Luigi Amoroso's father Nicola played an important role in his son's moral. intellectual, and scientific development. He was an engineer and important technical official, first in the Southern Railway Company and then in the Italian State Railway. Despite his heavy workload, in the evenings, after supper, the father would dedicate his time to research in pure mathematics, thereby setting an example and demonstrating the importance of study to his six sons, of whom Luigi was the eldest.

This article [by Amoroso] begins with a description of the development of the Paretian concept utility, from a cardinal concept to a purely ordinal index-function. It then continues with a description of economic equilibrium under perfect competition according to Pareto, showing how all marginal utilities for consumers equate, as well as for the producer and marginal productivities. In a short digression on monopolistic and duopolistic market structures, he adopts Pareto's view, later rejected, that each duopolist would seek to optimize his own output independent of the output of his competitor, thus "over determining" the solution and in essence giving up any attempt to solve it. Typically, he thus rejects the problem as not being part of 'economia puru', but of sociology. "Pure economics tells us that the conditions given in the outline of our problem are incompatible. ... It is not appropriate to force ourselves further."

While studying mathematics, he also carried out research in the field of administration and economics, and in recognition of his eclecticism, he was awarded the 'libera docenza', which qualified him to teach at the university level in economics (1910) and in mathematical physics (1913).

With this book, Amoroso established himself as a follower of Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, Walras, Edgeworth, Pareto, and Fisher and in it professes to draw a sharp distinction between mathematical and political economics. Amoroso"s digressions ... only very occasionally concern political issues, but consist of seemingly endless mathematical examples. At this point Amoroso still believes in a distinction between industries with increasing returns to scale (manufacturing industry) and industries with decreasing returns to scale (agriculture), a notion which he would later dismiss in favour of a general U-shaped average cost curve. He is evidently fascinated by correspondences between the equilibrium concepts in economics and mechanics.

In 'Lezioni di Economia Matematica', Amoroso isolated the object of mathematical economics which ... was a field whose discipline was not yet settled, identifying the insufficiencies of the historical evolution of economic thought as it was summarized in the nineteenth-century static systems from Cournot to Fisher. Mathematical economics, as an abstract analytical science, came for Amoroso to coincide with economic mechanics, that is, with the study of the relations between (psychological) forces on the basis of which the economic facts and the obstacles that oppose the action of these forces are produced: in every instant forces and obstacles determine the connections that are then realised among the quantities in the economy as a whole. The laws of mechanics and economic laws have in common the object - the phenomena of motion - and the methodology: the passage from the analysis of the motion of every single particle, and therefore of every action, to the study of the composition of these individual actions in collective action. The specificity of mathematical laws in economics consequently derives from their appearing as barriers and insuperable constraints both at the microeconomic level and at the level of collective action, whatever the institutional condition in which the economic process takes place.

Fascism attacks the whole complex of democratic ideologies and rejects them both in their theoretical premises and in their applications or practical manifestations. Fascism denies that the majority, through the mere fact of being a majority, can rule human societies; it denies that this majority can govern by means of a periodical consultation; it affirms the irremediable, fruitful and beneficent inequality of men, who cannot be levelled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as Universal suffrage.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Amoroso had become the foremost academic spokesman for fascist economic policy and theory. This freely assumed role placed him in a pivotal position in one of the great debates of the time - the debate over the merits and structure of a corporatist reorganization of a capitalist economy. This debate, ultimately about the optimal degree of state intervention in market economies, was an international phenomenon, yet nowhere else did it assume the critical importance it had in Italy. There, corporatism provided the ideological veil for the contradictions of the fascist regime under Benito Mussolini, which had to reconcile its roots in revolutionary syndicalism with its role as a bulwark against the threat of left-wing forces gaining power in the tumultuous years after World War I. Luigi Amoroso"s 1933 essay, written jointly with the one-time fascist minister of the economy Alberto de' Stefani, "La logica del sistema corporativo" Ⓣ, was a generally recognized synthesis of the debate on corporatism. It is not without irony that Luigi Amoroso, as Italy"s foremost neoclassical economist, would devote a large part of his writing on economic policy to eulogizing fascism for having overcome "economic liberalism."

Just as the weaknesses of the flesh delayed, but could not prevent, the triumph of Saint Augustine, so a rationalistic vocation retarded but did not impede the flowering of the mysticism of Pareto. For that reason, Fascism, having become victorious, extolled him in life, and glorifies his memory, like that of a confessor of its faith.

Its most striking feature is a new attempt to combine mathematics with expository presentation. Many of its more than fifty chapters contain mathematical appendices, which are in no way necessary to follow the flow of the book. For example, lengthy discussion of the necessity of interest, abounding with practical and historical examples, is followed by an appendix on compound interest calculation. Amoroso also engages in institutional analysis and, once again, moralistic advice, now exclusively based on conservative Catholic thinking, as represented, for instance, by Pope Pius XII. The book contains a clear pro-capital bias. Speculation is now seen as a dynamic element, in which only the excesses have to be curbed. Most striking is the fact that oligopoly theory is completely omitted.

... in my view the fellows ought to be persons who have done some econometric work in the strictest sense. That is to say, they must have been in one way or another in actual contact with data they have explored and exploited, for which purpose they may have even developed new methods.

I, too, have more than once experienced the unpleasant feeling mentioned by Professor Morgenstern in seeing pages crammed with formulae which, in general, apply only with limitations to the economic reality. And in this connection allow me to recall Edgeworth's golden maxim: if discretion in the use of algebraic symbols constitutes an elegance for the mathematician, it constitutes a necessity for the economist. I cannot, however, agree with the opposite thesis which, it seems to me, is implicit in the thought of my eminent colleague i.e., I cannot agree that econometrics should consider as its principal task the mathematical analysis of statistical data, with the purpose of obtaining directly the empirical laws governing the phenomenon in question. In reality econometrics (like Janus' temple) is two-faced: at the same time an inductive and deductive science. And these two lines must be harmoniously blended, avoiding any excess in one or the other direction. By this criterion I let myself be guided in indicating candidates for fellowship; this I do within the limits of my possibilities which are bounded by my incomplete knowledge of the papers written by the individual authors.