Dealing with a dangerous golem: Gino Arias's corporative proposal

Abstract

Gino Arias (1879–1940) had made his academic debut as a legal historian and devoted himself to economics at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. As a prominent nationalist, he joined the Fascist regime from its very beginning and in 1925 was named official speaker of the Presidential Committee for the study of constitutional reforms. The laws suggested by the Commission were the first step towards the gradual ‘corporatisation’ of the Italian society, a process that Gino Arias encouraged through many essays and writings that appeared in the main Fascist journals and newspapers. This paper seeks to analyse Arias's fate during the rest of the 1920s and 1930s that would eventually lead to a rather dramatic and paradoxical ending: the flight of the ‘Jewish’ Gino Arias to Argentina, due to Fascist racial laws. Gino Arias's elaboration of the ‘revolutionary’ corporatist economy is based on an original reformulation of the individuals’ economic motive. Arias moved from the traditional self-interest motive to a new and particular affectio societatis, an hypothesis, although far from being realistic, that was necessary to give corporatism a sound theoretical foundation. The elaboration of Arias's speculative analysis was strictly related to government's economic policies throughout the Twenties and the Thirties and cannot be understood without referring to the institutionalisation of Fascist corporatism. Arias's affectio societatis represents in fact the theoretical formulation of a widespread cultural process and as such will be examined in this paper.