The official site of Italy's central bank

No. 15 - Statistics and Politics: Italy in the Decades after Unification.

Official Italian statistics in the first few decades after the achievement of national unity were shaped, in epistemological terms, by a pronounced inductive approach that prevented the adoption of two of the most important scientific innovations of the day: "representative method" and "economic semiology". Two opposed epistemological visions confronted one another, strictly bound up with specific content (e.g., the notion of probability) and with political and ideological orientations. The French Catholic culture of the Restoration, anti-Enlightenment and anti-rationalist, was the main intellectual frame of reference for the Lombardy-Venetian group that shaped official statistics. They conceived of scientific knowledge as nothing but the mirror of reality, which led them to engage in fierce polemics against the deductive method. The most advanced statistical methods of the day, by contrast, did not merely seek out "facts" but stressed the importance of testing hypotheses and the scientific method, considered among other things as a tool for sharing empirical data between researchers. The epistemological backwardness of Italian statistical science was an impediment to the construction of institutions capable of organizing the public debate on economic and social issues; it was set in the framework of the more general failure of early Italian liberalism to guide the democratic evolution of the institutions.