IRI: financial intermediary or entrepreneurial state?

Abstract

The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), a state-controlled holding company, was founded in 1933. Its original mission was to prevent the collapse of Italy's largest universal banks by taking over their huge industrial shareholdings. As a consequence, the historiography traditionally associates it with the concept of ‘entrepreneurial state’. This article aims to challenge this interpretation by focusing on the ideas and actions of three prominent figures: Alberto Beneduce, the IRI's first chairman; Donato Menichella, Beneduce's right-hand man who became governor of the Bank of Italy after World War II; and Pasquale Saraceno, a technocrat who spent his entire career as one of the IRI's top managers. Beneduce and Menichella regarded the IRI as a financial intermediary open to private shareholders. To Saraceno, by contrast, the IRI was an expression of a Catholic ideology that entrusted to the state the mission of promoting the industrialization of the south. This view, which aimed at reducing regional inequalities in order to complete the country's political unification, prevailed only in the second half of the 1950s. By trying to blend profit maximization with political and social goals, this strategy sowed the seeds of the IRI's decline and eventual demise.