With Senza Lavoro, Manfredi Alberti sets himself an ambitious aim: the study of the long-term political and social history of Italian unemployment. Since the publication in 1884 of the report of the parliamentary inquiry on Italian agriculture led by Stefano Jacini, the country has always had a difficult relationship with the social malaise of unemployment. The structural problems posed by a great mass of people without work have absorbed the Italian collective imaginary at a political and cultural level, from state administration to literature and the arts. Italian historiography has not eschewed the issue, but it has provided only piecemeal accounts. Scholars have focused on the evolution and effects of unemployment only in specific and delimited periods of Italian history. Alberti is the first historian to provide a comprehensive account of how Italy’s intellectuals and political elite framed and tried to cope with unemployment, from unification until the early twenty-first century.
Almost inevitably, given the nature of the task at hand, the book structure follows the canonical periodisation of Italian history. The first chapter covers the liberal age, until 1914, tracing the progressive discovery of unemployment as a social problem and the early labour legislation of the Kingdom of Italy. The second chapter starts off with the immediate aftermath of the First World War and covers the whole interwar period, focusing on the wide but contradictory array of social policies put forward by Italian Fascism to cope with the Great Depression and the delayed industrial modernisation of the country. The third and last chapter covers the post-war period, highlighting the paradox of the Italian Republic, which sanctioned the universal right to work at a constitutional level but ultimately failed to provide meaningful employment and social protection for the jobless.
The significance of Senza lavoro lies not only in its scope, but also in the depth of its analysis. Alberti rejects an economistic understanding of unemployment. Rather, he regards it as a plural category, the meaning of which has changed through time along with Italian society. The modern conception of involuntary unemployment as a condition of forced inactivity, he argues, started to emerge only towards the very end of the nineteenth century, as the development of capitalist social relations led to a progressive transformation of the Italian labour market, with the introduction of wage relations and a timid industrial take-off. Before then, the lines between work and non-work were blurred: discontinuity of employment was the norm and inactivity was equated to idleness and moral deviation. The idea that unemployment is a historically contingent social construction is already well established in the literature, but Alberti is able to show how the thinking of policymakers and the everyday functioning of state bureaucracy shaped the category. Building on his training as a historian of statistics, he offers a detailed analysis of how the unemployed were defined and accounted for by governmental offices. While the book relies largely on second-hand quantitative data, Alberti offers an almost philological examination of census sources and reports, effectively demonstrating how the development of statistics was as much about science as it was about politics. In its early days, for instance, the Italian labour movement championed the development of more efficient statistics as a tool to control the job market; under Fascism, the constant changes in data collection criteria led to an underestimation of the unemployment rate and played into the hand of the regime’s propagandists.
The implicit assumption of Senza lavoro is that tracking the social history of Italian unemployment is primarily about revealing the politics behind it. The book is thus also a rich retelling of the economic and social policies put forward by the Italian political elite to provide work opportunities and assistance for the jobless, from the introduction of the first insurance against unemployment in 1919 to the recent Jobs Act reform launched by the government of Matteo Renzi, highlighting the many missed opportunities for social reform that punctuate the history of the country.
On this point a critique can be offered. Alberti exhibits masterful command of the intricacies of the intellectual debate and state policies: however, he does not provide an overall theory to understand the institutional evolution of the Italian welfare edifice. In his introduction, he sketches a theory of unemployment that derives from the key insights of Marxism and Keynesianism, but does not develop it explicitly throughout the rest of book. Social conflict seems to play a very important role in his long-term narrative and the author often links major policy breakthroughs with the bottom-up pressures exercised by labour organisations. This is a standard interpretation in comparative politics. Yet, the reader is left wondering how social actors concretely exert influence on policymaking and what is the political economy mechanism underpinning the functioning of the state, à la Charles S. Maier. A greater attention to international comparisons and the cases of other countries, particularly in the post-war European context, would have helped clarify and set the contours of the Italian experience and its peculiar welfare model.
All in all, these minor shortcomings do not detract from the overall important contribution. The book is intended for a wide audience and successfully manages to summarise in a few hundred pages the unsolved struggle of the Italian nation with the problem of unemployment. The sheer number of references and primary sources that Alberti draws from, together with the many political and cultural nuances of its long run narrative, already make Senza lavoro an authoritative text in Italian social history.
