Luigi Luzzatti died in Rome on 29 March ninety years ago. One of the most brilliant minds in political, legal, economic and academic culture. One of the most significant and incisive personalities who accompanied the difficult transformation of post-Risorgimento Italy into a modern country. "All progress must tend towards greater spiritual progress, but [...] this greater spiritual progress is not possible without the basis of this material well-being: man does not live by bread alone, but he needs bread in order to live". These are words that a young Luzzatti writes to his interlocutor Fedele Lampertico and which render well the depth of the statesman and the topicality of his thought. A leading exponent of the "historic right", Luzzatti decisively defended the free market, without however ever ignoring its dysfunctions, including the lack of fairness, information asymmetries and above all the inability of private companies to achieve, in many, too many, cases, a balanced and optimal production dimension.
The Association of Cooperative Banks was founded in 1876, 140 years ago, by Luigi Luzzatti who, in the previous decade, by importing the German model of Credito Popolare into Italy, had been the inspirer and protagonist of the birth of numerous Popular Banks. A construction that with the publication, in 1863, of the work "The diffusion of credit and popular banks" was structured after having been positively tested in practice. On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of his death, the President of the Republic remembered Luigi Luzzatti through an official note released by the Quirinale. These are the authoritative and welcome words of the President, Sergio Mattarella:
“Ninety years have passed since the death of Luigi Luzzatti, an Italian academic, politician and economist, one of the main protagonists of liberal Italy. Since his inception he has shown careful analytical skills in the study The diffusion of credit and popular banks in which he supported the centrality of cooperative credit for the growth and economic prosperity of the country, in compliance with the principles of equity and promotion of the classes popular, affirming a solidarity conception of the economy with the subsidiary intervention of the State. The originality of the reflections and legal formulas described generated an initiative to promote credit and consumer cooperatives, which led to the creation, in 1876, at his instigation, of the National Association of Popular Banks. In the many government positions that were entrusted to him, both as Minister and as Prime Minister, he favored the recovery of public finances through a more rigorous policy and at the same time promoting a virtuous circle of development based on the collection of savings, the access to credit and the moderation of bank profits. As a parliamentarian and attentive observer of collective phenomena, he outlined a decisive social policy in an innovative way: the laws on compulsory insurance against accidents at work are owed to his decisive contribution, on the raising to twelve years of the minimum age for work of children, on the establishment of the national compulsory maternity fund, on the first organic law on social housing. Tenacious and farsighted supporter of a necessary monetary peace between the states emerging from the first bloody world conflict, to be entrusted to international regulation, his figure refers us to great political passion, to the principles of social equality and integrity, inspired by a high patriotic spirit and ideal of Italianness”.
*Giuseppe De Lucia Lumeno is the General Secretary of Assopopolari
