“Now, if, in the infinite, all these particular things are not differentiated, are not divided into species, it necessarily follows that they have no number: the universe, therefore, is one and immobile… the universe is in all things and all things are in the universe, we in it and it in us: thus, everything coincides in perfect unity.”
The significance of Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity (De la causa, principio et uno) of 1584 belays questions spanning the entire history of Western philosophy – from the original Greek’s debates over the “many,” the “one,” and “unity,” to the contemporary Renaissance scholastics that bore the brunt of Bruno’s most severe criticism. Hegel himself commended Bruno’s “thought of unity” as a “great beginning” in the Spirit’s self-consciousness of the “universe in its development, in the system of its determinations.” A decade later, the thought of unity would even be definitional in the Italian politician and nationalist Alfredo Rocco’s theory of “nation”:
“…substantial collectivities, like the species, the Nation, the family, constitute organic unities, having their own lives, which go beyond the life of the individuals and propagate themselves through the centuries, creating for the collectivity its own functions, particular purposes, distinct interests, and are sometimes opposed to those individuals that, in a given moment, constitute them.”
A member of the Italian Nationalist Association, Alfredo Rocco argued that “unity” transcended the “many,” by binding its members by “consciousness of a common ethnic origin, by the community of language, traditions, culture, and by the conviction of the solidary of their interests of lineage.” Rocco’s argument in 1914 resembled that of Benedict Anderson nearly a century later in Imagined Communities: the origins of the “nation” reflected not only an “ideology” like Marxism, but a “consciousness,” or an imaginary around united language, traditions, culture, etc. However, where Anderson tended to look at that “unity” in an anthropological view, Rocco’s conception clearly reflected metaphysical, Romantic, and obviously propagandistic concepts of “unity” pervasive across Italian thought.
Indeed, Rocco’s emphasis on “unity” harkened not only to Bruno, but to a wider culture around the keyword in nineteenth and twentieth century Italian thought. The Italian Hegelian Augusto Vera, for example, claimed the most “essential” element of science – albeit in a Hegelian sense of “science” – was “unity, and systematic unity.” Vera was inspired by Hegel’s thesis of the “undifferentiated unity” of being and nothing itself, that is, the “beginning” of Hegel’s The Science of Logic, a book that Vera crucially translated into two-volumes of French. Another Italian Hegelian and a peer of Vera at the University of Naples, Bertrando Spaventa, further explained that “one who sees nothing but the law, seeks the ultimate law; one who sees nothing other than the cause, the ultimate cause; one who sees none other than the end, the ultimate end.” He continued, “All these processes, whether we say it openly or not, are a tendency towards something ultimate or absolute.” That “absolute” was the real unity, for Spaventa, that accounted for and determined even the most “totalizing” philosophies, from Darwinian evolution and Marxism to even postulates of God himself.
In fact, Italian intellectuals’ allusions to a greater, unilateral “unity” was a widespread ideal of turn of the century Italian theory. The sociologist and early Marxist, Achille Loria, for example, thought that increasingly fragmented disciplines, that is, those like the burgeoning economics and sociology, could be united in a “superior synthesis.” Sociology could be that uniter itself, for Loria, by reducing all spheres of thought to a “common denominator and demonstrating their origination from a single group of causes.” Another Italian sociologist, the senator Giuseppe Carle, outright asserted sociology was the last attempt to study the unified whole of human affairs. An early Italian marginalist economist, Vincenzo Tangorra, similarly thought the new “subjectivist” economics brought to light “the many relationships of mutual dependence between many economic phenomena” and therefore made “economic science an organic whole.” Where classical economics presented a “character of scientific atomism” the subjectivist school brought political economy to assume a “character of unity.” Another significant marginalist economist, Vilfredo Pareto, also imagined a greater “synthesis” of subjective phenomena and disciplines, whereas the young philosopher Giovanni Gentile, clearly inspired by the Neapolitan Hegelians, thought “unity” was outright the task of modern philosophy.
In a sociological sense, the larger significance of “unity” and synthesis among Italian theorists reflected transformations in the structural constitution of Italian social thought. A long way had come since 1849, when the Italian economist Francesco Ferrara lamented that political economy was an “ignored science” in Italy.[1] Indeed, it was only in Unification that distinct faculties for social (philosophy and letters) and natural disciplines were officially instituted in Italian universities.[2] Even by the 1890s, official statistical reports hardly disaggregated social disciplines at all – the categories were merely jurisprudence, philosophy, and mathematical sciences (which included natural sciences).[3] Beneath the surface of Italy’s government statistics, however, the social disciplinary landscape was rapidly changing. After 1876, the rate of Italian students specializing in economics quadrupled the previous decade[EH1] .[4] Indeed, economists even began to enter parliament at levels (until 1904) that wouldn’t be matched again until after World War I.[5] There was also the adjacent new school of Italian sociologists that began to plant institutional roots during the 1890s, most notably in the journal Rivista di sociologia founded in 1894. The journal declared itself as the “the second [sociology journal] in the world,” before relaunching as the Rivista italiana di sociologia in 1896.[6] Indeed, even Pareto practically ceased publication in the Giornale degli economisti, the journal par excellence of Italian economics,altogether for the Rivista in the 1900s.[7]
Italian social thought almost suddenly splinted into distinct chunks of method and discipline, and theorists themselves faced concerns over the fate of their field. As the psychologist Guido Villa lamented in 1898, “each [discipline] works on their own, not caring what the other fine sciences do.”[8] Indeed, Villa even speculated on a unity of all sciences in the future. To be sure, the keywords “atomization” and “specialization,” and their dreamed “unity,” were recognized by theorists across the nation throughout the early twentieth century.[9] Pareto, for example, thought the process of specialization and atomization reflected a “general principle of the evolution of the sciences.”[10] On the other hand, Benedetto Croce charged theorists with abstracting the “organic whole” of reality into “pseudoconcepts,” which negated the true historicity and irregularity of things.[11] As he explained in his Logic, “we know apodictically that reality is not constant nor uniform; that it is in perpetual evolution and transformation.”[12] For Croce, the rise of novel disciplines, therefore, meant theorists isolated themselves in a divided “archipelago” of theory. Indeed, the rationale Croce and Gentile cited in the very first paragraph for launching their journal, La Critica, was to provide a countermeasure against the rise of highly specialized journals.[13]
Of course, the dramatic national uncertainties – from mass emigration, political corruption, and revolt across Italy – bolstered beliefs in society and knowledge “disaggregating.” In fact, a larger corpus of discontent-based studies in Italy and France only verified the causes and truth behind a general feeling of “disaggregation” of the national unity since its apogee during the Risorgimento. Italian intellectuals did not have to seek far for reasons for “unity” in their turbulent period, therefore; that “unity” reflected an antidote to larger national uncertainties over security, identity, and knowledge. The concept could express a general reaction to social discontent, disjointed disciplines, and at the same time harken back to paradigmatic Italian philosophers from the Renaissance, from the Unification Hegelians, and to the broader tradition of “unity” theorists. By the time the nationalist theorist, Alfredo Rocco, could propose his theory of the nation as united subject, he was already seeing Italy as a “disintegrated society.” He concluded:
“Now, this disintegration must disappear. And to make it disappear, to firmly establish Italian society, there is only one way: to recall with the lively attention of Italians to the struggle that the Italian nation fights, and will further fight in the world… And [then] each one will understand the necessity of work, in their own field, with alacrity and zeal; because in battle, those who remain inert are cowards; and to not disturb by internal discord, the unity of the nation, because those who foment discord on the day of battle is a traitor. In the name of the nation, they will cement the national aggregate, they will create consciousness of the national interests, they will establish national discipline.”
[1] Francesco Ferrara, Importanza della economia politica e condizioni per coltivarla, introduzione al Corso 1849-50 nell’Università di Torino (Torino: Giuseppe Pomba, 1849), pp. 14-16.
[2] Asa Briggs, “History and the Social Sciences,” in A History of the University in Europe: Volume 3, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800–1945), ed. Walter Rüegg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 454.
[3] Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Annuario Statistico Italiano, 1894 (Roma: Eredi Botta, 1894), p. 177.
[4] Massimo Augello, “La nascita di una professione accademica: gli economisti Italiani post-unitari (1860-1900). Un’analisi quantitativa,” Quaderni di storia dell’economia politica 10, No. 3 (1992), pp. 12, 16-18.
[5] Figure 1 in Massimo Augello and Marco Guidi, “The Italian economists in parliament from 1860 to 1922: a quantitative analysis,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 12, no. 2 (2005): p. 292.
[6] Quoted in Marco Santoro, “Empire for the Poor: Imperial Dreams and the Quest for an Italian Sociology, 1870s-1950s,” Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 107. Ibid., pp. 145-155.
[7] In fact, it was Pareto’s Manuele of 1905 that historians Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel cite as his “ideal watershed” from economics to sociology. Riccardo Faucci, A History of Italian Economic Thought (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 142-143. Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science, trans. Ian McGilvray (Roma: Laterza, 2015), p. 120.
[8] Guido Villa, “L’ODIERNO SVILUPPO DELLE SCIENZE STORICHE E SOCIALI” Rivista italiana di sociologia 2 (1898): pp. 461-462.
[9] Labriola, Socialisme et philosophie, pp. 87-88.
[10] Vilfredo Pareto, Cours d’économie politique, volume I (Lausanne: Rouge, 1896), p. 13.
[11] Croce, Lineamenti di una logica come scienza del concetto puro, p. 66.
[12] Ibid., p. 74,
[13] Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, “Introduzione,” La Critica: rivista di letteratura, storia e filosofia 1 (1903): pp. 1-5.