The Debates on Eugenio Rignano’s Inheritance Tax Proposals Guido Erreygers and Giovanni Di Bartolomeo In June 1920, Filippo Turati (1857–1932), one of the founders of the Italian Labour Party, gave a three-hour speech to the Italian Parliament in which he presented his reformist socialist program. One of the measures he advo- cated was a system of inheritance taxation based upon a differentiation between “immediate inheritance,” upon which moderate tax rates would be imposed, and more remote forms of inheritance, which would be sub- ject to much heavier tax rates. The specific plan he had in mind was that History of Political Economy 39:4 DOI 10.1215/00182702-2007-034 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press Correspondence may be addressed to Guido Erreygers, Department of Economics, Faculty of Applied Economics, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium; e-mail: guido.erreygers@ua.ac.be. Giovanni Di Bartolomeo is at the Department of Public Economics, Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” via del Castro Laurenziano 9, 00161 Rome, Italy; e-mail: giovanni.dibartolomeo@uniroma1.it. This is a revised version of the paper presented at the 2004 ECHE conference “The Political Element in Economics,” University of Reims Cham- pagne-Ardenne, 25–27 March 2004. A substantially different earlier version of the paper had been written by Guido Erreygers under the title “Eugenio Rignano and the Inheritance Tax Debate of the 1920s” and presented at the twenty-first annual conference of the History of Eco- nomics Society, Babson College, Boston, 10–13 June 1994. Some of the material in this older paper was used in Erreygers 1997. Over the years, discussions with Walter Van Trier and John Cunliffe have been helpful in improving the paper. We are grateful to Sandro Bulgarelli for his help in consulting the Biblioteca del Senato della Repubblica Italiana and to Claudia Rotondi for her search in the Istituto lombardo in Milan. We have greatly benefited from the detailed com- ments of the two referees and of the editors of this symposium, as well as from the remarks of participants in the 1994 HES and 2004 ECHE conferences. Guido Erreygers thanks the Univer- sità di Roma “La Sapienza” for the opportunity to finalize the paper during visits in November 2004 and May–June 2005. As usual, we are responsible for all remaining errors. Unless other- wise noted, all translations are ours. History of Political Economy Published by Duke University Press