The Externalist Theory

Comte distinguished three stages in human intellectual development: the theological, characterized by “spontaneous fictions”; the metaphysical, characterized by the personification of abstractions; and the positive stage “based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case” (Reference Comte1908 [1844]: 35–36). Comte (ibid.: 37) linked these stages of thought to stages of social development: the periods of “offensive war,” “defensive war,” and “industry.” He also asserted a connection between the “positive spirit” and “industry” (ibid.).

Spencer claimed that industrialization made scientific knowledge increasingly necessary for “every man above the laborer” (Reference Spencer1884: 38–39). As Spencer (ibid.) summarized his point: “Just as fast as productive processes become more scientific, which competition will inevitably make them do; and just as fast as joint-stock undertakings spread, which they certainly will; so fast will scientific knowledge grow necessary to every one.” Both Comte and Spencer, in sum, saw an intimate connection between positivism and industrialization.

The notion that modern capitalist society generates positivism also has roots in Marx’s (Reference Marx1977 [1867]: 149, 165–66, 168–69) theory of commodity fetishism, Weber’s (1978: 91–93, Reference Weber1992 [1927]: 275–77) account of rationalization, and Simmel’s (1930 [1900]: 482–83, 488, 495, 498) theory of money. Lukács (Reference Lukács1971 [1923]: 83) synthesized these arguments, claiming that capitalist social relations take on a “thingish” appearance. He combined this with the claim that capitalism also produced a calculating and rationalized worldview. This combination of naturalization and quantification was “reification”: a high degree of individual calculation proceeding within a social context treated as a quasinatural reality. Positivism reflects this situation (ibid.: 84, 119–20).

Adorno (1976a: 11, 1976b: 113, Reference Adorno, Hans, Ralf, Jürgen, Harald and Popper1976c: 74) argued that capitalist society created a social world appearing as a set of disconnected “facts” that anchored positivism. Steinmetz (Reference Steinmetz and George2005c: 278, 296, 300, 305, 311) and Sewell (Reference Sewell and George2005: 173–74) claimed that positivism “resonates” with the experience of organized or “Fordist” capitalism characterized by “Keynesian management of aggregate demand, full employment strategies, welfare state institutions, and highly bureaucratized forms of both public and private management” (Sewell Reference Sewell and George2005: 180). This stabilized form of capitalism makes the application of natural scientific models to the social world plausible (Sewell Reference Sewell and George2005: 180–81; Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz and George2005c: 299).

Positivism’s accounts of itself thus converge with positivism’s critics. Both offer a “social epochal” (Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz and George2005c: 290) explanation linking industrial capitalism (whether Fordist or not) to a form of social experience, rendering empiricist-scientism possible. Although positivists are not entirely clear about the mechanism that links these things, critical theories of positivism claim that capitalism makes the analogical transfer of natural scientific methods to the social world plausible.

The Internalist Approach

A second approach to the sociology of knowledge tends to focus on the dynamics of intellectual fields. Accordingly, we term this, again following Steinmetz (Reference Steinmetz and George2005c: 289), an “internalist” theory. Its most developed form is Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which accords “methodological primacy to objective relations” (Reference Bourdieu1968: 703). In general, fields are social spaces, and actors’ positions in them determine their behaviors or objectifications (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1996 [1989]: 1; Heilbron Reference Heilbron2015: 5) in politics (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1981: 6) and intellectual life (Bourdieu 1988 [Reference Bourdieu1984]: xvii; Lachmann Reference Lachmann2013: 65–67). In field analysis, researchers explain intellectual positions, including positivism, as consequences of the position of other intellectual stances in social space (Swartz 1997: 40, Reference Swartz2013: 58–59). Bourdieu used this field argument to explain positivism in two slightly different ways. In one sense, positivism was a slogan useful for the construction of an autonomous field of sociology. By providing a “positivist reinterpretation of the scientific practice of the sciences of nature,” rules could be developed for use in sociology as well (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1976: 102; see also Heilbron Reference Heilbron2015: 74–75). Positivism was thus an ideological tool for creating the new field of sociology.

Positivism was not, however, just a tool for establishing the autonomy of the intellectual field of sociology. It was also a position within sociology after its consolidation. Thus, Bourdieu argued with reference to American sociology that positivism constituted the dominant pole of an already established field. Its basic characteristics were a claim to political neutrality, a gradualist view of scientific development, and a preference for formalization. These epistemological positions were in fact misrecognized political positions linked to the interests of scholars working in prestigious American universities (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1976: 90, 98, 101).

Positivism, for the internalists, is a resource in a symbolic struggle allowing scholars deploying it to make two claims: first, that the “social” is a distinctive level of reality, and second, that it is like enough to the natural world that the logic of inquiry developed for the study of nature applies to it as well. In both cases, positivism stakes a claim to the distinctive character of social science: to emphasize both the difference with natural science in terms of its object and its similarity to natural science in terms of its method. Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1976: 92) saw the attempt to borrow the legitimacy of the natural sciences to bolster social scientific claims as common to all the social sciences.

The Gramscian Sociology of Intellectuals

Before introducing our approach, we note one similarity between the externalist and internalist accounts. For both, positivism is a consequence of the rise of capitalism. The tradition of critical theory growing out of Lukács explicitly makes this argument; Bourdieu’s sociology implies the claim as the differentiation of fields is a consequence of capitalist development. This suggests a synthesis: the internalist account provides a mechanism (stance taking in fields) linking the macro-factor identified in the externalist account (capitalism) to the outcome of positivism. There is, however, one problem with these accounts: it is difficult to link positivism directly to the development of industrial capitalism.

Positivism emerged in European thought during the 1850s first with the work of August Comte and Herbert Spencer (Kolakowski Reference Kolakowski1972 [1966]: 60–67; Plé Reference Plé1996: 61; Winkler Reference Winkler2009: 687). Later, in the 1860s and 1870s, a partially autonomous positivism emerged in Italy under the influence of Roberto Ardigò (Plé Reference Plé1996: 151).Footnote ¹ Accordingly, there were three major cultural areas in which the movement was important during this period: France, the Anglo-Saxon area including Great Britain and the United States, and Italy. In the later nineteenth century, positivism spread beyond these European countries to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and Turkey (Clark Reference Clark, Ofelia and Otávio2010: 59–64; Cruz Costa Reference Cruz Costa1964 [1956]: 82–108; Forbes Reference Forbes, Fillafer and Jan2018: 32; Nemeth 2018: 273–74; Özervarli Reference Nemeth, Fillafer and Jan2018: 81–84; Palti Reference Palti, Fillafer and Jan2018: 59–65; Skidmore Reference Skidmore1999: 66; Surman Reference Surman, Fillafer and Jan2018: 239). In all these areas, positivism provided a guide for ethical behavior as a substitute for the weakened position of the church and established a unified framework for a thought world fragmented by the progress of science (Plé Reference Plé1996: 114–15).

This pattern of development seems to correspond to the view that positivism was a reaction to industrial capitalism. The first half of the 1850s was a period of rapid economic growth in Europe (Winkler Reference Winkler2009: 687–88). Yet the leading areas of positivism do not fully correspond to industrial capitalism. The most industrialized countries in Europe in the late nineteenth century were the United Kingdom and Germany. France, Italy, and the southern and eastern European peripheries were much less industrialized (Mayer Reference Mayer1981: 23; Winkler Reference Winkler2009: 1029, 1069). But Germany remained relatively immune to positivism (Ringer Reference Ringer1992: 242), while France and Italy were awash in it. Accordingly, the relationship between positivism and capitalism seems not nearly so direct as the prevailing accounts would suggest. Manuel (Reference Manuel1965 [1962]: 274) stated that “positivism, like many of the other great dogmatic structures of modern times, exerted its greatest influence in those countries which were comparatively backward in their cultural and economic development.” Indeed, these peripheral positivisms, such as the Italian one discussed here, represent negative cases with respect to the established accounts (Emigh Reference Emigh1997: 649). In light of this, what is a more satisfactory account?

A third approach explains positivism by the characteristics of intellectuals (e.g., Emigh et al. Reference Emigh, Riley and Ahmed2016b: 15–16). This theory states that political economy affects social thought through its impact on the structure of the intelligentsia. “Information intellectuals” draw on social experience, but they also play an active role by developing and clarifying that experience. Thus, intellectuals create “elaborate worldviews and ideologies” out of “everyday forms of consciousness” (Emigh et al. Reference Emigh, Riley and Ahmed2016a: 25). The social structure of the intelligentsia shapes how this process of conversion of everyday forms of consciousness to ideologies and worldviews occurs.

The sociology of intellectuals is useful here. Alvin Gouldner, Antonio Gramsci, György Konrád, Iván Szelényi, and Talcott Parsons see positivism as an ideology of preindustrial intellectuals fascinated and threatened by the rise of industrial capitalism. As Gouldner (Reference Gouldner1979: 35) put the point, “Positivism was a premature bid by the emerging New Class to portray itself as the essential source of legitimacy and productivity in modern society” (see also Gouldner Reference Gouldner1976: 36). This was a secular religion that emerged prior to the consolidation of sociology proper and would disappear with the rise of the ideology of professionalism exemplified by Parsonian sociology. Parsons (Reference Parsons1949 [1937]: 3–6), although he did not explain positivism sociologically, also saw it as a prescientific worldview that emerged prior to the rise of the theory of social action. However, it was Gramsci’s and Konrád and Szelényi’s work in particular that linked positivism specifically to the structure of the intelligentsia. Gramsci suggested that the relationship between knowledge and production affected the position of intellectuals. Under capitalist conditions, knowledge and production link because entrepreneurs incorporate knowledge into production. As Gramsci put it, “In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual” (1971: 9 see also Asor Rosa Reference Asor Rosa and Romano1979: 813–14). In precapitalist societies, the relationship between knowledge and production differs. Here knowledge production is separated from economic life.

These different relationships between knowledge and production in capitalist and precapitalist societies are at the base of two different types of intellectuals: organic intellectuals under capitalism and traditional intellectuals under precapitalism. Organic intellectuals are “‘specializations’ of the partial aspects of the primitive activity of the new social type” (Gramsci Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell Smith1971: 6). They participate in production. Traditional intellectuals in contrast develop an esprit du corps, insulating them from production and the dominant class. As Gramsci wrote, “They put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group” (1971: 7).

There is a connection between capitalism and organic intellectuals, on the one hand, and precapitalism and traditional intellectuals, on the other. However, the transition from one configuration to another is not a reflex of the economy. Traditional intellectuals can be reproduced within capitalism partly because this economic system generates class positions that are indeterminate in relation to the main classes of capitalist society. Furthermore, traditional intellectuals play a role in reproducing capitalism because they are positioned to develop justificatory ideologies, whereas more specialized organic intellectuals are less able to do this (Gramsci Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell Smith1971: 18–19).

Konrád and Szelényi’s (Reference Konrád and Iván1979: 19) account of positivism as a new philosophy of history reconciling dynamic social change with an overarching purpose to human society resembles Gramsci’s. The bearers of positivism are “teleocrats” similar to Gramsci’s traditional intelligentsia. “Technocrats” in contrast are agnostic about ends; they place their knowledge at the service of market actors, similar to Gramsci’s organic intellectuals (ibid.: 64, 69–70). Konrád and Szelényi’s analysis usefully complements Gramsci’s because it suggests that a particular style of thought (teleocracy and technocracy, respectively) is associated with a particular structure of the intelligentsia (traditional, organic).

Gramsci and Konràd and Szelènyi, like Parsons and Gouldner, interpret positivism as an ideology of “traditional intellectuals” associated with precapitalist society. All four thinkers suggest that positivism was a secularized form of scholasticism that attempted to reassert traditional authority in a period of social transformation (Gramsci Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell Smith1971: 445). However, Gramsci and Konràd and Szelènyi specified a mechanism linking the social structure of the intelligentsia to positivism. We draw on, and reformulate, this theory to account for different forms of positivism.

Gramsci and Konràd and Szelènyi employ the same logic as the externalist position to arrive at an opposite empirical implication: that positivism is associated with backwardness, not with capitalist development. Nevertheless, like the positivists and the critical theory of positivism, theories of intellectuals seek to link the emergence of positivism to a specific period of economic development.

The sociology of intellectuals, however, can be generalized by specifying more closely what positivism means. There are, on closer examination, two sorts of positivism associated with the predominance of two different types of intelligentsias: ontological positivism associated with traditional intellectuals and methodological positivism associated with organic intellectuals. This allows a more general theory of the social foundations of positivism that can account for both its methodological and ontological forms.

The social structure of the intelligentsia mediates macro-structural factors, in this case the rise of industrial capitalism, and the predominant type of knowledge, in this case the type of positivism likely to exist in a given society. This provides a more general explanation of positivism than those currently on offer. Figure 1 situates our theoretical approach in relation to the two prevailing ones.

FIgure 1.

Theories of positivism.

Both the externalist and the internalist accounts establish an immediate connection between a given context and positivist social science, and both assume the existence of a highly specialized group of intellectuals. The analogical extension of natural scientific methods to the social sciences implies that “natural scientists” and “social scientists” are clearly differentiated social groups. But intellectuals need not be organized this way. Where intellectuals are generalists, positivism can also arise. Capitalism is an important determinant of positivism in these cases but not in the way that the critical theory and the Bourdieusian accounts suggest. For in these cases, it is not the experience of advanced capitalism that produces positivist social thought but rather awareness of capitalism’s uneven development: the emergence of backwardness as a problem. Positivism in this context is based on a claim to ontological continuity, not methodological similarity, and it promises to address questions of value through the study of questions of fact. Yet this is still positivism in the sense that it embraces empiricist-scientism. Thus, our theory draws attention to the importance of the social structure of the intelligentsia as a relatively autonomous factor in the determination of the type of positivism likely to emerge in a given social context.

Positivism, to summarize our view, arose in two quite different forms. In industrial capitalist societies with organic intelligentsias, methodological positivism emerged based on an analogical extension of natural scientific methods to the realm of society. In backward or semiperipheral societies with traditional intelligentsias, ontological positivism emerged based on the claim that society was in fact part of the natural world.

Implications 1 (Externalist)

Following the positivist self-account, critical theory, and Steinmetz’s and Sewell’s work, we might expect that positivist social science should be associated with capitalist development. Therefore, positivism should have been weak in late-nineteenth-century Italy because industrial capitalism was not highly developed. To the extent that positivism did develop, it should have been regionally concentrated in the more economically developed northwestern part of the peninsula. The first part of our empirical analysis assesses these implications.

Implications 2 (Internalist)

Following Bourdieu, to establish the legitimacy of social science, positivists should have distinguished “society” as a level of reality, and they should have claimed that this level could be studied with formalized methods analogous to those in the natural sciences. In short, positivists should have used positivism as a justification for establishing a new “field” of sociology. The second section of the article draws on the writings of some exemplary positivists to assess this claim.

Implications 3 (The Expanded Gramscian Theory)

Positivism can arise on the basis either of an “organic intelligentsia,” in which case it should take a methodological form, or it can arise on the basis of a “traditional intelligentsia,” in which case it should take an ontological form. In Italy, given the predominance of traditional intellectuals, positivism should have taken an ontological form. This leads to three expectations. First, positivists should have come from intellectual family backgrounds rather than from industrial ones: as an “estate group,” intellectuals should have been somewhat separated from the dominant economic classes on the peninsula. Second, positivists should have been trained in the established faculties of medicine and law and not in the new fields associated with industrial capitalism like political economy and engineering. This would indicate that they were traditional intellectuals. Finally, they should have used positivism to reassert their traditional role as a goal-setting “teleocratic” estate. To assess this claim, we draw on some prosopographical evidence (described in the following text) and some key writings. The point of this presentation of the material is not to falsify existing theories of positivism, or even to amass evidence disconfirming them, but instead to use the empirical anomalies generated by the Italian case to expand the range and specificity of theories of positivism (Emigh Reference Emigh1997: 649). The externalist and internalist explanations, in many instances, were developed to illuminate the rise of positivism in places other than Italy and after the time when Italian positivism developed, so it is quite plausible that we would need to expand these explanations to take the Italian case into account.

The Ontology of Italian Positivism

Ardigò, a Mantuan priest, developed positivism’s ontology. His positivist debut was a laudatory piece on the heterodox Renaissance Mantuan priest Pietro Pompanazzi, published in 1869, rejecting metaphysics and insisting that all knowledge is based on observation and experiment (Ardigò Reference Ardigò1908b: 49). Ardigò held in particular that there was no difference between “collective units” such as states, regions, and social groups, and “absolute units” or natural kinds such as physically individual organisms (Ardigò Reference Ardigò1881–82: 12). Both could be dissolved into a series of further relationships among the parts, “indistinct matter,” the reality comprising all things (ibid.: 9). Thus, natural, social, and psychological phenomena existed on the same level. Because Ardigò denied ontological distinctions in general, he necessarily failed to develop a strong conception of the social. Individual minds, collectives such as nations, and physical objects all interacted in an undifferentiated soup.

Society, then, appeared to Ardigò as ontologically mixed. As he put the point (Ardigò Reference Ardigò1908a: 64–65):

The social world for Ardigò was, in other words, no different from that of plants or rocks (Salvadori Reference Salvadori1960: 185).

Each of these partly natural and partly social settings produced different character types. These were often national such as the French, the Italians, and the English; this made possible a comparative “psychology of peoples” (Ardigò Reference Ardigò1908a: 106), something halfway between medicine and political theory. This was the common ontological framework of all Italian positivists.

Positivists developed this framework in different ways depending on how they conceptualized the “group” whose psychology they tried to explain. We now turn to discussing some important exemplars of this conceptualization of the group, the concepts of “national character,” “regional types,” “social class,” and “north/south.”

Lombroso and Regional Type

The Italian criminal anthropologist Lombroso expressed skepticism that the relevant groups were national character types, instead focusing on different regional types. His views were first laid out in L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), a treatise on criminal anthropology that tried to link cranial measurements to criminal types. Lombroso’s tabulations implied different ethnic stocks in different parts of the peninsula, suggesting profound ethnic differences within Italy.

Figure 4 is a table from the treatise that tabulates types of criminals: “murderers,” “thieves,” “robbers,” “arsonists,” and “swindlers” (omicidj, furti, grassazioni, incendj, and falso e truffa) by region. It purports to show, for example, that Piedmontese murderers had a higher skull capacity (totale capacità mm) (1,513 millimeters squared) than either Calabrian or Neapolitan murderers (with figures of 1,493 and 1,480, respectively). In general, wrote Lombroso (Reference Lombroso1876: 17, see also 24), the “stature of delinquents almost always reproduces the regional type.” Lombroso’s version of positivism thus put regional unevenness on a new racial foundation. Lombroso’s regional types, in analogy to Ardigò and Villari’s national types, formed the main object of his social science.

Figure 4.

Image from Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquent.

The Methodology of Italian Positivism

What rules of procedure (Merton Reference Merton1968 [1957]: 100–4) did this definition of the object of the moral sciences imply? Italian positivists lacked a firm conception of rules of inquiry in this sense. Indeed, although highly sophisticated in some respects, they seem to have been either unaware of, or unconcerned about, the problem of inference (Stinchombe Reference Stinchcombe1968: 15–17).

Internalism

We are now in a position to conclude our evaluation of the internalist argument. Internalists treat positivism as a strategy of distinction aimed at establishing a new field of sociology. They suggest that positivists extend a scientific method to social reality. This is possible, according to positivists, because the domains of nature and society are ontologically distinct, but analogous (Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz and George2005c: 283). Italian positivists, however, did not identify society as a distinct ontological layer, nor did they try to establish any particular disciplinary field. Rather, they treated empirical materials (history, demographic trends, or crime statistics) as the expression of group (either national, regional, or racial) psychology. They also did not develop a method to distinguish themselves from their rivals. Paradoxically, it was the very ambition of the Italian positivist agenda that undermined any methodological reflection. Given the ontological continuity between nature and society, the question of exactly how the social could form the object of a specific science could not arise; sociology, or the “moral sciences,” was a branch of biology or geography (Santoro Reference Santoro and George2013: 114–15). Positivism, therefore, was not a strategy of distinction allowing for an analogical extension of method in Italy. Instead, positivism claimed ontological sameness between natural and social reality, which undermined methodological development (Burgalassi Reference Burgalassi1996: 97–110).

A Traditional Intelligentsia

How did Italian positivists relate to the dominant disciplines? The university as an institutional form was established in Bologna in the thirteenth century and had two levels. The lower focused on arithmetic, geometry, dialectics, music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy. The upper was broken into three specialized faculties: theology, jurisprudence, and medicine (Winkler Reference Winkler2009: 60). Even after unification, this system remained in place. Classically educated lawyers, doctors, and theologians dominated the intelligentsia at the expense of technicians (Barbagli Reference Barbagli1982: 19–21). Italian intellectuals educated in this system were generalists; they possessed a common classical education but relatively little specialist training (Charle Reference Charle1996: 295). This generalist background was also characteristic of Italian positivists and, as we show in the text that follows, their fathers.

Consider the five men we discussed already. Roberto Ardigò (1828–1920) was born to a downwardly mobile Cremonese family. He attended elementary and high school in Mantua, where he studied with a Mazzinian priest named Enrico Tazzoli, who was defrocked and executed in 1852 for his political ideas. Tazzoli introduced Ardigò to the writings of many important nationalist intellectuals. Following his high school education, Ardigò studied theology at Milan in 1848 and became a priest in 1851. In 1853, he began teaching and in 1863 became a canon of the cathedral of Mantova. Ardigò was, then, a Catholic priest. This is perhaps the clearest possible case of a positivist traditional intellectual because, as Gramsci (Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell Smith1971: 7) put the point, ecclesiastics, with their specific esprit de corps and relative separation from economic life, were typical of the traditional type.

Villari (1820–1918), the son of a lawyer, was born in Naples and began to study law himself until his move to Florence (Moretti Reference Moretti2012: n.p.). Villari was initially drawn to Hegel’s philosophy because he saw it as a source for renewing Italian national culture (Gentile Reference Gentile1921: 55–56). He became a positivist in his adopted city, where he published a number of important historical works, engaged with the social problems of Italian unification, and edited an important positivist review called La Rassegna Settimanale (The Weekly Review) together with Sidney Sonnino (1847–1922) and Leopoldo Franchetti (1847–1917) (Donzelli Reference Donzelli1999: 82; Espinas Reference Espinas1880: 125; Gentile Reference Gentile1921: 61; Restaino Reference Restaino1985a: 73–74, 86). The review published a number of groundbreaking studies of Italian society, including Villari’s (Reference Villari1885: xxiv) own Lettere meridionali (Southern Letters). These Florentine currents developed Comtean positivism, as well as elaborating Galileo’s science as a general model of knowledge (Restaino Reference Restaino1985a: 73–74). However, Villari’s background of Neapolitan idealism, going back to Giambattista Vico as well as his family origins as a lawyer (Abbate Reference Abbate1966: 33; Restaino Reference Restaino1985a: 86), mark him clearly as a traditional intellectual because, like Ardigò, he was part of the stratum of generalist scholars sharply separated from economic activity.

Lombroso (1835–1909) was born to a previously wealthy but economically declining Jewish family in Verona in 1835. After age 15, he was privately schooled at home before attending university, where he studied medicine at the University of Pavia beginning in 1853 (Armocida Reference Armocida2005: n.p.). He had been a medical official in Calabria in 1862 during the struggles against brigantaggio (brigandage) that followed Italian unification (Pick Reference Pick1986: 61–63). Initially believing in a political solution to the problem of regionally uneven development that plagued the newly unified state, he later shifted his thinking toward a biologically reductionist view interpreting regional differences in crime as the expression of racial differences (Petraccone Reference Petraccone2005: 79–80). Lombroso too was part of the traditional intelligentsia. He had a wide humanistic education, and medicine was one of the traditional disciplines of the Italian university.

Gini (1884–1965) was born in Treviso, a town in the eastern Veneto, in 1884 to a “privileged family of the high agrarian bourgeoisie” (Federici Reference Federici and Mario2000: 18). He studied jurisprudence at Bologna, but also statistics, economics, mathematics, and biology. Gini’s first job was at the university of Cagliari, where he taught statistics before moving to Padova and finally to Rome (ibid.). Given his mathematical background, it might be tempting to think of Gini as a technician. But he was in fact a classically educated polymath.

Niceforo (1876–1960) was born in Castiglione, Sicily. His father, Nicolò, was a jurist at the Palermo appellate court and a historian of Italian literature who held various ministerial appointments. Niceforo’s classical education included the study of authors such as Horace, Quintillian, Cicero, and nineteenth-century Russian and French novelists. He studied in Florence, Perugia, and Rome, and received a degree in Naples, probably in law. Niceforo’s literary interests remained even after his turn toward criminal anthropology as exemplified by his 1898 study, Criminali e degenerate dell’Inferno dantesco (Criminals and Degenerates in Dante’s Inferno) (Guarnieri Reference Guarnieri2013: n.p.). Like our other exemplars of Italian positivism, Niceforo was a traditional intellectual. He came from a background of lawyers and had received a classical literary education before attending university.

The Prosopography

The biographical sketches mentioned previously suggest that many Italian positivists came from traditional intellectual social backgrounds. They were mostly the sons of lawyers, professors, doctors, or landowners. None of the positivists discussed already were sons of industrialists. Was this true of Italian positivists as a whole? To answer this question, we collected information on father’s occupation for 69 positivists. We divided the occupations into six categories: “intellectual,” “petty-bourgeois/peasant,” “merchant/banker/financier,” “landowner,” “industrialist,” and “military.” As figure 5 shows, more than half all positivists came from “intellectual” backgrounds. None of the other social backgrounds was more than 10 percent, and industrial class backgrounds were rare, comprising less than 5 percent of the cases.

Figure 5.

Distribution of positivists by father’s occupation.

This evidence implies that Italian positivists were not a new group of intellectuals linked to a developing capitalist class. Rather they were largely the scions of an already established strata.

A further implication of the biographical sketches is that Italian positivists tended to be trained in traditional university disciplines: theology, law, and medicine. Does this pattern hold more broadly? Figure 6 shows that a plurality of the positivists (40 percent) studied law, and well more than half (58 percent) concentrated in the two traditional disciplines of law and medicine. Only small percentages (4 percent and 2 percent, respectively) studied engineering or political economy.

Figure 6.

Type of degree.

The social bearers of Italian positivism were thus traditional intellectuals. They came from an already established intellectual stratum and had been educated in the ancient disciplines of law and medicine.

Positivism as Teleological Knowledge: Ardigò’s Theory of Morality

A final characteristic further indicates the traditional character of this group. Italian positivists concerned themselves with goal setting. As Konrád and Szelényi (Reference Konrád and Iván1979: 64–65) and Gramsci (Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell Smith1971: 6–7) argued, there is a crucial difference between the technical knowledge produced by organic intellectuals and the teleocratic or value-relevant knowledge characteristic of traditional intellectuals. Italian positivists were not content with providing descriptions or causal models. Rather, most were eager to provide an answer to Weber’s (Reference Weber1946: 152–53) query: “What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?” Indeed, positivism was a strategy for reasserting the special qualifications of the traditional intellectuals to speak on political matters in an age of secularization (Konrád and Szelényi Reference Konrád and Iván1979: 64; Plé Reference Plé1996: 417). This characteristic can be best shown by examining how, for Italian positivists, values grew out of the study of facts. We return to a discussion of Ardigò’s psychological theories to demonstrate this.

Ardigò, before his break with the church, claimed that the results of positive science could bolster Catholic moral teachings; indeed, his first major work, La psicologia come scienza positive (Psychology as a Positive Science), was published while he was still a canon of Mantova (Gentile Reference Gentile1921: 242–46; Pironi Reference Pironi2000: 24–25). In this work, Ardigò (Reference Ardigò1908a: 145–46; Pironi Reference Pironi2000: 32, 128, 137) sought to establish a set of scientifically justified ethical maxims.

Ardigò conceived of the development of morality as a transition from egoism to antiegoism. Although biologically human beings are self-interested, they are also naturally social. Through historical development, egoism was gradually transformed into antiegoism, an attitude aimed at safeguarding society rather than the individual (Pironi Reference Pironi2000: 143). With this scheme, Ardigò was able to reestablish much of the content of Catholic morality on a supposedly empirical foundation (ibid.: 145). Thus Ardigò (Reference Ardigò1908a: 238) wrote: “Virtue properly so-called, or rather the truly moral disposition, is a species of holy furor that transports man to the sacrifice of himself; and before he has been able to reflect on his own advantage; and even not expect it.”

Strikingly, therefore, Ardigò's positivism provided a way of anchoring morality in social science. Self-sacrifice in the name of the community was not a premodern attitude but the product of social evolution. Ardigò also insisted on the importance of education as a way of forming Italian national character (Pironi Reference Pironi2000: 9–10, 148; Plé Reference Plé1996: 391; Spirito Reference Spirito and Ugo1956: 19).

Ardigò’s psychological theories exemplify the value stance of a traditional intelligentsia. Rather than considering science a value-free activity, Ardigò claimed to establish values scientifically. He thereby scientifically authorized the demand that Italian citizens consider the good of the nation rather than their own narrow self-interest. Italian positivism was, then, an ideology of ends, not techniques. It served the interests of a teleocratic estate (a traditional intelligentsia), not a rising technical intelligentsia (organic intelligentsia).

Italian positivism was thus rooted in a group of traditional intellectuals. This evidence is compatible with our expanded Gramscian theory of positivism. To be clear, our theory does not suggest that positivism is always associated with traditional intellectuals, but what our argument does suggest is that traditional intellectuals can produce a distinctive form of positivism, as they did in Italy in the late nineteenth century.