The Rockefeller System on Trial: Luigi Einaudi and the Selection of Italian Scholars for the Social Sciences (1926-1931)

In line with the expectations of Wilsonian universalism, after the First World War, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial under the management of Beardsley Ruml not only oriented the field of social sciences towards a clearer disciplinary and methodological definition, but also allocated substantial funds from 1924 onwards to grant fellowships to a number of young American and European scholars. They thus found themselves assuming a crucial function in the construction and redistribution of knowledge on the international chessboard.

Europe, in particular, was perceived as a fertile terrain in which to develop a model of social sciences that, by lowering the threshold of formalisation, promoted empirical research, quantitative data analysis and fieldwork, to which was added the desire to modernise an academic system obsolete due to the weight of the 19th century tradition and the inability to form elites ready to confront large-scale collaborative practices. In turn, Memorial grants, from the perspective of crossfertilisation, could serve to identify the European scholars most functional to the process of producing the new version of the social sciences being developed in the US. This explains why graduates funded to conduct a two-year research project in universities on both the Old and New Continent were under a strict obligation to return home at the end of their stay1.

The need to implement a selection of candidates that would conform to the high quality standards defined by the New York staff had therefore required the involvement of some of the most prestigious European academics who, in addition to having their finger on the pulse of the local situation, would have assisted the foreign guest scholars in their countries2. As suggested by the French economist Charles Rist, William E. Lingelbach, Professor of Modern History at the University of Pennsylvania, had contacted Luigi Einaudi during his European tour to recruit future representatives. Einaudi was a professor of finance at the Faculty of Law in Turin and was also collaborating with two national centers of excellence, the Laboratorio di Economia Politica and the Istituto Giuridico.

Luigi Einaudi appeared to the Executive Committee as the most suitable referent for Italy for his immediate adhesion to the cause of the Entente in the recent world conflict and his subsequent support of Wilsonian internationalism, for his frequentation of John Maynard Keynes’ thought, for the progressive nature of his own liberalism, open to the demands of the working classes, of which the activity of the magazine “La Riforma Sociale” was clear proof, and finally for his unquestionable fame, earned with articles in The Economist and Manchester Guardian3. Ruml then invited Einaudi to the US to observe numerous American campuses.

Figure 1: Luigi Einaudi on board the Conte Biancamano, April 1926. Einaudi is the third standing on the left

Source: Luigi Einaudi Foundation Archives, section 4, 1926, Turin© Luigi Einaudi Foundation, reproduced with permission.

Source: Luigi Einaudi Foundation Archives, section 4, 1926, Turin
© Luigi Einaudi Foundation, reproduced with permission.

After the visit, which took place in the spring of 1926 in the company of the Dutch referent Johan Huizinga, Einaudi had grasped the potential of the Memorial program both in fostering innovation in the social sciences through Italian scholarship holders, who would be taken away from an increasingly fascist university, and in boosting the organisation of post-graduate courses. Moreover, the measures implemented by the neo-idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile who, with the 1923 school reform had attempted to address both the issue of student mobility by founding the Istituto italiano interuniversitario as well as that of postgraduate education through specialisation courses in the Faculty of Medicine and at the Scuola Normale in Pisa (the Scuola di perfezionamento in legislazione corporativa was added in 1929), proved to be inadequate, as did the work of a special Commission that, ten years later, was supposed to standardise courses and degrees.

Ruml was immediately aware of Italy’s backwardness, and as early as the autumn of 1926, he was informed by Einaudi of the difficulty of finding young people in their mid-twenties who knew English adequately, were unmarried and renounced the possibility of getting an “assistant-professorship” at any university4:

My feeling is that I will be obliged to limit my choice to men between 22 and 25-26 years, who, being bachelors and not tied by professional or academic situation, are anxious of making acquaintance with new countries and different institutions and learning-methods.

Despite the rise of this sort of academic underclass following the emergence of new schools of economics and political science, the memorial officer Lawrence K. Frank was confident that the Memorial program could indeed prompt systemic change5:

In this way, the Fellowship plan could be directly related to the building up of the educational institutions in Italy which would insure cooperation by the various institutions in the selection of the promising young social scientists of the future.

On the other hand, the different structure of Anglo-Saxon higher education, which seemed to be able to absorb most of the graduates, allowed the UK referent James Ramsay Montagu Butler to express no preclusions towards senior candidates6.

In informing Ruml of the proposal of the first six names (including that of his son Mario), Einaudi took the opportunity to explain the functioning of an educational institution that was highly selective in giving access to university after five years of gymnasium and three of high school, not to mention that the prestige of the universities ended up determining the value of the degree awarded, with disparities that sometimes prevented full marks being awarded for equal abilities7. The academic career was then studded with uncertainties and years of ‘apprenticeship’ as “assistants” to ordinary professors or as “readers”, “substitutes to professors” and “private docents”, a role conferred only after passing a competition in Rome, which introduced teaching in non-compulsory courses.

The presence of a married scholarship holder, Alessandro Gatti, led Memorial, during the Conference of European Representatives held in Paris in February 1928, to attempt to curb the phenomenon of family reunions and to discourage, by signing a Statement of Intent, requests to extend the stay in the US to the third year, which four Italians had not hesitated to ask8. While agreeing with the changes to the regulation, Einaudi alluded covertly to the illiberal climate imposed by Fascism by referring to the fact that9:

New circumstances can change, after return, the outlook of the life of past fellows so that they deem advisable to live in the U.S. as well as in other countries different from the country of origin.

In 1929 the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was absorbed into the Rockefeller Foundation and the new director of the Division of Social Sciences, Edmund E. Day, was assisted in Paris by John Van Sickle, who was joined shortly afterwards by Tracy B. Kittredge. In order to permanently dissuade any attempt to force the duration of the fellowships, a one-year allocation plan was presented for more mature candidates, already in the professions or university10. This opened up new scenarios in identifying the most suitable age group since, excluding the forty-year-olds, according to Einaudi, recent graduates did not yet have consolidated research skills, while the twenty-four to twenty-eight-year-olds returning to Italy would find themselves lagging far behind their peers in the race for the role of “associate professor” (“extraordinary” or “not stable professor”). The best period might have fallen between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five, when the attainment of a university post would have stimulated the desire to upgrade abroad, without contemplating a definitive move11.

Van Sickle’s point of view, on the other hand, was that of a officer who believed that the renewal of the social sciences in Europe had to come about through practice rather than theory, and therefore insisted on recruiting barristers, journalists, and businessmen, who had maintained a lively and documented interest in research and at the same time offered the guarantee of returning to their jobs after the grant, which in the Italian situation inevitably meant raising the age bar12.

Van Sickle visited Italy several times and was able to see for himself how problematic it was for former scholarship holders to re-enter the academic world due to the excessive political control of the universities and the corporatism of the professors themselves13. The warnings received shortly after the launch of the program, which had highlighted the lack of progress in the social sciences, were sadly confirmed in the early 1930s14, to the point that the peninsula was declared out of the range of the Rockefeller Foundation’s initiatives.

Figure 2: Rockfeller Foundation internal memorandum about the situation of the social sciences in Italy in the early 1930s.

Source: Memorandum from Selskar M. Gunn to E. E. Day, Cadiz, December 31st 1931. Rockefeller Foundation Records, RG 2 General Correspondence, 1931, series 700 ES, box 63, folder 516. New York
© Rockefeller Archive Center, reproduced with permission.

Although Einaudi, by then acting as an external consultant, claimed that all those who had taken advantage of this opportunity had benefited in terms of their careers, so much so that they had been given the position of “private docents” or “chargé-de-cours15, Van Sickle used the case of the professor’s son, Mario, who was in the regime’s crosshairs for the anti-fascist activities of his brother Roberto, to call for the “Emergency Committee in Aid for Displaced Scholars” program, set up to rescue German Jewish intellectuals, to be extended to other European countries16.

Having moved permanently to the US in 1933, Mario Einaudi spent his entire career there, with decisive support of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Figure 3: Mario Einaudi’s Fellowship card with different mentions of support for his first full-time position in the US.

Source: Mario Einaudi Fellowship recorder card. Rockefeller Foundation records, R.G.10.2., New York
© courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center.

Treasuring the American approach to the social sciences, the former Memorial fellow contributed to the updating of Italian academic practice after World War II, not only by acting as an intermediary between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute of Political Science in Turin, which received substantial funding, but also by personally initiating a highly innovative foundation both in Turin and Rome named after his father.

Further reading

This article is based on my article “On Luigi Einaudi’s advisory collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation (1926-1931)”, Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LII: December 2018, pp. 247-300.

  • R. Faucci, Luigi Einaudi, Torino, Utet, 1986.
  • G. Gemelli, “Un imprenditore scientifico e le sue reti internazionali: Luigi Einaudi, la Fondazione Rockefeller e la professionalizzazione della ricerca economica in Italia”, Le Carte e la Storia, XI: 1, 2005, pp. 189-202.
  • D. Da Empoli, “The Role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the Training of Italian Economists”, in P. F. Asso-L. Fiorito (ed.), Economics and institutions. Contributions from the history of economic thought. Selected papers from the 8th Aispe Conference, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2007, pp. 406-414.
  • d. p. [D. Parisi], “A fruitful experience away from the University of Turin: Luigi Einaudi and the Rockefeller Foundation “, Storia del pensiero economico, II: 2, 2005, pp. 204-205.
  • L. Tournès, “La Fondation Rockefeller et la naissance de l’universalisme philanthropique americain”, Critique internationale, 35:2, 2007, pp. 173-197.
  • F. Attal, “Reconstruire l’Europe intellectuelle: les sciences sociales en Italie (1945-1970)”, in L. Tournès, L’argent de l’influence. Les fondations américaines et leurs réseaux européens, Paris, Éditions Autrement, 2010, pp. 143-163.
  • Id., “Luigi Einaudi, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Sciences in Italy”, Ventunesimo secolo, XXXI: 2, 2013, pp. 41-62.
  • A. Mariuzzo, “Stato-nazione e mobilità degli studenti universitari dall’Unità alla Repubblica. The situation of studies”, Storicamente, VII: 42, 2011, pp. 1-9.
  • P. Barucci-P. Bini-L. Conigliello (ed.), Economics and law in Italy during fascism: insights, biographies, new research paths, Firenze, Firenze University Press, 2017.
  • A. Mariuzzo (ed.),”‘Big foundations’ and Italian universities: paths of transatlantic political-cultural collaboration in the twentieth century”, Annali di storia delle università italiane, XXIII: 23, 2019/1, pp. 3-101.

  1. Young Italians going to the US were required to spend a period of three to four months at the London School of Economics, in order to acquire an adequate command of the English language. ↩︎
  2. After a reconnaissance visit in Europe, Rockefeller Foundation officials recruited the two contact persons for Great Britain and France. Over the next three years, the program was extended to Australia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Holland, Norway and Sweden. ↩︎
  3. Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Turin [TFE], Correspondence. 2, f. Beardsley Ruml. Letter from Ruml to Einaudi, [New York], December 28th, 1925. ↩︎
  4. Ibid. Letter from Einaudi to Ruml, Turin, November 12th, 1926. ↩︎
  5. Ibid. Correspondence. 2, f. Lawrence K. Frank. Letter from Frank to Einaudi, New York,
    November 27th, 1926. ↩︎
  6. Rockefeller Archive Center, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial records[LSRM], series 2, box 3, folder 34, Beardsley Ruml. Memorandum for the Committee on reorganisation by the Memorial’s Representative for Great Britain and Ireland J. R. M. Butler, St. Louis Mo., December 31st, 1926, pp. 21-22. ↩︎
  7. TFE, Correspondence. 2, f. Beardsley Ruml. Letter from Einaudi to Ruml, Turin, May 10th, 1927. ↩︎
  8. Ibid, Letters from Einaudi to Ruml, Turin, February 14th, 1928 and from Ruml to Einaudi, New York, February 29th, 1928. Ibid, Correspondence. 2, Edmund E. Day. Letter from Day to Einaudi, New York, November 20th, 1928. ↩︎
  9. Ibid. Letter from Einaudi to Day, Turin, December 4th, 1928.  ↩︎
  10. TFE, Correspondence. 2, f. John Van Sickle. Letter from Van Sickle to Einaudi, Paris, March 10th, 1930. ↩︎
  11. Ibid. Letter from Einaudi to Van Sickle, Turin, May 15th, 1930. ↩︎
  12. Ibid. Letter from Van Sickle to Einaudi, Paris, May 23rd, 1930. ↩︎
  13. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Records, RG 1.1., series 751 S, box 8, folder 93. Letter from Van Sickle to Day, April 11th, 1933. ↩︎
  14. Rockefeller Archive Center, LSRM, series 3.06, box 63, folder 676. Social Sciences, 1925-1928. Memorandum of Selskar M. Gunn’s conversation with Ruml, Paris, August 15th, 1928. ↩︎
  15. TFE, Correspondence. 2, f. John Van Sickle. Letter from Einaudi to Van Sickle, Turin, September 24th, 1932. ↩︎
  16. Rockefeller Archive Center,Rockefeller Foundation Records, RG 2. General Correspondence, 1933, series 717, box 91, folder 725, Exiled Scholars. Letter from John Van Sickle to E. E. Day, May 2nd, 1933. For a comparison with the German fellows, see J. Syga-Dubois, “Managing Scientific Exchange in Interwar Germany: August Wilhelm Fehling and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships“, in: L. Tournès- G. Scott-Smith (ed.), Global Exchanges. Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, New York Berghahn, 2018, pp. 113-126 and J. Syga-Dubois, “Des itinéraires transnationaux entre États-Unis et Europe : les boursiers allemands de la Fondation Rockefeller dans l’entre-deux-guerres”, Études Germaniques, 303:3, 2021, pp. 359–377. ↩︎

Alessia Pedio

Alessia Pedio is a lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Turin. In addition to having dealt with the cultural policy of the fascist regime in numerous studies, she is on the scientific committee in charge of the reprinting of Piero Gobetti's works.

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Alessia Pedio (December 15, 2024). The Rockefeller System on Trial: Luigi Einaudi and the Selection of Italian Scholars for the Social Sciences (1926-1931). Rockefeller fellows. Retrieved April 25, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12xfd


About Alessia Pedio

Alessia Pedio is a lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Turin. In addition to having dealt with the cultural policy of the fascist regime in numerous studies, she is on the scientific committee in charge of the reprinting of Piero Gobetti's works.