The shock of the War and the advent of technocracy. The archipelago State and the birth of economic public bodies in Italy

Abstract The article considers the transformations in Italian public administration induced by the Great War. In particular, it focuses on the birth and spread of economic public bodies that changed the relationship between state and market between the two wars; they introduced a new organizational formula parallel to ordinary public administration; they redesigned the relationship between public and private sector; they created a technocratic elite that went through fascism and played a fundamental role in the first phase of the republic. The Italian State, with the birth of public bodies, suffered a flight from the center of government administration in favor of new financial and industrial administrations which played a central role in the economy and politics for decades. Thus, it was born the archipelago state and the government through public bodies which characterized the first fifty years of republican history and whose influences on the Italian political system are still evident today.