The dynamics of the relationships between state and economy examined in Chapter 1 concern to some extent all the advanced industrial democracies. Therefore, Italy has also seen the growth and decline of the Keynesian welfare state. However, in both scientific and political debate, one notes a certain reticence, almost discomfiture, in applying this analytical category to Italy -so much so that it is frequently accompanied by stress on the country's ‘peculiarity’.

Whereas ‘American exceptionalism’ and the Modell Deutschland – to cite two examples of categories equally widespread in analysis of these two national cases, respectively – assume the status of real conceptual tools, rather than being treated as national variants of a general pattern, the ‘Italian case (Cavazza and Graubard 1974; Lange and Tarrow 1980; Lange and Regini 1989) has come to symbolize the difficulty of applying any analytical category developed for the purposes of comparison. In fact, with respect to the models used in comparative analysis, interpretation of the Italian case and of its evolution consists mainly in highlighting a series of ‘shifts’ within a context considered, for reasons that are rather unclear, to be more multiform and complex than that of other countries and which therefore cannot be captured by oversimplified concepts.

HAS THERE EVER BEEN A KEYNESIAN WELFARE STATE IN ITALY?

First of all, there is the widely held opinion (Amato 1976; Cassese 1987) that, in Italy, public intervention in the economy is both more extensive than in other Western countries and extremely inefficient, in that it is unable to produce a coherent and comprehensive economic policy.