Cambridge and the Anglo-Italian Economic Tradition (Institute of Advanced Study, University of Bologna, 26 May 2006)

The workshop on ‘Cambridge and the Anglo-Italian Economic Tradition’ has been organized within the framework of the Focus Group 'The Migration of Ideas' at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Bologna. Its co-convenors have been Prue Kerr, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, and Roberto Scazzieri, University of Bologna. The purpose of the workshop has been the attempt to investigate migration of ideas by looking at the microcosm of the important cluster of intellectual exchanges and cross fertilizations that took place between Italian economists and the Faculty of Economics and Politics of the University of Cambridge over the period from the late 1920s to the final decades of the 20th century. This case of migration of ideas is interesting from a variety of points of view. First, at some point the mutual interaction was so strong that one could even point to the existence of an ‘Anglo-Italian’ school of economics (thinking primarily, although not exclusively, of the Cambridge connection). Second, the migration of ideas, if considered in a medium- and long-term perspective, was two-sided rather than unidirectional: concepts and intellectual frames were often conceived and discussed in Cambridge but quite often they were themselves the result of a much wider web of influences. Third, this pattern of intellectual exchanges was primarily a consequence of the post-war consolidation of cosmopolitan academic networks, and did not immediately depend upon the existence of threats to personal or intellectual freedom (as other cases of migration of ideas had been).