Twilight: Pasquale Boninsegni
In November 1903, after a rather unclear incident, Pareto requested that his new protege, Pasquale Boninsegni, should replace Racca, which the faculty accepted. Four years later, Boninsegni was appointed as an extraordinary professor, but he had to wait almost 20 years, until 1926, to eventually access the full professorship.
Boninsegni’s scientific contribution to the Ecole de Lausanne is not very original: he published three articles in the Giornale degli Economisti before his appointment, and a dozen in journals deemed less prestigious thereafter. Indeed, Boninsegni’s academic activity focused on teaching and on the dissemination of Pareto’s economic theory. In his eyes, Pareto can be credited with abandoning metaphysical research into value and its causes, to focus solely on facts, that is, how men act to procure the goods they want. Boninsegni advocated the importance of mathematization and the study of concrete social phenomena, but disagreed on Pareto’s (liberal) involvement; but it did not prevent him - while President of the School of Social and Political Sciences and holder of the political economy and sociology chair - from overtly affirming his commitment to Mussolini’s fascist stands. It is also at his instigation and through dubious manoeuvring that, in 1937, the university granted an honorary doctorate to Benito Mussolini.Finally, from the perspective of a rational reconstruction of economic analysis, Pareto’s work, Manuale di economia politica con una introduzione alla scienza sociale (Manual of Political Economy with an Introduction to Social Science, 1906), is the Ecole de Lausanne’s last major contribution to modern economic theory, while marking Pareto’s transfer to sociology with the Trattato di sociologia generale (1916).
More on the topic Twilight: Pasquale Boninsegni:
- Twilight: Pasquale Boninsegni
- Faccarello G., Kurz H.D.(eds.). Handbook on the History of Economic Analysis. Volume II: Schools of Thought in Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,2016. — 498 p, 2016