"Generalist" Journals between Dissemination of Economics and Regime Propaganda

Abstract

Early in the 20th, generalist journals – a kind of press which had its major diffusion in the nineteenth century – continue to accommodate the contributions of economists offering a specific debating space. However, with the affirmation of fascist ideology, generalist periodicals progressively ceased to exist or to host economists’ articles. Thus, the main object of this research consists in clarifying what could be intended by “generalism” and in relation to which events and ideological pressures it disappeared as a different way to do journalism in a dialectic interplay with specialization. The paper reviews the panorama of generalist journals focusing on the impact of the Fascist regime on their life and activity. Furthermore, the work analyses the fate of the two most representative of generalist journals in Italian culture -Nuova Antologia and Echi e Commenti- showing how their survival to the Fascist censorship implied their transformation into two docile means of propaganda.