Loria, Achille (1857–1943)

Achille Loria graduated in law in 1877 and taught political economy in various Italian universities. In 1903, he moved from the University of Padua to the University of Torino, where he spent thirty years directing the Laboratory of Political Economy as the deputy of Luigi Einaudi (1874–1961), an economist who later would become President of the Italian Republic. Positivist and, in particular, Darwinist in education, Loria tried to apply historical materialism to the study of law, society, and economics, but always refuted orthodox Marxist thinking and the theory of labor value. For this, he came under severe attack from official Marxists and from Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) in person.

During his lifetime, scholars considered Loria an outstanding economist, something of an Italian Marx, but with a clear political tendency toward democratic and reform socialism. His formidable erudition enabled him to breathe new life into nineteenthcentury academic positivist thinking, which enjoyed a great deal of scope in the cultural climate of contemporary Torino. Nevertheless, his acknowledged ingenuity went hand-in-glove with an equally acknowledged eclecticism—perhaps the main reason for the rapid decline in his celebrity immediately after his death.

One of Loria's most important contributions to law and society was an interesting theory on the periods of human history and the distribution of income as a function of the variation of the system of land ownership, which encountered the dissent of contemporary Italian idealism. Loria based his theory on the firm belief that demographic growth conditioned economic phenomena and the consequent occupation of free lands. Together with his political convictions, this belief induced him to favor the abolition of private landed property and of estate income, political positions that could hardly pass unobserved in the socioeconomic context of Italy at that time—which still [Page 971]featured a powerful class of landowners—with the result that it earned him fierce criticism.

Idealism, Marxism, the political opportunism rife after the Second World War, and Loria's political position, which was midway between the classical free market and communism, conspired against his lasting fame. Nevertheless, Loria remains one of the salient figures in the Italian science of law and society. As Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004) wrote, Loria was one of the luminaries of the Torino faculty of law and economics, together with Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), among others.