me hos-
pitality on so many occasions. Giuliana Quartullo, Alfonso Bracci,
viii Acknowledgments

14. Giampiero De Marco, and Stefano Moro have also become dear
friends whom I long for when not in Italy. Finally, I would like
to dedicate this book to my late wife, Danielle Choquette (1956–
2008), on whose support and love I was always able to rely.
Jean-Guy Prévost
Acknowledgments ix

15. This page intentionally left blank

16. a total science

17. This page intentionally left blank

18. Introduction
Statistics has expanded its jurisdiction over all phenomena of life.
Benito Mussolini (1926)
The history and sociology of scientific activity under authoritarian
or totalitarian regimes have generally focused on two dimensions:
the relationship between scientific communities and the state, and
the nature and content of the knowledge produced in such a con-
text. Italian statistics of the Fascist era was distinguished by orig-
inal, consistent, and widely recognized scientific and technical
developments as well as by the clearly hegemonic position it
acquired vis-à-vis Italian social science at that time, providing us
with a peculiarly interesting case in this regard. Fascist Italy, the
first regime to openly strive for the establishment of a totalitarian
state, immediately suggests comparison with Stalinist Russia and
Nazi Germany. The former stands as probably the starkest case of
the combination of absolute power with an all-encompassing ideol-
ogy. Political conformity was ruthlessly enforced, and formerly
autonomous scientific bodies were brutally brought to heel if not
subjected to outright terror. The “ideologizing” of science, based on
what was seen as the opposition between proletarian and bourgeois
science, led to an official ban on genetics, relativity theory, and
quantum mechanics (not to mention social and economic theories
other than Marxist), as well as to the triumph of fraudulent theo-
ries, with sometimes disastrous practical consequences, as evi-
denced by the infamous episode known as Lyssenkism (Josephson
1994; Krementsov1997;Graham1974; Lecourt1976). In the case
of statistics, we know that during the1920s Soviet statisticians still
had their own journals, kept regular contact with their foreign col-
leagues and considered themselves accountable first and foremost
to strictly scientific standards; following the advent of Stalin, and

19. particularly from the beginning of the Great Terror, links with the
external world were cut, ideological orthodoxy prevailed over pro-
fessional norms, and statisticians embarked on a desperate attempt
to anticipate the changing expectations of political rulers (Stanziani
1998; Mespoulet2001; Blum and Mespoulet2004). Although the
course of the Nazi regime was less straightforward in this matter –
as in others – it also provides us with a clear case of scientific
ideologizing, this time in accordance with the fundamentally racist
character of the HitlerianWeltanschauung, particularly the opposi-
tion it drew between Aryan and Jewish science, and the support it
gave to “racial” disciplines. The scientific community in Germany
was also brought into political line, subjected to coercion and
sometimes brutality, though repression was much more targeted
than inussr– Jewish scientists being of course the foremost victims
(Guérout1992; Olff-Nathan1993; Pfetsch1994). Many eminent
German statisticians, such as Friedrich Zahn, president of the Inter-
national Statistical Institute during the first half of the1930s, or
Johannes Müller, president of the State Statistical Office in
Thuringe, enthusiastically embraced the new course, claiming to
be first and foremost soldiers rather than scientists (Aly and Roth
2004,8–9). The advent of the Nazi regime offered a wide field for
their “fantasies of omniscience,” at least until the chaotic radical-
ization of the late1930s led to the disintegration of German official
statistics (Tooze2001,24–5).
Fascist Italy calls for a much more nuanced portrait. To be sure,
political conformity was enforced, as shown, for instance, by the
1931loyalty oath to the regime required of all university professors,
on threat of dismissal. From1938on, the enactment of anti-Jewish
legislation was also backed up by “scientific” arguments about the
need to defend the “Italian race”. However, theaggiornamento
(updating) of Italian government statistics and statistical teaching
in the first years of the Fascist regime testifies to the importance
that the new leadership, especiallyIl Duce, attached to statistics as
a tool of management and control. Statistics, as a specific complex
of theories, hypotheses, techniques, and routines, may be seen as
the intersection of a variety of disciplines (demography, economics,
sociology, biometry, criminology, etc.), for which it provides a
robust methodological foundation, as well as a point of connection
between science, management, and politics. It should come there-
fore as no surprise that the proponents of astato totalitariosaw
4 A Total Science

20. statistics as the applied social science par excellence. It is thus only
to be expected that rigid political and ideological control would be
maintained over such an important activity. The interventions of
political authorities into statistical matters (before and after as well
as during Fascism) were frequent and multi-faceted. They oversaw
the distribution of resources, nominations to the most important
bureaucratic-scientific positions, and the role statistics could (they
hoped) play in the monitoring of demographic and economic poli-
cies. Mussolini, the regime’s central figure, with direct political
authority over the Istituto centrale di statistica from its creation in
1926, frequently intervened in statistical matters, offering vigorous
support for the reform of official statistics, inquiring regularly
about data, criticizing certain results and sometimes censoring
them. But Italy never approached the complete “de-structuring” of
the statistical profession that theussrexperienced under Stalinism.
Despite an exacerbated nationalism, the idea of an original “Ital-
ian” statistics cannot be compared to that of “Aryan science”; nor
did Italian official economic statistics ever – despite government
declarations that could be seen as favourable to corporatism and
autarchy – become a pure accounting practice, as was largely the
case in Communist planned economies.
During the greater part of the Fascistventennio(the twenty years
of Fascist rule from1922to1943), Italian scientists, judges, mili-
tary officers, industrialists, and businessmen succeeded in maintain-
ing a considerable degree of autonomy when compared to their
Soviet or German counterparts. As has been written of Italian aca-
demic life in general, this situation may be described as “a constant
search for arrangements and compromises, during which adherence
to the regime’s political orientations [did] not exclude the defence of
traditional areas of power and autonomy,” one result of which was
the persistence of independent professional bodies as well as of sci-
entific norms and standards in research and debates (Belardelli
2005, 40). In many respects, for the world of science, the passage
from Liberal to Fascist Italy meant continuity rather than abrupt
change. Using Solingen’s ideal types of relationships between scien-
tific communities and the state, the case of Italian statistics may be
described as one of “happy convergence,” which “assumes a high
degree of consensus between state structure and the aspirations of
scientists” – at least until the regime had reached a high degree of
“totalitarization.” Despite the obvious lack of political pluralism,
Introduction 5

21. convergence – happy or simply objective – between statisticians and
the Fascist state is hardly disputable: the interest shown by authori-
ties in statistics, the resources they provided for its development,
the evident affinity between the policies put forward by the govern-
ment and the nationalist ideology shared by most members of the
statistical community all combined to tie its destiny to that of the
regime. After the promulgation of the anti-Jewish laws in1938,the
situation became much more difficult, at least for a part of the com-
munity. Those who disapproved – discreetly, in most cases – of the
alignment with Germany, of official racism, or of the perspective of
economic autarchy, generally chose an approach of “passive resis-
tance.” This includes individuals who tried at first to evade the oath
imposed on professors, who wrote to Mussolini denouncing the
anti-Jewish decrees or – extending the meaning of resistance to its
utmost limit – who kept an embarrassed silence about anti-Semi-
tism. The model of “deadly encounter,” in which political account-
ability replaces scientific autonomy and scientists are faced with the
risk of various forms of persecution, including exile and physical
annihilation, applied primarily to statisticians of Jewish origin, who
were forced to relinquish their positions in1938. On the other
hand, the rise of thesquadristaGiuseppe Adami to the position of
general director of government statistics on the sole basis of his
political credentials and in spite of the overt opposition of profes-
sional statisticians, or the bizarre episode of theRacist Scientists’
Manifesto, the content of which was apparently unknown to its sig-
natories, both indicate a significant weakening of scientific auton-
omy during the final years of Fascism. A fourth model, that of
“ritual confrontations,” may be applied to the case of Italian econ-
omists: though they all proclaimed, in a ritualistic manner, their
agreement with the ideas of corporatism, partisans of economic
orthodoxy remained clearly hostile to state intervention, planning,
and bureaucracy throughout the Fascist era, constantly trying to
reintroduce, under a slight corporatist coating, the fundamental
truths of their discipline.
autonomy and its limits: statistics as
discipline and institution
Italian statistics from the early to mid-twentieth century has been
the object of sustained scholarly attention during the last two
6 A Total Science

22. decades or so. Within this body of work, mention should be made
of what might be called the “internal” history of the discipline, that
is, those studies that play a role in symbolically asserting the auton-
omy of statistics; in other words, the historiography of the scientific
discipline of statistics conceived as the rational reconstruction of
the genesis and development of a set of concepts, techniques, and
devices. The Italian contribution to the development of modern sta-
tistics has been both original and important, as demonstrated by
the inclusion in four successive editions of the International Statisti-
cal Institute’s authoritativeDictionary of Statistical Termsof more
than sixty entries taken from a much longer list of concepts pro-
posed by Corrado Gini, which were without equivalent in Anglo-
Saxon statistics (Kendall and Buckland1957,1960,1972,and
1982). A good sample of this internal literature, written in the
impersonal style typical of the self-confident sciences, can be found
in the volume published in1987by the Società Italiana di Statistica
under the titleItalian Contributions to the Methodology of Statis-
tics. It covers a variety of topics that benefited from significant Ital-
ian contributions; for instance, means and their properties, the
study of variability and concentration, indexes of dissimilarity, the
concept of transvariation or the analysis of qualitative variables
(Naddeo1987). An even more important study is G. M. Giorgi’s
monograph on the genesis and evolution of the famous Gini coeffi-
cient: focussing on the mathematics involved, Giorgi’s work is a
detailed examination of the successive formal devices that led to the
perfecting of both the coefficient and those coefficients it generated
in turn (Giorgi1992).
A critical appraisal of histories of statistics written by and for
statisticians must take into account the state of the discipline at a
given historical moment. The absence of any contextual element in
such studies should not be understood as a shortcoming on their
authors’ part, but rather as a clue to the role such works play within
a discipline, which is to proclaim its autonomy. In the case of Giorgi
(who is the current editor-in-chief ofMetron, the journal launched
in1920by Corrado Gini himself), his monograph was intended to
reassert the importance of the coefficient against the opposition and
criticisms it had encountered, in Italy and elsewhere, from the
moment of its inception. The length of the annotated bibliography
in Giorgi’s work is in itself a clear indication of the coefficient’s rele-
vance and consistence: it lists442papers whose primary focus was
Introduction 7

23. Gini’s coefficient. In this sense, the genre of “internal” history may
be likened to Festschrifts, or obituaries, whose authors are often
disciples of the subjects; their positions within the disciplinary hier-
archy rely on appropriate handling of their masters’ scientific and
symbolic legacies (Brian1994,73). To continue with the example
of Gini, undoubtedly the major Italian statistician of his epoch, this
sort of discipleship was apparent in the two major papers written to
pay him homage on the occasion of a conference held in Rome in
1960. The first, which dealt mainly with Gini’s contributions to sta-
tistical methodology and was also a vigorous assertion of the origi-
nality of the Italian statistical school, was written by Vittorio
Castellano, who had just been named president of the Faculty of
Statistical, Demographical and Actuarial Sciences at the University
of Rome (a faculty created by Gini in1936and chaired by him until
his retirement) and would become editor ofMetronupon Gini’s
death in1965(Castellano1961).
1
The other paper was written by
Nora Federici who became editor ofGenus, another journal
founded by Gini (Federici1961); it considered Gini’s contributions
to the social sciences, insisting on a unitary vision underlying them.
In these cases as well, failure to take into account the external con-
text emphasizes the coherence of the author’s career and his body of
work at the time of his elevation into the disciplinary pantheon.
Thus, even though Gini had held eminent positions under the
Fascist dictatorship (notably as the commanding figure of govern-
ment statistics from1926to1932), one would search these texts in
vain for any reference to the political context: the word “fascism”
never appears in these texts; nor does “dictatorship” or even the
name Mussolini.
2
However, context returns with a vengeance when we move from
the history of coefficients and formulas, i.e., statistics as a science,
to the history of institutional functions, i.e., statistics as an activity
of the state. Here, even “official” narratives, such as the mono-
graph published in1996by Giuseppe Leti under the auspices of the
Istituto nazionale di statistica (istat), quotations from various acts
and decrees, or of communications between Mussolini and the offi-
cials in charge of government statistics, reveal the effects of the
authoritarian character and the structure of political authority on
the quantity and quality of statistical work. For instance, from
1926on, official statistics fell directly under the authority of the
prime minister (presidente del Consiglio); they were influenced by
8 A Total Science

24. the preferences of rulers (as expressed notably by the pro-birth
demographic policy) and by unforeseen turns of events (e.g., the
boycott of Italy following its conquest of Ethiopia). Leti dedicates
the third part of his monograph (more than100pages out of a total
of600) to the specific connection between “Mussolini e la statistica
pubblica italiana” (Leti1996).
3
In writings from a more independ-
ent perspective, the role of context is also quite clear, as many
authors locate the history of Italian public statistics within larger
interpretive narratives, such as the transformations undergone by
public administration, the development of the social sciences and
the correlative formation of public space, the structuring of a tech-
nocratic discourse and the relation between the regime and reform-
ist technical elites, and the elaboration and implementation of
population management policies (see Lanaro1979; Melis1988and
1996; Padovan1999; Misiani2007). The focus of all these works is
again autonomy, but as a problem to be examined rather than as
agiven.
To what extent were the inquiries and surveys conducted by offi-
cial statisticians during Fascism true to the ideals of science, techni-
cal quality, and neutrality that were the proclaimed ethos of
statisticians, in Italy as elsewhere? To what extent, on the other
hand, were such inquiries subjected to distortion or manipulation,
or used for purposes of propaganda rather than enlightenment (De
Sandre and Favero2003; D’Autilia1992)? What was the exact role
of statisticians – who were in most cases also demographers – in the
definition and implementation of various demographic policies?
Were they instigators, technicians, or merely collateral beneficiaries
of the importance attached by the highest authorities of the state to
one of their central objects of study (Ipsen1996;Treves2001)?
More generally, given the scientific prestige of statistics, to what
degree did the technocratic, nationalist, and biologizing discourse
of the majority of statisticians play a part in preparing the advent of
an authoritarian-totalitarian regime and, later, its racist laws (Israel
and Nastasi1998; Maiocchi1999)?
Judgments about the degree of scientific autonomy statisticians
were able (or willing) to preserve in such a political environment or
about the scientific value of inquiries and analyses produced by
istatduring the Fascist era differ according to the importance one
gives to the ideological aspect of a statistician’s writings, to the
interpretation of certain conflicts, or, more simply, according to
Introduction 9

25. chronology. Thus, based on the obviously nationalist and totalitar-
ian uses made of Corrado Gini’s neo-organicist theory, and the lat-
ter’s designation as head ofistat, S. Bertaux concludes that official
statistics during that period were “first and foremost a servant of
the state in its dimensions of propaganda and population control”
(Bertaux1999,593). For their part, De Sandre and Favero point to
the international character of the norms regulating statistical work
at that time and draw two clear distinctions: one between “social
philosophies” and “holistic political ethics” and, on the other hand,
statistical surveys and analyses; and another betweenistat,asthe
body in charge of survey research and the establishment of statisti-
cal series, and the university as the natural locus of theory and spec-
ulation. This leads them to conclude that, in spite of the context,
statistical work conducted atistatduring that period “seems to
have preserved a substantial degree of autonomy and of empirical
scientific dignity” (De Sandre and Favero2003,54). Similarly,
Treves describes demography during the ventennio as a “regime sci-
ence,” in the sense that there is a very neat homology between “the
statistician’s and demographer’s habitus,” which approaches popu-
lation movements (births, deaths, marriages, migrations) in terms
of numbers and aggregates, and an authoritarian or totalitarian dis-
course that referred to such units as states, masses, or nations rather
than to individuals. But, on the basis of a minutely detailed analysis
of their writings, Treves nonetheless insists on a distinction between
the work of statisticians-demographers as students (studiosi)of
population and the rather different role they would or could have
had as technicians (tecnici) of demographic policy. She notes that
the boundary between these two functions was much less visible
after1938, when the enactment of racist legislation coincided with
a vigorous resumption of the regime’s totalitarian dynamics (Treves
2001,236–7). According to D’Autilia, there were frequent episodes
of censorship that exemplified the brutal intrusion of political cri-
teria “contrary to any professional or scientific ethics” and “per-
fectly in line … with a totalitarian policy of information control”
(D’Autilia1992,113–4). According to Leti, however, cases of true
censorship were confined to the period of economic sanctions
(1935–36) and to the war years (1940–43) and can thus be largely
explained by circumstances and resource allocation problems, with
Mussolini’s interventions at other times amounting to not much
more than examining data before releasing them and offering “an
10 A Total Science

26. interpretation that lessened or exalted their significance” (Leti
1996,321).
italian statistics as a ‘field’
The concept of a “statistical field” offers an interesting insight into
the institutional-cum-intellectual developments that characterize
Italian statistics during the first half of the twentieth century. The
“field,” which may be defined as a structured and multidimensional
set of positions governed by specific criteria of legitimacy, consti-
tutes an appropriate framework for taking into account the scien-
tific as well as political activities of a given group, the system of
norms, incentives, and constraints within which these activities are
deployed, and the relations of such a system with others (Bourdieu
1971,1992,and1997;Ringer1990). Yet, if a rich tradition of
administrative statistics existed in nineteenth-century Italy (the
1880sareoftenreferredtoasagoldenageinthisregard),noreal
statistical “field” had in fact begun to emerge before the twenty-
year span whose center may be located at the start of the Great War
(1915). Up to that time, the few university chairs that were dedi-
cated to statistics were found in law (giurisprudenza) faculties, and
teaching amounted to not much more than displaying masses of
data pertaining to the national territory, population, and govern-
ment. Only as of1910did a network of laboratories, institutes, and
schools of statistics begin to appear, allowing for the bringing
together of statisticians and the accumulation of intellectual and
material resources, including libraries and computing devices, as
well as standardization of the discipline, notably through the dis-
semination of textbooks and the introduction of examinations to be
taken by all would-be recruits to government statistical services.
Statistical literature offers a more or less similar story. TheAnnali
di Statistica,createdin1871, was still the sole statistical periodical
at the turn of the century and its content was limited almost exclu-
sively to the results of official statistical inquiries and announce-
ments of decisions taken by statistical authorities. The more
theoretical and innovative work, as well as debates between statisti-
cians, was dispersed among journals of a more general character or
belonging to other disciplines, chiefly political economy. Then, in
1911,theGiornale degli economisti, which had been publishing
some statisticians on a regular basis, was renamedGiornale degli
Introduction 11

27. economisti e rivista di statistica.In1920, Gini launchedMetron,
which was especially devoted to statistical methodology, and, in the
following years, nearly a dozen statistical journals came into being.
Italian official statistics, which had been declining steeply for some
three decades, were spectacularly revived in1926with the reorgani-
zation of the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica (css)andthecreation
ofistat. There was soon a very sharp increase in the number of
inquiries made, publication delays were considerably shortened, and
statistical personnel became more professional. From then on, a real
gulf developed between nineteenth-century scientific-literary statis-
tics, aimed at the enlightened public, and the new Italian statistics,
now largely esoteric. Being a statistician in the1920s and1930s
required a high degree of technical competence and implied member-
ship in a network of specialists, who were governed by their own
rules and who exerted their intellectual and scientific authority on an
extended domain of investigation.
The Italian statistical field that emerged during that period was
thus structured along two axes: on one, the world of academy and
“pure” science, with its statistics chairs, its laboratories, institutes,
and schools; its various forums, scientific societies, meetings, and
its network of publications. Taken together, these organized the dis-
semination of knowledge, the transmission of know-how, and the
strengthening of common identity among the members of the field.
On the other axis was the practical world of government statistics,
or of statistical research in the private sector, where statisticians had
to rub shoulders (and numbers) with empirical reality. Those two
axes preceded (by a few years) and survived Fascism, in a manner
that strikingly contrasts, for instance, with the tragic destiny of
Russian statisticians under Stalinism (whose careers often ended in
prison, deportation, or before a firing squad), as well as with the
withdrawal of many major figures of German statistics following
the fall of Nazism (Stanziani1998,411–16; Blum and Mespoulet
2004,140–1; Tooze2001,283–4). In the case of Italy, the continu-
ity is quite remarkable: the style of Italian statistics, the schools and
tendencies among which the field was divided, even the political
views of many major statisticians were largely defined during the
tentofifteenyearsprecedingthe March on Rome and remained
largely intact after the regime’s downfall.
The existence of a specific field implies by definition a relative
degree of autonomy. In fact, the existence of a scientific (or any
12 A Total Science

28. other kind of) field attests to its success in becoming autonomous
from other spheres of activity. In this case, what allowed Italian sta-
tistics to develop significantly as a scientific discipline and as a set
of practices was precisely the intellectual autonomy statisticians
continued to enjoy under a totalitarian regime, the permanence (or
quasi-permanence) of norms defined primarily by the state of the
field (and could not therefore simply be identified with the political
imperatives of the day), and the value and originality of their intel-
lectual production. The autonomy of a field is made manifest by,
among other things, the existence of debates and controversies that,
given their esoteric character, remain outside the reach of those who
do not command the specific competence required from members
of the field. More often than not, these discussions were part of the-
oretical or methodological statistics, which was of course the most
abstract and the most formalized part of the discipline. This auton-
omy was, however, not absolute: given its legal-institutional status,
its position within public administration, and its importance in the
eyes of political authorities, official statistics necessarily served as a
kind of interface between the statistical, bureaucratic, and political
fields. Thus, the impressive growth in the teaching of statistics dur-
ing the1920s, the creation and initial success ofistat,andthe
funding and support of certain research programs were in a large
measure the result of an input of public resources. On the other
hand, periods of scarcity of the same resources and, on occasion,
ukases on the part of political authorities led to less fortunate peri-
ods. But if the global structure of the field and the distribution of
positions within it were largely the result of struggles that took
place during the time of its emergence and thus before the advent of
Fascism, one of the results of the interest Fascist authorities had in
statistics was a notable increase in autonomy for the statistical field
and a significant increase in available positions and the resources
that came with them. In contrast, the1938racist laws, which drove
most Italian statisticians of Jewish origin into exile, had a pro-
foundly destabilizing effect on the field, brutally suspending its
ordinary functioning norms and subjecting it to extraneously
defined criteria.
The nature and form of the changes that altered and reshaped the
statistical field, the controversies and struggles it experienced, can-
not be explained solely by reference to the ideal of a neutral, techni-
cal, and scientific statistics, although in Italy, as elsewhere, that is
Introduction 13

29. the way statisticians describe themselves and their enterprise. In
many cases, statistical debates can be read as the technical trans-
lation or the formalized gist of properly political debates. The
direction taken by these debates and their (often provisional) out-
come are largely due to the struggles and strategies of individuals
concerned with strengthening their own positions within the field.
A great deal of the energy expended by the field’s most eminent
members is thus dedicated to the accumulation of material and
symbolic resources, to the creation of barriers and filters designed
to regulate access to these resources, and to the development of net-
works and alliances within and outside the field. Studying the his-
tory of a field requires close examination of the distribution of
symbolic capital within it and of its fluctuations during the period
under consideration.
The analysis of a field’s functioning and that of the political and
ideological role played by a scientific community therefore require
significant empirical work, bearing on individuals’ writings as well
as on the institutional context within which these writings obtain
recognition. It thus becomes possible to move away from internal
intellectual history and militant hagiography, two genres that are
very present within the field under examination, and also to avoid a
purely external kind of history, which remains blind to the specific
rules that govern “the universe of those who produce works”
(Bourdieu1995,10). However, the problem of defining the bound-
aries of the field and of assessing the positions around which it is
structured can be analysed only through critical use of the criteria
put into play by the agents themselves. In this regard, I have started
from the bio-bibliographies of Italian statisticians published in
Statistica,the official journal of the Italian Society of Statistics,
between1956and1959.
4
StatisticawasatthattimeeditedbyPaolo
Fortunati, one of the prominent figures of the Italian statistical
school, which represented a specific pole within the field; but gath-
ering these bio-bibliographies clearly had an ecumenical purpose
and a number of the statisticians included in it had been widely
known for their indifference, their estrangement, in some cases
their hostility, towards that school of thought. This wide definition
of the field’s boundaries should be interpreted precisely as an effect
of the existence of a field and an obvious indication of the shared
interest of various tendencies, groups, or schools in positing them-
selves, whatever their rivalries, within a sufficiently extended space.
14 A Total Science

30. object and structure of the study
The following study is thus not meant to be a history of Italian sta-
tistics as a set of formal, methodological, and technical devices; a
compendium of the demographic and economic theories shared by
statisticians; or a history of official statistics. It will, however, be
necessary to take into account all these aspects in order to show
how those who defined themselves first and foremost asstatisti-
cians(rather than as demographers, economists, or civil servants)
succeeded in obtaining and maintaining a position that specifically
enabled them to address a number of issues pertaining to popu-
lation, wealth, or (political) authority with adequate (scientific)
authority.
5
Indeed, given their position within the academy and/or
official statistics, the scientific prestige and recognition attached to
their work, within and outside Italy, and the specific skills and
resources they invested in a number of technical-political issues
(such as the settlement of the war debt), Italian statisticians have
been able both to play an important ideological role in rallying sci-
entific and technocratic elites in support of the authoritarian deci-
sions imposed on the country at crucial moments and to take
advantage of this role to consolidate their positions, thereby aspir-
ing to a higher degree of practical influence (through the project of
a corporative statistics, for instance). In other words, what we need
to examine is how – through what schemes, struggles, alliances, and
opportunities – Italian statisticians have succeeded in building and,
to a large degree, maintaining their collective autonomy in a prob-
lematic political context. My primary purpose here is to illuminate
thespecific intellectual projectto which, in spite of differences and
rivalries, most of those who defined themselves as statisticians
throughout the period were committed: an overlapping quantita-
tive social science that was defined by its method rather than by a
specific object, whose scope included domains of inquiry tradition-
ally identified with sector-based disciplines such as sociology,
economics, demography, etc., and to which only those whose com-
mand of the formal devices defining that method was acknowl-
edged by their peers could make useful contribution. In that sense,
this study (though it will largely rely on them) differs from those
that have focused onistatas an institution or on the role of statisti-
ciansquademographers – no doubt a legitimate perspective given
the importance of population policies during the ventennio – by
Introduction 15

31. arguing that the position and prestige earned by statistics and statis-
ticians during that period was dependent upon precisely this
specific intellectual project. The intellectual and institutional foun-
dations of this endeavour for a “total science” were undoubtedly
laid during the period that extended more or less from1905to the
years immediately following the Great War, but the advent of Fas-
cism offered, through a combination of extended opportunities and
ideological affinities, an environment within which it could prosper.
As regards intellectual history, the object of this study can be
defined as follows. By examining a specific community – that of
Italian statisticians during the first half of the twentieth century – it
is meant as a contribution to the growing interest in the cultural
dimensions of Fascism but focusing on the “rational” or the “scien-
tific,” in contrast to the “romantic” or the “irrational,” associated
with Nietzschean and Sorelian influences, or the “mystic,” exem-
plified by cases such as that of Julius Evola.
6
Regarding the more
general theme of ideology and ideological change, the present study
deals with a corpus that has not been examined much from that
angle. The work of statisticians, those “intellectuals/officials” par
excellence (Isnenghi1979), which is highly specialized, often eso-
teric, has the merit of generating undeniable constitutive effects:
numbers, of course, thanks to which political decisions can be
taken – but first and foremost a series of tools (the Gini coeffi-
cient probably being that period’s best-known legacy) which allow
the issues to which these decisions referred to acquire manage-
able coherence.
7
Regarding the numerous attempts to define Fascist ideology, this
study adopts a rigorously nominalistic position. The two decades
during which Italian Fascism was in power saw the appearance of a
wide variety of discourses whose purpose or effect was to support
it. In that sense, it is more consistent with the complexity of histori-
cal reality to take into account the diversity, in both content and
form, of the ideological constructs that existed under Fascism than
to try to identify a highly improbable ideal type or common mini-
mum denominator.
8
All the same, a correct account of social real-
ity’s inherent complexity requires that the products of intellectual
activity be examined by analysis of a corpus whose constitution is
the result of an objective dynamic – that is, by combining the analy-
sis of discourses with that of practices and techniques that can con-
vert the object of theoretical speculation into an object of practical
16 A Total Science

32. intervention, as well as with the study of channels, networks, appa-
ratuses, and institutions that allow for the dissemination and even-
tual acknowledgment of these discourses and practices.
Rather than following a strictly chronological approach, which is
the one generally favoured by authors interested in a specific insti-
tution such as government statistics, I have chosen to examine the
statistical field, a more complex territory, by considering various
dimensions and combining diachronic and synchronic perspectives.
The first half of this book (chapters1,2,and3) thus deals with the
emergence and structuring of the Italian statistical field, while the
latter half (chapters4and5) is dedicated to the project of a “total
science”. Indeed, while a rather neat division of intellectual labour
between (a) mathematical statistics (essentially probability calcu-
lus), (b) statistics as an activity concerned with the production of
quantitative series according to rigorously defined protocols of
inquiry (broadly, official statistics), and (c) academic social science
– the analysis of economic and social phenomena through theoreti-
cal constructs developed in institutional contexts different from the
context of the design of tools intended for numerical data analysis
(mathematical statistics) as well as that of the collection and tabula-
tion of data (official statistics) – emerged in many other countries
during more or less the same period, the ambition of Italian statisti-
cians, and more specifically of the group that came to be identified
withstatistica metodologica, consisted of maintaining a state of
non-division among those three activities. This was achieved
through a remarkable effort to: develop the discipline within the
academy through the creation of increasingly complex structures
that sought to insure the autonomy of statistics vis-à-vis mathemat-
ics (laboratories, institutes, schools, and faculties of statistics);
establish a strong position for the scientific element within gov-
ernment statistics, thanks notably to the bureaucratic-scientific
activities of many academic statisticians during the war and its
immediate aftermath; and aggressively seek the annexation of the
various domains of social and economic inquiry to statistics
through a massive editorial presence and the creation of learned
societies (in sociology, eugenics/genetics, etc.) dominated by mem-
bers of the field. If the notion of a statistical field seems here espe-
cially suggestive, it is precisely because of the homology that exists
between the cognitive project of a “total” science and the extended
institutional space its promoters were able to occupy.
Introduction 17

33. The concept of a statistical field offers the advantage of consider-
ing together aspects that are often examined separately: the theoret-
ical and epistemological foundations of a science, its applications,
the formation of a scientific community and its institutions, the
political views of its members, etc. This stands in contrast with the
kind of analysis that is founded upon a neat distinction between, on
the one hand, the “internal logical-scientific coherence” of theories,
categories, propositions, and arguments, whose examination
belongs to the philosophy of science, and, on the other hand, the
place of these theories, propositions, arguments, etc. as “social phe-
nomena interacting with other social phenomena in the formation
of the public sphere” (Padovan1999,26). Focusing on the statisti-
calfieldrather than on the statisticalsystemorinstitution, talking
about astatisticalrather than ademographicfield, implies that the
set of relations thus identified can be granted a significant degree of
density and consistency as well as efficiency. The hierarchic pat-
terns that were established at the precise moment when statistics
gained its disciplinary autonomy were reproduced throughout the
discipline’s institutionalization. Similarly, clashes over a number of
issues (demography, for instance) cannot be understood unless they
are set against the contending forces that govern the field. The
dynamics of relationships between official statistics and the whole
field also vary according to the combinations of scientific prestige
and bureaucratic power that can be observed at any given moment.
Even if I cannot envision an exhaustive study – the thorough exami-
nation of Italian statisticians’ intellectual project probably exceeds
the abilities of a single individual – using the concept of field allows
for a simultaneously global and dynamic perspective.
The structure of the study is as follows. Chapter1concerns the
genesis of the statistical field, that is, the emergence of Italian statis-
tics as a specific scientific discipline. This came about through a
process that involved a radical departure from the intellectual cor-
pus that had been developed throughout the nineteenth century
under the name ofstatistica, as well as a systematic demarcation
from the older disciplines of mathematics and political economy.
This episode, which occurred between1905and1914, was charac-
terized by the arrival on the academic scene of a new generation of
statisticians (the most brilliant among them would dominate the
field for half a century) and the simultaneous rise of a “new” sta-
tistics, in which the technical dimension would become central.
18 A Total Science

34. Almost at one stroke, there was an obvious change in the style of
statistical papers, in the nature of the debates that mobilized the
attention of statisticians, and in the skills required to take part in
these discussions. It was during this period that the methodological
perspective later identified with the Italian statistical school was
first put forward, therefore settling once and for all the recurrent
dilemma of nineteenth-century statistica, whether statistics was a
method or a science.
In chapters2and3, we move from the history of statistics as a
discipline to that of the institutional vectors that led to the structur-
ing of the statistical field. Structuring may be defined as the com-
plex and multi-faceted expansion and ramification process the field
went through during the1910s,1920s, and1930s. More precisely, I
intend to examine the infrastructure or material basis of the field.
Compared with a discipline such as philosophy, statistics – which
combines highly abstract procedures (conceptual definition, index
construction, hypothesis formulation, etc.) with others that are
much more time-consuming (data collection and classification,
computations, etc.) – require the maximization of human and mate-
rial resources through an efficient division of labour. Accordingly,
from the1910s on, the history of Italian statistics was punctuated
by the creation of a variety of cooperative ventures, of which the
laboratory offered the basic model (and the institute, a more com-
plex avatar). If the word laboratory connotes the scientific ideal
with which its promoters yearned to be identified, the statistical
laboratory – and, on a larger scale, the official statistical bureau
envisioned as a national laboratory – can also be considered, with
regard to the division of labour, as an analog of the industrial enter-
prise. This structuring of the field was pursued simultaneously
along the two above-mentioned axes, that of the scientific or aca-
demic world – with the expansion in statistical teaching, the devel-
opment of statistical research, and the dissemination of its results
through a growing number of editorial ventures – and that of the
practical world, with the radical reorganization of government sta-
tistics by the mid-1920s, of course, but also with changes that
occurred during the war and its immediate aftermath, when many
“new” statisticians were recruited as technical experts by the Italian
government or by international organizations in order to address,
scientifically, a number of political and economic issues. Their capac-
ity to be present in both worlds, to combine theory and practice,
Introduction 19

35. science and action, is what accounts for the eminent position
reached by statisticians in the more general Italian social-scientific
scene during the interwar period.
Chapters4and5will examine more closely the project of a
“total” quantitative social science, thus considering the statistical
field from the perspective of the territories or domains of reality
over which statisticians have tried to extend their intellectual
authority. To be sure, such an undertaking, which could not but
encounter some competition on the part of other social scientists,
especially economists, had to be built on stable foundations. I will
thus start by analysing the statisticians’ “discourse on method”
whose purpose was to establish the epistemological priority of their
discipline over any form of inquiry about reality, the effect of which
was to set up a hierarchy that defined the field, i.e., the superiority
of pure over applied statistics. From this methodological discourse,
it becomes possible to decipher a set of theoretical positions that
correspond to the general structure of the field and in which the
rivalry between those who considered themselves first and foremost
statisticians and those who identified themselves primarily as econ-
omists appears central. One can also reconstruct from this method-
ological discourse another defining feature of the field: the idea of a
peculiar originality of Italian statistics as opposed to mainstream
(or Anglo-Saxon) mathematical statistics, which reached its peak
on the occasion of theSocietà italiana di statistica’s first scientific
meeting (1939), with Gini’s address on “the dangers of statistics”.
This ambitious project of a “critical revision of the principles and
methods of statistics,” which was launched in a context of growing
isolation from the international statistical community because of
the war, may indeed be interpreted as a kind of scientific equivalent
(or better: a theoretical sublimation) of the Fascist ideal of “autar-
chy.” I will then describe the various architectonics put forward by
Italian statisticians as competing frameworks for the project of an
encompassing quantitative social science. Among the imaginary
topographies that were elaborated in this context, the most radical
and comprehensive was surely Gini’s neo-organicism, in which the
biological dimension remained fundamental – but the major blocks
in this Grand Theory (the cyclical theory of nations, economic
pathology, the study of primitive populations) succeeded in holding
together and in resisting its critics, up to a point, only as long as its
20 A Total Science

36. author was able to spend the considerable scientific capital he had
earned in the sub-field of statistical methodology.
Finally, this totalitarian intellectual undertaking includes the stat-
isticians’ contribution to political theory, in which the schemes and
devices that were characteristic of their professional habitus (mea-
surement, weighing and aggregation procedures, analysis of con-
comitant variations) were put to use in an effort to rationalize
authoritarianism. It also includes an incursion into the field of prac-
tical politics, where the debate about economic planning that went
on during the last years of the Fascist regime and in its immediate
aftermath pitted those who, in spite of the corporatist discourse
they could not openly discard, remained faithful to classical eco-
nomic orthodoxy, against those who, reviving the idea of “corpora-
tist statistics” that had timidly emerged in the mid-1930s, called for
much more significant regulation of the economy, in which statis-
tics and statisticians would hold key positions and simultaneously
achieve their own personal political reconversions.
The conclusion will briefly examine the state of the statistical
field following the Second World War in an attempt to measure the
respective proportions of continuity and difference with regard to
the preceding era.
Introduction 21

37. 1
The Emergence of Modern
Italian Statistics
The purpose of this chapter is to account for the emergence of mod-
ern Italian statistics as an autonomous scientific discipline. More
precisely, it seeks to examine the manner and stages through which
a specific domain was identified, demarcated, and carved out for
statisticians over a period of ten to fifteen years within the Italian
academic world. To this end, we will examine a number of episodes
intended to establish the nature of statistics as a discipline, and thus
to support the legitimacy of its claims. The goal of the work con-
ducted during that period was to draw boundaries that distin-
guished statistics from contiguous domains of inquiry or potential
competitors, to equip its practitioners with a conceptual and techni-
cal repertoire that endowed them with specific skills, and to rede-
fine a certain number of concepts, problems and objects in a way
that enabled some form of exclusive appropriation. The most sig-
nificant result of this process was to weaken the very close identifi-
cation, up to the turn of the twentieth century, ofstatisticaas an
intellectual undertaking with its political-administrative accep-
tance. On the eve of World War I, the word referred to a new set of
theories, hypotheses, techniques, devices and problems (probability
calculus, correlation coefficients, index numbers, representative
method, etc.) whose successful command required a considerable
intellectual investment. This development, evidenced by the elabo-
ration of a series of formal devices that resulted in an exponential
growth of the space taken up by mathematical notation in statisti-
cal papers and textbooks, led to a redefinition of the statistician’s
profile; it also brought about the emergence of a social space and of
networks that were open only to those individuals whose compe-

38. tence was acknowledged. Thus, a porous yet very real boundary
was established between a statistical field and other, external areas.
Even if the empirical and pragmatic dimensions of statistical activ-
ity remained extremely important for many within the field and
offered a scientific-bureaucratic basis for their activities, the figure
of the statistician was no longer synonymous with that of the civil
servant attached to registration or census duties. Henceforth, one
could find statisticians in laboratories, in industry, in the banking
system, in insurance companies, and they concerned themselves
with a whole set of theoretical issues largely independent of the prac-
tical problems that were the domain of official statistics. At the same
time, a statistician’s competence could be measured by his command
of the knowledge and routines that allowed him to move within the
complex social space encompassed by the statistical field.
The emancipation of Italian statistics, which primarily occurred
during the fifteen years or so between the turn of the century and
the Great War, was a two-pronged process. On the one hand, Ital-
ian statistics, which had up until then been understood as an admin-
istrative-social-scientific activity that made use of numbers, but
relied on a very basic repertoire of mathematical techniques, had to
reach a higher technical level: that is, it had to adopt an elaborate
set of highly formal devices, but without becoming a sub-field of
the noble and well-established discipline of mathematics. On the
other hand, statistics, while it developed a more general character,
nevertheless also had to resist the attraction of political economy, a
discipline that lacked the lustre of mathematics but still benefited
from an undeniable theoretical prestige and a certain level of for-
malization, and to which statistics was closely linked, through the
choice of its objects of inquiry. The increasing autonomy of the field
of Italian statistics, which may be described as a “mathematiza-
tion” process, will be analysed as follows. First, we will draw a pic-
ture of the periods preceding and following the turn of the century,
so as to highlight the rapid mutation the intellectual activity desig-
nated as statistica underwent at that time. We will then consider
two episodes that had a strong structuring effect on the genesis of
modern Italian statistics: (a) the appropriation, by Italian statis-
ticians, of the concept and calculus of probability, notions with
which they were previously mostly unfamiliar and that would be
posited, from then on, as a central element of the discipline’s core;
and (b) the development, in the wake of specific debates relative to
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 23

39. Pareto’s wealth distribution curve, of the Gini coefficient, a flexible
tool that would advance the representation of statistics as a general
method rather than a specific science. Finally, we will examine the
exclusion or marginalization this redefinition of statistics caused
for those who were trained before the turn of the century and who
were not able to incorporate the skills now vital for acknowledg-
ment as a member of the field.
theoretical and methodological statistics
before and after 1900
The “mathematization” of Italian statistics, exemplified by the
existence of methodological debates that required a command of a
number of complex mathematical notions and techniques as well as
by the growing space devoted to mathematical notation in statisti-
cal papers and handbooks, can be seen as the most conspicuous
trait, the graphical imprint, so to speak, of the emergence of a dis-
tinct and relatively autonomous statistical field. During the
Risorgimento, by convention dated1815–60(Riall1994), the word
statistics evoked an essentially descriptive literature, within which
the role of figures and tables was initially quite modest. The estab-
lishment of a centralized administrative system in the wake of uni-
fication, the beginnings of industrialization, the resonance of
Adolphe Quetelet’s work all combined to stimulate an interest in
exhaustive and precise knowledge of the new nation’s economic
and social conditions, and in the development of a wide range of
statistical inquiries (Patriarca1996).
1
Yet neither decennial cen-
suses, nor the steady flow of statistical reports on industry or the
living conditions of labouring classes during the late nineteenth cen-
tury, although they led to a surge in volumes and articles replete
with figures and tables, and embodied a redefinition of statistics,
which added to its “functions of description, compilation and data
collection” that of the “investigation of the laws and causes (…) of
the concatenation of facts,” put into play any especially complex
mathematical notions (Pazzagli1980,800). The bibliography of
Luigi Bodio (1840–1920), who was the dominant figure in Italian
statistics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, is quite
revealing as to the objects and forms that filled the intellectual uni-
verse of statisticians in that era (Favero1999). Bodio was the head
of Italian official statistics from1873to1898, secretary of the
24 A Total Science

40. Giunta Centrale di Statistica del Regno d’Italia from1872to1898,
a position that was then transformed into that of president of the
Consiglio Superiore di Statistica, which he held until his death. This
high-profile bureaucrat, who became senator in1900, was also one
of the founding fathers of the International Statistical Institute, of
which he was secretary from1885to1905, and then president from
1909to1920(Bonelli1969). Although the bulk of Bodio’s writings
were concerned with the disclosure of original data (census results,
vital statistics, industrial statistics, statistics of property, strikes,
instruction, crime, marriage, divorce, etc.), the energy he devoted to
methodological concerns, i.e., reflection on the construction and
implementation of cognitive devices, was in no way negligible.
These dealt mainly with problems such as the coordination of data
collection, the harmonization of classification methods, the con-
struction of mortality tables, or the fine-tuning of various progress
indexes (economic, social, moral, intellectual) – that is, with prob-
lems and tools closely related to the specific objects of each inquiry.
The mathematical skills that were then required of a technician of
statistics remained quite modest. Turning to the statistical writings
featured during the same period in a first-rate economic journal
such asLa Riforma sociale, for instance, one finds the same implicit
view of methodology: essentially, how can one grasp, with the help
of figures and numbers, social phenomena such as the professions,
social classes, unemployment, strikes, international trade, etc.
(Marucco2000a). Opposed to the fundamentally concrete or spe-
cific nature of the methodological concerns that were characteristic
of Bodio’s work or ofLa Riforma sociale,was the abstract and
multipurpose nature of the objects that aroused the interest of the
new generation of statisticians of the early1900s: probability calcu-
lus, correlation indexes, concentration ratios, interpolation tech-
niques, etc. The objects of applied methodological reflection
remained; they even, at times, mobilized major investments, but
from then on they held a subordinate position within the hierarchy
of methodological issues. The upsurge of a new set of problems,
concepts, techniques, and skills, by the specialization it entailed,
drove the establishment of new divisions of labour and, conse-
quently, the emergence of a field distinct from the pragmaticscienza
dell’amministrazione(administrative science) as well as from the
more theoretically orientedscienze sociali(social sciences), between
which statistics had been divided up to then.
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 25

41. TheGiornale degli economisti( GDE) offers a vantage point to
one who wishes to observe the nature of this change. Created in
1875under the patronage of the Associazione per il progresso degli
studi economici and under the guidance, at first, of Eugenio Forti,
who was sympathetic to the interventionist, industrialist, and pro-
tectionist positions defended by the economists of the Lombardo-
Venetian school such as Fedele Lampertico, Luigi Luzzatti and
Luigi Cossa, it soon ceased publishing, in1878. It began anew in
1886, this time under the intellectual control of Maffeo Pantaleoni
and Vilfredo Pareto, the two beacons of Italian marginalism, eco-
nomic liberalism, and free trade. In1911,the
GDEchanged its title
toGiornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica.Alberto Beneduce
and Giorgio Mortara, both professors of statistics and both recently
nominated (asreferendari) to the Consiglio Superiore di Statistica,
joined Pantaleoni and Antonio De Viti De Marco, another outspo-
ken partisan of laissez-faire economics, specializing in public
finance, as co-editors (Bagiotti1952,177–207). From1875to
1920– that is, until the birth of new statistical journals such as
MetronandEconomia –the
GDEpublished no fewer than275
papers under the heading of theoretical and applied statistics,
according to its1939cumulative index. (Its classification system
was derived from that of the International Economic Bibliography,
prepared under the auspices of the League of Nations, and whose
Italian section had been entrusted to the
GDE[see Bagiotti1952,
197–9].) This endurance contrasts favourably with the ephemeral
existence of another significant statistical journal, theArchivio di
Statistica(1876–83), edited by Luigi Bodio, Cesare Correnti, and
Paolo Boselli under the theoretical guidance of Angelo Messedaglia,
whose inaugural lectures at the University of Rome were regularly
published in theArchivio(Favero2000). Above all, compared with
theAnnali di Statistica, which was created in1871mainly to pub-
lish official statistical reports and inquiries, the
GDEgranted consid-
erable room to the theoretical and methodological dimensions of
statistics, with approximately a third of the above- mentioned275
articles falling under this sub-heading.
The semantic range, the nature of the debates, and the rhetoric
falling under the category of statistical theory and methodology
varied considerably during this half-century. Conveniently, the year
1900is a useful reference point in this matter. In the last issue pub-
lished that year, one finds, under the name of Achille Loria, a brief
26 A Total Science

42. article entitled ‘Intorno ad alcune opinioni del Bortkiewicz in
materia di statistica teoretica’. Loria (1857–1943), then a professor
of political economy at the University of Padua, was a well-known
figure in Italian social science and theoretical socialism for his work
on ground rent and books such asLa legge di popolazione ed il
sistema sociale(1882),La teoria economica della costituzione
politica(1886), andAnalisi della proprietà capitalista(1889)
(Faucci2000). His statistical paper anticipated the controversy
about the law of small numbers that would unfurl in the pages of
the
GDEfrom1907to1910(about which more will be said later).
However, it is of interest not because of its intrinsic merits (Loria’s
paper would be completely ignored by the protagonists of the later
debate), but because of the considerable space it devoted to mathe-
matical notation: by its graphical appearance, it broke neatly with
the literary style characteristic of the contributions to statistical the-
ory published up to then by the
GDE.
The fifteen or so articles dealing with statistical methodology that
appeared in the
GDEbefore1900constitute a clearly confined cor-
pus on their own. Published over a period of some twenty years
(1877–1895), they were the work of a group of six authors: Carlo
Francesco Ferraris (1877,1886,1891,1895), Giovanni Battista
Salvioni (1888,1892,1895), Giuseppe Salvatore Del Vecchio
(1877,1878), Filippo Virgilii (1889,1890), Antonio Gabaglio
(1878), and Giovanni Della Bona (1878). With the exception of the
latter, each of these authors was quoted by at least one of the oth-
ers, as illustrated in the textual network that appears in figure1.1.
The recurrent theme in the corpus was that of the definition and
partition of statistics: the idea was to delimit the proper domain of
statistics within the larger conceptual space of the social sciences,
and to sketch its specific topography as well as its internal dividing
lines. Thus, in his1876–77inaugural lecture at the University of
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 27
Ferraris Gabaglio Della Bona
Del Vecchio Virgilii Salvioni
Figure1.1: Theoretical statistics in theGiornale degli economisti(1877–1895): textual
network and quotation practices.

43. Bologna, where he had just been nominated to the chair of statistics
following the1875ministerial by-law relative to the teaching of
statistics withingiurisprudenzafaculties, Del Vecchio (1845–1917)
began by summarizing the history of statistics, underlining its “pos-
itive” character, and defining it as “the science of the masses of
human and social phenomena, of their movements and of their
laws” (1877,101; see also Giva1990). Ferraris (1850–1924), who
held a chair in administrative sciences at the University of Pavia and
then one in statistics at Padua, exhibited a similar vision, which, in
the context of the construction of the post-unification Italian state,
sought to define the specific function of the social sciences, notably
of statistics, vis-à-vis the administrative and legal sciences (1877;
Beneduce1996). The same can be said of Gabaglio, whoseTeoria
generale della statistica, published originally in1880(an extended
version was issued in1888), remained a reference until the end of
the century. His inaugural lecture at the University of Pavia in1878
insisted, following the path opened by Quetelet, on the validity its
mathematical dimension conferred upon statistics. One of the cen-
tral questions of the rhetoric of these inaugural lectures and of the
introductory chapters of textbooks, regarding which every author
was expected to take a stand, was that of deciding if statistics was a
method or a full-fledged science, with its specific domain of inquiry.
Most authors preferred the second of these alternatives, but their
answer was generally of a syncretic character (among the textbooks
that included this topic, we may mention Ferroglio1880, Gabaglio
1888, Virgilii1891, Errera1892, and Tammeo1896). All the arti-
cles that came under the heading of theoretical statistics during
those years shared the same concerns regarding the nature of the
discipline as well as the same outspoken confidence in its “positive”
character. Undoubtedly, as C. Pazzagli, a student of that period,
wrote, the paternity of such views should be granted to Messe-
daglia; his inaugural lecture at the University of Rome in1872
already drew the major outlines of the program to which the above-
quoted authors would adhere (an extended version of it appeared in
theArchivio di statisticain1879), but its dissemination was insured
by the
GDE(1980,801).
There is a striking contrast, though, between the insistence all
these authors put on the privileged position statistics must be
awarded because of its mathematical character, the frequent appeal
they make to the authority of Quetelet, Laplace, Fourier, or
28 A Total Science

44. Cournot, and the perfectly literary bent of their own writings. Curi-
ously, these passionate commendations of numbers are conspicuous
for their lack of them. Such is the case with Del Vecchio’s and
Gabaglio’s lectures, but also with Della Bona’s article, which,
despite the promising title “Le leggi dei grandi e dei piccoli numeri
nelle scienze fisiche e nelle scienze sociali” (“The Laws of Large and
Small Numbers in Physical and Social Sciences”), contains neither
formulae nor data. Surely, we do find some sparse data, a few per-
centages, a mean or a ratio here or there – for instance in Ferraris’s
articles – but the main thrust of these contributions is the search for
the discipline’s foundations; the authors’ imagination is driven by
the taxonomic dimension, as illustrated by the frequent use of the
word “partizione” (notably present in the titles of Salvioni1887
and Ferraris1891). Only in F. Virgilii’s article on historical and
mathematical statistics (1889) do we find explicit mention of math-
ematical formulae (on probability calculus). As Pazzagli wrote, in a
paper quoting from Gabaglio’s treatise as well as from Messe-
daglia’s inaugural lecture, “notwithstanding the repeated assertion
of the innovative role granted to mathematical calculation, con-
cretely (the authors) often limit themselves ‘to the most elementary
notions of statistical arithmetic’ and come to admit … that in many
cases ‘statistics can content itself with very modest mathematical
operations, of an almost elementary character’’’ (1980,810).
In statistical textbooks published during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, the place awarded to mathematics is also quite
minimal. In the most elaborate cases, that of Gabaglio’s treatise
(1880), for instance (but see also Majorana-Calatabiano1889or
Errera1892, who put forward the same methodological program),
it is restricted to a very succinct presentation of probability calcu-
lus, a somewhat more explicit exposition of the computation of var-
ious types of means (arithmetical, geometrical, harmonic) and of
the varieties of graphic presentation (tables, diagrams, stereo-
grams). As a matter of fact, Gabaglio’s mathematical orientation,
modest by later standards, landed him in trouble: after having held
the statistics chair at the University of Pavia since1878,hechoseto
leaveitattheendofthe1880s, moving back to the communal
Technical Institute he had come from. According to his biographer,
“efforts made … in favour of strengthening the mathematical
method in a discipline traditionally taught within law faculties and
where the use of statistics was exclusively conceived to support
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 29

45. legally-oriented research were not appreciated very much, precisely
because of the excessively technical orientation that was adopted”
(D’Autilia1998,817). A textbook published by Napoleone Cola-
janni in1904seems on the other hand a perfect example of that
statistica that was on the verge of leaving the scene. It included a
discussion about thevexata quaestioof whether statistics was a sci-
ence of social facts or a method, and thus relevant also for the facts
of nature. It also suggested a partition that was derived from the
one proposed by German statistician Rümelin and disseminated in
Italy by Ferraris, Salvioni, and Virgilii. This partition was founded
upon a division between “methodological” statistics – itself subdi-
vided into “theoretical” statistics or general methodology and
“technical” statistics or special methodology – and “expositive”
statistics – also subdivided, into “descriptive” statistics, whose
purpose was to take note of the “quantitative manifestation of
observed phenomena,” and “investigative” statistics, whose aim it
was to discover “causes and empirical laws” (Colajanni1904,
100–1).
The next quarter of a century (1900–24) witnessed a considerable
change in this regard, since the
GDEpublished during that period no
fewer than228articles dealing with one or the other aspect of sta-
tistics. Table1.1illustrates this growth, the articles being classified
according to four categories.
In relative terms, it is quite obvious that the most significant
increase concerns the category of theory and methodology. But the
most important thing is that this increase accompanied the emer-
gence of a new generation of statisticians and a change in the con-
tent of articles published under that heading. Indeed, authors from
the first network simply vanish from the pages of the journal and
new names emerge, such as those of Giorgio Mortara, Corrado
Gini, Costantino Bresciani, Luigi Amoroso, and Rodolfo Benini.
2
30 A Total Science
Table1.1: Statistical articles published in theGiornale degli economisti,1875–99and
1900–24(numbers and percentages)
Topics 1875–1899 1900–1924
Theoretical and
methodological statistics
15 (23.4) 70 (30.7)
Economic and financial statistics 27 (42.2) 95 (41.7)
Demographic statistics 12 (18.8) 44 (19.3)
Social statistics 10 (15.6) 19 (8.3)
Total 64 (100.0) 228 (100.0)

46. The generational character of this methodological divide appears
clearly in table1.2, where the latter are compared with the authors
of the former group.
The two groups are clearly different. The earlier group, Del
Vecchio, Salvioni, Ferraris, and Gabaglio, were all born by the
middle of the nineteenth century and their careers had been
launched at the time of Italy’s unification. The later cohort,
Bresciani, Gini, Mortara, and Amoroso, were all born in the1880s
and came of age during the first decade of the twentieth century,
becoming professors soon after. Between these two groups are
Virgilii and Benini, whose entry into the academy went back to the
late1880s and whose divergent trajectories offer a remarkable por-
trait of the transformation undergone by statistics at the turn of the
century. Virgilii’s position within the statistical field became more
and more peripheral as time went by, the work he published being
aimed more and more at a public outside the field; his famous little
Manuale di statisticawas reprinted regularly up to the late1930s,
but it remained completely immersed in the problems and vocabu-
lary of late nineteenth century statistics (De Plato1999). Already in
1903the commission in charge of examining Virgilii’s demand for
promotion to the rank ofprofessore ordinario, and on which, inci-
dentally, Benini – who was only three years older – sat, had criti-
cized his “lack of originality” as well as “the absence of a body of
work in which mathematical applications to statistics, which he
recommended so strongly on a methodological level, were effec-
tively put to use” (Marucco1999a,508). As one of the twelve con-
tenders for the chair of statistics at the University of Palermo in
1908, Virgilii, who was forty-three years old at that time, was not
even considered for the short list, which included the names of the
much younger Alberto Beneduce (thirty-one), Costantino Bresciani
(twenty-six), Corrado Gini (twenty-four), and Giorgio Mortara
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 31
Table1.2: Most frequent authors on statistical theory and methodology in thegde,
1877–95and1900–24
Pre-1900 group Post-1900 group
A. Gabaglio, 1840–1909 R. Benini, 1862–1956
G.S. Del Vecchio, 1845–1917 C. Bresciani, 1882–1963
G.B. Salvioni, 1849–1925 C. Gini, 1884–1965
C.F. Ferraris, 1850–1924 G. Mortara, 1885–1967
F. Virgilii, 1865–1950 L. Amoroso, 1886–1965

47. (twenty-three) (acs 1897–1910,b.275). When Virgilii applied for
the Padua chair of statistics in1913, the commission described his
Manuale(which had by then been reprinted fifteen times) as “ele-
mentary” and deplored its lack of any presentation of more recent
statistical developments (acs 1912–16,b.6). Benini, on the other
hand, would play a leading role in the discipline’s redefinition. At
the beginning of his career, he had held a chair in the history of
commerce at the University of Bari, from1889to1896.Hethen
moved on to Perugia, where he was appointed to a chair in econom-
ics, and, a year later (1897), to Pavia, where he held a chair in sta-
tistics until1907. He then moved to the University of Rome, where
he held the chair of statistics until1918, and then, until his retire-
ment, a chair in political economy (Dall’Aglio1966; Favero
2006b). Benini was the first statistician to declare categorically, in
hisPrincipiididemografia(1901), that statistics was fundamen-
tally a methodological discipline; he wrote that it was “in substance
a branch of Logic and, more precisely, amethod”(1901a,10). He
was also the author ofPrincipii di statistica metodologica(1906),
the seminal work that would become a cardinal reference for the
new generation and would consign all previous textbooks to obliv-
ion. However, as in any kind of generation gap, the important fac-
tor here was not age as such, but rather the state of statistical
knowledge at the time of these statisticians’ intellectual training.
The decisive fact in this regard is what S. Stigler calls “the English
breakthrough” linked with the names of Galton and Pearson (1986,
265). Thus, for instance, Benini was the first Italian author to estab-
lish a clear difference between the widely used but vague notion of
statistical relation and that of correlation, which was defined by the
existence of concomitant variations (1901b), as Bresciani would
later acknowledge (1909a). How long it would take for such a dis-
tinction to take hold is evident in the still vague acceptance of the
notion of correlation we find in Niceforo’sForza e ricchezza(1906),
a work that otherwise made significant use of statistical data.
The advent of the mathematical dimension within Italian statisti-
cal culture is exemplified by Vito Volterra’s1901paper in the
GDE:
“Sui tentativi di applicazione delle matematiche alle scienze
biologiche e sociali.” That Volterra, the major figure within Italian
mathematics, chose to write for a journal read by economists and
statisticians, testified symbolically to the new turn taken by Italian
social science. The Pareto-Edgeworth debate about the income dis-
32 A Total Science

48. tribution curve, which occurred within the pages of theGiornalein
1896–97, was an early manifestation of that turn. Volterra would
publish again in theGiornalein1906, giving an enthusiastic review
of Pareto’sManuel d’économie politique. And Volterra was once
again closely associated with the destiny of Italian statistics when
he presided over the rebirth of the Società italiana per il progresso
delle scienze (sips), which, in1907, held its first meeting since
1875. Participants in this meeting voted in favour of a division of
thesipsinto fourteen sections, the precise headings of which would
represent the “positive and experimental disciplines” – including
political economy and statistics as a combined section – so as to
avoid, according to one of them, the risk that the Society would “be
invaded by pettifogging lawyers, political schemers, or literary
hacks” and make sure that it “remained insulated from the petty
quarrelling of jurists, the logomachy of sociologists as well as the
ideologies of philosophers and theosophists” (Ricci1907,1107).
Among the most active participants in that meeting and the follow-
ing (1908) were Benini, Gini, Bresciani, and Mortara, the old guard
generally staying away. From then on, highly technical statistical
papers were published on a regular basis, in the
GDEas well in other
journals where statistical literature was welcome. Probability the-
ory, Bortkiewicz’s law of small numbers, the mathematical proper-
ties of various types of means, the measurement of correlation,
concentration, or dependence, interpolation techniques, etc., all
became frequent subjects of exposition or debate. Bresciani played
a decisive part and was in fact the main Italian relay in the dissemi-
nation of Anglo-Saxon contributions during these years. In his
1909papers dedicated to the measurement of correlation and to the
theory of frequency distributions, which both had a clearly
didactical intent, he insisted on the “unfamiliarity” of Italian statis-
ticians with regard to the methods developed “in England by mem-
bers of the so-called biometric school” (1909a,401),andonthe
fact that “certain recent methods have not yet been taken into
account byallthose who do statistical research” (1909b,701). The
sole Italian names he mentioned were those of Benini and of the
engineer Luigi Perozzo (to which we may add that of physician and
anthropometrician Ridolfo Livi, from whom he borrowed data).
Bresciani’s role as disseminator of foreign contributions at that time
is also borne out by the chronicles he published in1907under the
title “Rassegna del movimento scientifico, Statistica,” in which he
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 33

49. signalled and summarized the work of many English authors
(including Pearson, Edgeworth, Galton, and Yule), and the other
wide-ranging epistemological and methodological papers he pub-
lished during the following years (1910a,1914a, and1914b). It
should therefore come as no surprise that by1913, just a dozen
years after Benini’s pronouncement on this issue, Umberto Ricci
could write: “It has become a common saying that statistics is a
method” (1913,1). And two years later, in the second edition of his
Teoria statistica generale e demografica, A. Contento, who held the
chair of statistics at the University of Catania, summarized the evo-
lution of Italian statistics by distinguishing three moments: that of
description, which covered more or less the first half of the nine-
teenth century and was concerned with the collection and display of
facts; that of investigation, the program for which had been set
forth by Messedaglia and that consisted of inquiring into the causes
of phenomena; and finally, that of theory or methodology, which
Contento defined as “that complex of fundamental rules to be fol-
lowed when we study phenomena” (1915,6; in the first edition,
Contento, while presenting the rival viewpoints regarding the nature
of statistics – science or method? – had already sided with the
Beninian or methodological view [1909,28–9]). Mastering this
new body of concepts, problems, techniques and know-how
required a much higher level of specialization and expertise; thus,
giving way to a new division of intellectual labour, it contributed
significantly to the emergence of a distinctive statistical field.
mathematics, statistics and probability
The existence of a conscious field-building strategy, centred on
the demarcation and specification of an autonomous statistical
domain, appears with utmost clarity when one considers the man-
ner in which the concept and calculus of probability were seized
upon by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Up to
that time, probability theory had not been the object of sustained
attention on the part of Italian statisticians, even though they often
referred to it. To be sure, engineer Luigi Perozzo had devoted a cele-
brated article to this topic as early as1883, yet most of the text-
books used for the teaching of statistics by the turn of the century
did not go much beyond the most elementary notions of probabil-
ity, even though they attempted to earn some symbolic credit by
34 A Total Science

50. evoking what was still an esoteric topic. The fact that Perozzo was
an engineer was of course significant, since his training was thus
radically different from that of most professors of statistics, who
often came from law faculties. Only with Benini’s1906Principii di
metodologia statistica, in which some forty pages were dedicated to
the “elementi di calcolo combinatorio e di calcolo delle proba-
bilità,” did this situation begin to change. (It should be mentioned,
however, that he had already published the paper “Probabilità
statistica e probabilità matematica” in1898.) Nonetheless, the first
two editions of Contento’sTeoria statistica(1909and1915),
another significant textbook of the early twentieth century, devoted
only a very limited space (some thirty pages out of six hundred or
so) to probability calculus and its applications. A much more
sophisticated approach to probability could be found at that time
among Italian mathematicians such as Francesco Paolo Cantelli
and Guido Castelnuovo. In1905Cantelli (1875–1966), a mathe-
matician and actuary, publishedSui fondamenti del calcolo delle
probabilità, which would initiate a series a major contributions to
the subject, among which was the “strong” or uniform law of large
numbers (Delsedime1975). His friend and colleague Castelnuovo
(1865–1952), who would become one of the major figures of twen-
tieth-century Italian mathematics, held the course on probability
theory at the University of Rome from the turn of the century. The
very first Italian treatise on the subject,Calcolo delle probabilità,
which was published in1919and had a number of editions, was an
outgrowth of this teaching (Togliatti1978). Up until the publica-
tion of Castelnuovo’s textbook, the reference work on probability
used by Italians was French (Bertrand1889). It should also be men-
tioned that Ugo Broggi and Tullio Bagni had also published, in
1906and1915respectively, monographs in which they made
significant use of probability calculus.
Of the authors who were considered statisticians but who were
not mathematicians by trade or background, the one who made the
most sustained contribution was undoubtedly Corrado Gini. Despite
having studied mathematics (and biology) as an optional subject
within the course of his degree in law, Gini was however obviously
at ease with the topic; he did not lack self-confidence. Over a very
brief span (1907–11) and at a very early age (he was born in1884),
Gini wrote and published a number of papers that established prob-
ability as an essential part of the Italian statistician’s trade as well as
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 35

51. his own reputation within the emerging field. These were his1907
laurea thesis, written under the supervision of Salvioni, about sex
ratio at birth, of which an expanded version was published the fol-
lowing year (Gini1908), a series of theoretical papers published in
various journals and devoted to the concept of probability and its
applications, and a string of polemical articles directed against the
so-called law of small numbers and eliciting bitter reactions from
the law’s exponent Ladislas von Bortkiewicz, who was the most
eminent German mathematical statistician at that time.
Gini’s first significant contribution was “Teoria logica e psicolo-
gica della probabilità,” a lengthy paper written in1907but pub-
lished only after his death; it was written in a less technical style
than the other articles he wrote during the same period, and it pre-
sented his ideas in a more exhaustive manner. In it, Gini wondered
why, given the admittedly paramount importance of the topic,
recent, otherwise accurate statistical treatises had devoted such
scarce, incomplete, and often inaccurate coverage to probability
theory (1907a,7). According to him, this unfortunate situation was
due to the fact that probability theory and its philosophical foun-
dations had up until then been explored by philosophers and math-
ematicians rather than by statisticians, as well as to the still
incomplete character of the theory itself. Gini’s paper was dedicated
to mapping and exploring this territory from a statistician’s point of
view. TheScienza delle probabilitàcould thus be divided into three
distinctive areas: (a) the philosophical, which dealt with the funda-
mentals of the concept and measurement of probability; (b) the
mathematical, or probability calculus per se; and (c) the practical,
which was concerned with applications of probability calculus to
concrete phenomena. This latter part could in turn be divided
between formal or deductive applications, which were concerned
with phenomena the nature of which was well-known, and inves-
tigative or inductive applications, the object of which were phe-
nomena not sufficiently well-known to be ascribed determined
probabilities. As instances of the first type of applications, Gini
mentioned the theory of chance games, that of observation errors,
the distribution of gunshots around a target, the kinetic theory of
gas, etc. As examples of inductive applications, he mentioned
Quetelet’s inquiries on anthropometric characteristics, those of
Galton and Pearson, Bortkiewicz’s law of small numbers, etc. (4–5).
From there, Gini proceeded to make two prescriptive assertions,
36 A Total Science

52. which can be viewed together as a bold move regarding the specifica-
tion of an autonomous statistical field. On the one hand, he put the
formal and investigative applications of probability right at the heart
of statistics broadly conceived: he described these applications as
“the most objective and the most subtle” part of statistics and
defined the discipline’s progress as extending the range of phenom-
ena that could be submitted to the calculus of probabilities. On the
other hand, he designated as properlystatisticalthe practical part of
probability, thus establishing a consequent division of intellectual
labour between philosophers, mathematicians, and statisticians.
Statistics and probability could thus be envisioned as two largely
intersecting sets, and statisticians were not necessarily to be subor-
dinated to mathematicians, since each group could claim hegemony
over its own province within the newScienza. Moreover, given the
technical nature of the subject, philosophers could be challenged by
statisticians within their own domain. Gini’s “Teoria logica e
psicologica” was an instance of this. In fact it was on their own turf
that Gini challenged them when he presented a paper on the con-
cept of probability to the Italian Philosophical Society’s Second
Congress, held in Parma in1907, under the chairmanship of mathe-
matician and philosopher Federigo Enriques (Gini1908). The logi-
cal and psychological theories that gave the1907unpublished
paper its title were, according to Gini, the two dimensions of the
properly philosophical part of the science of probability. The first
one dealt with the concepts of chance and probability and was there
to provide probability calculus with its fundamental principles. The
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 37
Science
of probability
Philosophical part
Mathematical part (probability calculus )per se
Practical or
statistical part
Logical theory (fundamental
principles)
Psychological theory (methods for
determining probabilities)
Deductive applications (well-known
phenomena, determined probabilities)
Inductive applications (little-known
phenomena, undetermined
probabilities)



Figure1.2:Gini’sScienza delle probabilità(1907).

53. second one dealt with the methods “by which we practically deter-
mine fundamental probabilities.” All things being equal, Gini even
credited statisticians with clear overall superiority, arguing that
application of the calculus of probabilities to concrete phenomena
required “full knowledge and long-standing practice of statistical
technique” (3–7).
Gini came back to these issues in the two main theoretical papers
he published on the subject in1907and1908. In both of them,
Gini displayed a remarkable command of the subject as well as a
strongly empirical orientation. In “Contributo alle applicazioni
statistiche del calcolo delle probabilità,” he delved more deeply into
the distinction between deductive and inductive probabilities and,
in the wake of Wilhelm Lexis’s work in the late1870s, examined
problems related to dispersion within statistical series. Interestingly,
the only Italian contribution he mentioned in his thorough review
of the literature was Benini’s1906Principii, thus emphasizing the
novelty of the subject with regard to the Italian statistical tradition.
In “Che cos’è la probabilità,” which was an expanded version of
the paper presented at the1907philosophers’ meeting as well as a
summary of his unpublished paper’s main conclusions, he looked
into the logical foundations of probability and began by recalling
the main criticisms that were made against both the classical and
empirical conceptions of probability.
3
The classical conception of
probability, which was founded upon the notion of the “equi-
possibility” of the modalities of a phenomenon (“the probability of
a phenomenon is the ratio of the number of modalities favourable
to the phenomenon over that of all possible modalities, all modali-
ties being equally possible”), was considered, if not tautological
(equipossibility could only mean equiprobability), at least unclear –
a judgment on the equipossibility of two events relying, according
to some, on the absence of any reason to believe in the inequality of
their probability (the subjective view) or on positive reasons deriv-
ing from the nature of the phenomenon itself (the objective view).
The empirical conception of probability, which was founded upon
the repeated observation of a phenomenon’s occurrence (“the prob-
ability of a phenomenon is given by the ratio of the number of times
a phenomenon is observed and the total number of observations,
given that this latter number is sufficiently high”), was on its part
criticized because of its approximate character (whatever the num-
ber of observations, a higher number would change probabilities).
38 A Total Science

54. Gini criticized both conceptions for considering probability as “an
abstract quality of phenomena, independent from the time and
place circumstances in which phenomena occur”. He suggested a
more comprehensive, but at the same time more concrete defini-
tion, a “new empirical definition” according to which probability
could not be related to a “singular fact” but always to a “concrete
class of phenomena” (1908d,148–51).
In another lengthy paper published in1911(“Considerazioni
sulle probabilità a posteriori e applicazioni al rapporto dei sessi
nelle nascite umane”), Gini sought to bridge the gap between a pri-
ori probabilities and experimental data in a manner that, according
to I. Scardovi, anticipated Carnap’s inductive logic and the revival
of Bayesian methods (Scardovi2001, xiii–xiv). That same year,
Gini’s views were thoroughly discussed by Luigi Galvani, a mathe-
matician at the University of Cagliari, where, at the time, Gini held
the chair in statistics. Even though Galvani’s professoral rank (he
was assistant to the infinitesimal calculus chair) was not equivalent
to that of the younger Gini, getting the attention of a mathema-
tician was, on the part of a non-mathematician, a very clear indi-
cation of his work’s significance. Collaboration between Gini
and Galvani would be strengthened, the same year, by the latter’s
writing of a mathematical appendix to the former’s1911paper.
(This would be a lasting alliance: at Gini’s request, Galvani would
joinistatas head of the mathematics and cartography service in
1926, as well as at the School of Statistics of the University of Rome
in1929.)
Gini’s thesis, which dealt with “the most time-honoured subject
of quantitative social research, birth ratios” (Porter1986,248;see
also Brian and Jaisson2007),andforwhichhewasgrantedthe
Vittorio Emanuele IIaward for social and political sciences by the
University of Bologna, offered an impressive example of the uses to
which probability calculus could be put for analysing social data.
Starting from the fact that statistical observations showed a regular
excess of male over female births but that these observations were
nevertheless subject to measurement error, Gini gathered an exten-
sive array of data and submitted these to critical scrutiny. Making
use of Lexis’s techniques, he examined whether the distribution of
observed excesses across different periods of time, different loca-
tions, or different modalities of other phenomena conformed to
subnormal, normal, or supernormal dispersion, and went on to
The Emergence of Modern Italian Statistics 39

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56. property-owning class to invest in outlying property. Some of them
bought property as far south as what is now Thirty-third Street.
The year of the Great Fire, 1871, Negroes owned four pieces of
church property. That fire stopped at Harrison Street and did not
consume all of the Negro settlement. A second large fire in 1874
spread northeast and burned 812 buildings over an area of forty-
seven acres. With the rebuilding of the city they were pushed
southward to make room for the business district.
In 1900 the most congested area of Negro residence, called the
"Black Belt," was a district thirty-one blocks long and four blocks
wide, extending from Harrison Street on the north to Thirty-ninth
Street on the south, between Wabash and Wentworth avenues.
Although other colonies had been started in other parts of the city,
notably the West Side, at least 50 per cent of the 1900 Negro
population of 30,150 lived in this area. As this main area of Negro
residence grew, the proportion of Negroes to the total Negro
population living in it increased until in 1920 it contained 90 per cent
of the Negroes of the city.
II. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE NEGRO COMMUNITY
In the discussion of race contacts attention is called to the peculiar
conditions which compel Negroes of the city to develop many of
their own institutions and agencies. Partly from necessity and partly
from choice, they have established their own churches, business
enterprises, amusement places, and newspapers. Living and
associating for the most part together, meeting in the same centers
for face-to-face relations, trusting to their own physicians, lawyers,
and ministers, a compact community with its own fairly definite
interests and sentiments has grown up.
The institutions within the Negro community that have been
developed to aid it in maintaining itself and promoting its own
welfare, are of four general types: (1) commercial and industrial

57. enterprises; (2) organizations for social intercourse; (3) religious
organizations; (4) agencies for civic and social betterment.
1. COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES
Commercial and industrial establishments conducted by Negroes are
listed by Ford S. Black in his yearly Blue Book, which serves as a
directory of Negro activities. They increased from 1,200 in 1919 to
1,500 in 1920. The compilation lists 651 on State Street, the main
thoroughfare, 549 on principal cross streets, and more than 300 on
other streets. The increase is strikingly shown in the following
figures: In 1918 Negro business places on Thirty-first Street
numbered nine and seventy-one in 1920; on Thirty-fifth Street there
were forty-seven in 1918 and seventy-seven in 1920. On Cottage
Grove Avenue, Negroes have only recently established themselves in
large numbers, yet between Twenty-eighth and Forty-fifth streets
there are fifty-seven Negro business places, including nine groceries,
three drug-stores, and two undertaking establishments.
A partial list of business places as listed in Black's Blue Book is given:
Art stores 14
Automobile schools and repair shops 10
Bakeries, wholesale and retail 13
Banks 2
Barbershops 211
Baths 2
Blacksmith shops 6
Book and stationery stores 6
Chiropodist 29
Cleaning, dyeing, and repairing establishments 68
Clothing stores 8
Decorators 12
Dressmaking shops 32
Drug-stores 31
Electricians and locksmiths 9
Employment agencies 15

58. Express and storage offices 71
Fish markets 7
Florists 5
Furnace and stove repairing 6
Groceries and delicatessens 119
Hairdressing parlors 108
Hotels 11
Ice-cream and confectionery stores 7
Insurance companies 3
Jewelers 5
Laundries 2
Medicine specialists 9
Millinery shops 15
Music and musical instruments 16
Newspapers and magazines 13
Musicians and music teachers 66
Notions 25
Optometrists 4
Orchestras 1
Photographers 4
Plumbers 4
Printers 20
Public stenographers 6
Real estate offices 52
Restaurants 87
Schools 4
Shoemaking and repairing shops 33
Shoe-shining parlors 26
Sign painters 4
Soft-drink parlors 11
Tailors 62
Toilet articles 10
Undertaking establishments 21
Vending machines 2

59. OLIVET BAPTIST CHURCH
The largest Negro church in Chicago (old building), at Twenty-ninth and
Dearborn streets.

60. ST. MARK'S M.E. CHURCH
Located at Fiftieth Street and Wabash Avenue, built by Negroes.

61. OLIVET BAPTIST CHURCH
The largest Negro church in Chicago, larger and more modern building,
Thirty-first Street and South Park Avenue, purchased recently by Negroes.
2. ORGANIZATIONS FOR SOCIAL INTERCOURSE
Various organizations for social intercourse and mutual helpfulness
have developed in the Negro community. Some are local lodges or
branches of national organizations, and others are purely local and

62. independent. Some are simply for social intercourse, and others
have in addition benefit features, professional interests, etc.
Frequent reference is made in the family histories given in this report
to these various organizations.
Fraternal organizations.—Fraternal organizations are an old
institution among Negroes. In the South they rank next in
importance to the church; in the North they have considerable
prestige. Membership is large and interest is strong. Following is a
list of the most active in Chicago:
Elks, Great Lakes Lodge No. 43, I.B.P.O.
Elks of the World (an independent order of Elks)
Ancient Order of Foresters
Catholic Order of Foresters
American Woodmen
Builders of America
Knights of Pythias
Mosaic Templars of America
Masons
Grand Court Heroines of Jericho of Illinois
Eastern Star
The Golden Circle
Odd Fellows (G.U.O. of O.F.)
Royal Circle of Friends
United Brotherhood of Friendship
Sisters of the Mysterious Ten
All of these organizations, although having their own rituals, serve as
a means of group control and of exchange of views and opinions.
They are also a guaranty against absolute friendlessness, and that is
perhaps one of the strongest motives for the establishment of the
first organizations years ago. Much charitable and relief work is
carried on by these fraternal bodies among their members.
Out of these associations have grown clubs with social activities
among wider circles. There are, for example, the Easter Lily Club,

63. the Mayflower Club, and the Masonic Progressive Club.
Social clubs.—Many of the clubs and societies with social,
educational, or professional interests are modeled after those of the
larger community. There are, for example, the Arts and Letters
Society, the University Society, and Civic Study Club. There are also
many smaller clubs organized for various purposes, but designed
principally to serve the Negro community. There are more than
seventy women's clubs, leagued in the Chicago Federation of
Colored Women's Clubs. There are also the Art and Charity Club,
Chicago Union Charity Club, Cornell Charity, Dearborn Centre, Diana
Charity, East End 30th Ward, East Side Woman's Club, Eureka Fine
Arts, Fideles Charity, Giles Charity, Hyacinth Charity, Ideal
Embroidery Art, Ideal Woman's Club, Imperial Art, Kenwood Center,
Mental Pearls, Mothers' Union, Necessity Club, New Method
Industrial, North Shore, North Side Industrial, Motley Social Uplift,
Phyllis Wheatley Club, Progressive Circle of Kings Daughters, 37th
Ward Civic League, Volunteer Workers, West Side Woman's City
Club, and the Woman's Civic League.
Among the exclusive social clubs, perhaps the most important is the
Appomattox Club. Its membership includes the leading business and
professional men, and it has a well-appointed club building. Its
membership is limited and it carries civic and social prestige.
The Phalanx Club is an organization of government employees. Its
membership is large, though limited by occupational restriction. Its
interests are largely social. The Forty Club and Half Century Club are
purely social and still more exclusive.
Negro professional societies, sometimes formed because of the
objections of whites to the participation of Negroes in white societies
of a similar nature, include the Lincoln Dental Association,
Physicians, Dentists and Pharmacists' Association, a Bar Association,
and a Medical Association.
3. RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS

64. Negro churches.—The church is one of the first and probably one of
the strongest institutions among Negroes. The importance of
churches in the Negro community lies not only in their large
membership and religious influence, but in their provision of a
medium of social control for great numbers of Chicago Negroes, and
in their great value in promoting the adjustment of newcomers.
In the South the churches are the principal centers for face-to-face
relations. They serve as a medium for the exchange of ideas, making
and maintaining friendships, community co-operation, collective
striving, group competition, as well as for the dissemination of
information, assistance and advice on practical problems, and the
upholding of religious ideals. The pastors know the members
personally, and the church exercises a definite control over individual
behavior.
The church is often the only Negro social institution with an
unhampered opportunity for development. In most southern cities,
Negroes have no Y.M.C.A., public playground, welfare organizations,
public library, gymnasium, orderly dance halls, public parks, or
theaters. The church in a large degree takes the place of these and
fills a vacancy created by the lack of the public facilities ordinarily
found in white communities. In many instances it determines the
social standing of the individual Negro. No one can escape the
opprobrium attached to the term "sinner" if he is not a member of
the church, however successful otherwise.
The minister is the recognized leader of the Negroes, and often their
legal adviser and school teacher. He is responsible for the social
good behavior of his people. No movement can get the support of
the people unless it has his sanction.
In the North the function of both Negro church and pastor is
different. Negroes can find other places than the church for their
leisure time; numerous urban and civic organizations with trained
workers look after their interests, probably better than the church.
In the Y.M.C.A. they find religion related to the development of their

65. bodies and minds. In northern cities enterprises and movements
thrive without the good-will or sanction of the clergy, and even
against their protest.
The field wholly occupied in the South by the church is shared in the
North by the labor union, the social club, lectures, and political and
other organizations. Some of the northern churches, realizing this,
have established employment agencies and other activities of a more
social nature in response to this new demand.
Social activities.—The churches in Chicago serve as social-contact
centers, though not to the same extent as in the South. Frequently
they arrange lectures, community programs, fêtes, and meetings.
Many of them, seeking to influence the conduct of the group, have
provided recreation and amusements for their members. Several
churches have social-service departments, basket-ball teams, and
literary societies. Olivet Baptist Church, with a membership of 9,069,
maintains an employment department, rooming directory,
kindergarten, and day nursery, and employs sixteen workers; in its
social organization there are forty-two auxiliary departments. During
the last five years it has raised $200,000, contributed $5,600 for
charitable relief, and found jobs for 1,100 Negroes.
Unique among such developments is the People's Church and
Metropolitan Community Center, organized by a group which
withdrew from the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
October, 1920. Relying solely upon its membership, it raised $22,000
during its first five months. Six persons are employed to carry on the
work, one a social-service secretary. Land for a church building has
been purchased, and plans have been made to buy a community-
center building to accommodate several thousand people.
Relief work.—The records of the United Charities, which assumes the
care of dependent children of the juvenile court, show a much
smaller proportion of appeals for aid from Negroes than might be
expected. This is partly explained by the work of the churches in
relieving Negro families. A very high proportion of families below the

66. line of comfortable subsistence belong to the churches, the small
"store-front" churches. The number and variety of denominational
divisions and sects increases competition for membership and sends
pastors and members out into the community to gather in the
people. Forty-one churches, many of them small, reported a total of
$15,038 distributed during 1920 for the relief of the sick and
distressed.
Following is a summary of information collected by the Commission
concerning the churches in the Negro community:
Number of churches, regular and "store-front" 170
Number visited 146
Number of churches owning their property 49
Value of property owned $1,677,183.00
Indebtedness on church properties being bought $325,895.91
Amount collected in 146 churches during 1919 $400,000.00
Membership of 62 of the 146 churches 36,856
Number in Sunday school in 57 of 146 churches 16,847
Number of persons in attendance in 64 of 146 churches
Morning 20,379
Evening 13,806
In a very few cases, Negroes are found to be members of white
churches, but the Negro churches have an entirely Negro
membership with Negro pastors.
"Store-front" churches.—The "store-front" church membership is
merely a small group which, for one reason or another, has sought
to worship independently of any connection with the larger
churches. The establishment of such a church may be the result of a
withdrawal of part of the membership of a larger church. They
secure a pastor or select a leader from their own number and
continue their worship in a place where their notions are not in
conflict with other influences. Most frequently a minister formerly in
the South has come with or followed his migrant members and has
re-established his church in Chicago. Or again a group with religious
beliefs and ceremonies not in accord with those of established

67. churches may establish a church of its own. The groups are usually
so small and the members so poor as to make the purchase of a
building impossible. The custom has been to engage a small store
and put chairs in it. Hence the name "store-front" church.
NEGRO CHURCHES
Denominations.—The varieties of denominational divisions are wide
and interesting. A classification on the basis of information collected
by the Commission is given in Table VII.

68. TABLE VII
Denomination Regular"Store-Front"
Baptist:
Missionary Baptist 19 61
Free Will Baptist 2
Primitive Baptist 4
Methodist:
Methodist Episcopal 6
African Methodist Episcopal 9 6
African Methodist Episcopal Zion 3 1
Colored Methodist Episcopal 3
Independent Methodist Episcopal 6
Presbyterian 2 2
Episcopal 1
Congregational 1
Disciples of Christ 1
Saints, Holiness, and Healing Churches 20
Total 45 102
The steady growth in the number of churches is shown in the dates
of organization of sixty-five of them as given in Table VIII.
TABLE VIII
Year Number
1825-50 2
1850-80 2
1880-90 5
1890-1900 5
1900-1910 5
1910-15 12
1915-16 4
1917 3
1918 15
1919 6
1920 6
Total 65

69. Church property.—It was not easy to determine the amount of
money raised and handled by the Negro churches for any specific
period, because only the better-organized churches keep accurate
accounts.
The total value of the property holdings of twenty-six of the larger
and better-organized churches is $1,677,183.02, with a total
indebtedness on nineteen of them of $318,595.91. In twenty of the
twenty-six annual collections aggregate $226,216.25.
Out of 100 "store-front" churches visited only seven own or are
buying the property they use. The total value of the property of
these seven churches is $44,300. Four of the seven have an
indebtedness of $7,300; and the four that kept records showed a
total annual collection of $5,170.
The pastors.—A sharp division both as to education and experience
is found between the pastors of the regular churches and those of
the "store-front" churches. Generally the larger churches have the
better-trained, more experienced, and more highly salaried
ministers. Exceptions are found in the case of one or two "holiness"
churches.
The ministers in these various churches represent a range of training
from that of such seminaries as Newton Theological and institutions
like Yale University, University of Chicago, and Northwestern
University, down to that of the sixth grade in grammar school. Some
have had no schooling at all. The number of specially trained
ministers totals twenty-one. Six of these are graduates of recognized
northern institutions, while fourteen are graduates of recognized
Negro institutions such as Lincoln University, Howard University,
Virginia Union University, and Livingston College. Four are graduates
of standard high schools and four of other high schools below the
standard rating. The remainder fall below the sixth grade. Among
this last group it is not unusual to hear that "God prepares a man to
preach; he does not have to go to school for that. All he must do is

70. to open his mouth and God will fill it. The universities train men
away from the Bible."
The range of active service in the ministry is from two months to
forty-four years. Here again the larger established churches have the
ministers of longer service. Typical examples are found in churches
like Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose pastor has
had forty-four years of service; Shiloh, thirty-seven years; Bethesda
Baptist Church, thirty-seven years; Grace Presbyterian Church, thirty-
two years (all at this one church); Original Providence, thirty-five
years; Berean Baptist Church, thirty years.
4. SOCIAL AND CIVIC AGENCIES
Social agencies in the Negro communities are an expression of group
effort to adjust itself to the larger community. Within the Negro
community there are two types, those especially for Negroes and
those which are branches of the agencies of the larger community
but located conveniently for use by Negroes.

71. TRINITY M.E. CHURCH AND COMMUNITY HOUSE
Located at Prairie Avenue near Thirty-first Street, purchased recently by
Negroes.

72. SOUTH PARK M.E. CHURCH
The congregation moved from a store-front church to this edifice at Thirty-
second Street and South Park Avenue in less than three years after the
church was established.

73. PILGRIM BAPTIST CHURCH
Located at Thirty-third Street and Indiana Avenue. Formerly a Jewish
synagogue, purchased recently by Negroes.
A. AGENCIES ESPECIALLY FOR NEGROES
Chicago Urban League.—This organization is one of the thirty-two
branches of the National Urban League whose headquarters are in
New York City. It was established in Chicago in 1917 during the
period of heaviest migration of Negroes to the city. The numerous
problems consequent upon this influx guided the development of the
League's activities. Its executive board and officers are whites and
Negroes of high standing and influence in both the white and Negro
groups, and it is supported by voluntary subscriptions. Within four
years this organization has taken the leading place among all the

74. social agencies working especially among Negroes. It has a well-
trained staff of twelve paid workers, and its work is carried out along
the lines accepted in modern social work. The League has organized
its activities as follows: Administration Department, Industrial
Department, Research and Records Department, Children's
Department, settlement work.
The work of the Administration Department involves, in addition to
general management, co-operation with other agencies and co-
ordination of their efforts for community improvement through
interracial meetings, conferences, and joint undertakings.
The Industrial Department during 1920 placed more than 15,000
Negroes in positions, made industrial investigations in sixteen plants,
provided lectures for workingmen in plants and for foremen over
Negro workers. It also investigates complaints of workers, selects
and fits men for positions, secures positions for Negroes where
Negroes have never worked before, and assists in other ways the
adjustment of Negroes in industry. More than 25,000 persons passed
through the department during 1920.
The Department of Research and Records makes the investigations
on the basis of which the programs of the League are carried out.
Its information is a permanent and growing body of material useful
to all agencies and persons interested in obtaining reliable
information concerning Negroes in Chicago.
The Children's Department handles cases of boys and girls and co-
operates with the schools, juvenile protective organizations, the
juvenile court and probation department, and various other child-
helping institutions. A total of 540 such cases were adjusted during
1920.
During 1919 a total of $28,659 was raised and used in the support
of the Chicago Urban League.
The Wendell Phillips Settlement on the West Side is under the
supervision of the League. The settlement has a day nursery and

75. provides a center and leadership for twenty-five groups in the West
Side community.
Wabash Avenue Y.M.C.A.—This organization is a branch of the local
Young Men's Christian Association, but because of its location and
the peculiar social problems of its membership and vicinity, it has
become one of the strongest agencies of the community. Its work is
among boys and young men, many of whom are industrial workers
in various plants. Community work is vigorously promoted. In 1920
an enthusiastic group of 1,137 boys was enlisted in a neighborhood
clean-up campaign, and 100 community gardens were put in
operation. Moving pictures and community singing were provided
during the summer months. The following list gives some statistics
of activities for the first nine months of 1920.
SOCIAL ACTIVITIES
Attendance at building 140,740
Attendance at reading-room 19,402
Attendance at Bible classes 1,514
Attendance at industrial clubs 5,394
Attendance at entertainments 6,542
Meals served 100,610
Dormitory attendance 71,396
Persons directed to rooms 614
Persons assisted 1,526
Persons reached through community work 10,406
Personal religious interviews 396
Men referred to churches 196
PHYSICAL WORK
Men used swimming-pool 3,604
Boys used swimming-pool 14,096
Men and boys used shower baths 24,332
Participated in leagues and tournament 3,906
Spectators 44,742
Men attended gymnasium classes 5,622
Boys attended gymnasium classes 17,106

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