Compétition, coopération, administration : les politiques de la société de Francesco S. Nitti et Luigi Einaudi (1893-1922)

This essay examines the intellectual and political dialogue between Francesco S. Nitti and Luigi Einaudi from the 1890s to the early 1920s, reconstructing their divergent conceptions of the politics of society. Nitti envisioned social forces as agents of collective advancement within a framework of cooperative and state-mediated modernization, embodied in institutions such as the INA. Einaudi, by contrast, upheld a liberal order grounded in competition, the primacy of producers, and the insulation of the economy from political interference. Their confrontation thus illuminates two competing paradigms of modernity in post-liberal Italy: Nitti’s industrial and corporative reformism versus Einaudi’s empirically tempered economic liberalism.