Race, Statistics and Italian Eugenics: Alfredo Niceforo’s Trajectory from Lombroso to Fascism (1876–1960)

Abstract

This article traces the development of Italian eugenics and scientific racism from their origins in nineteenth-century positivist anthropology to the 1938 Manifesto of Racial Scientists. I follow the biographical trajectory of the Sicilian racial thinker Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), the last member of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist school, a founding father of Italian eugenics and a prominent statistician throughout the fascist regime. I argue that the peculiarity of the Italian path to eugenics was its ‘internal orientalism’, caused by the poverty and perceived backwardness of the Italian South. Blending Niceforo’s biography with his ideas, I chart the social and intellectual history of Italian scientific racism from the transformation of Lombroso’s school to the fascist ‘Aryanization’ of Italians.