Luigi Einaudi was born in Carrù (Cuneo) on 24 March, 1874, to Lorenzo a tax collection service concessionaire, and Placida Fracchia. Luigi attended his primary school in Carrù and high school in Savona. In 1888, after his father’s death, the family moved to Dogliani, his mother’s hometown, where he lived in the old family home: "These habits that I observed in the ancestral home were the universal habits of the Piedmontese bourgeoisie for much of the 19th century; and at a time when social climbing was not frequent, one can understand how those habits moulded a ruling class who left deep traces of honesty, ability, thrift and devotion to duty in the political and administrative life of the Piedmont that made Italy...". In 1888, Luigi attended the Classical Lyceum in Turin. In 1891, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Turin to graduate with full marks in July 1895 with a thesis on "The Agrarian Crisis in England", supervisor Professor Cognetti de Martiis.

¹ t/n: In the North-West of Italy

After graduating, Einaudi became an "unpaid university professor assistant". In 1898, he was awarded the certification for teaching Political economy. In 1899, he won the competition for the Chair of "Economics, Finance and Statistics" in secondary technical schools. He taught at the Bonelli then at the Sommeiller secondary technical schools in Cuneo and in Turin. In the meantime, he began his university career on an independent teaching. In 1902, at the age of 28 only, he won the competition for Public Economics called by the University of Pisa. There, he was appointed professor of Public Economics and Financial Law under a temporary contract before being transferred to the Faculty of Law at the University of Turin, which was to become his permanent post. On 19 December 1903, Luigi married Ida Pellegrini in Turin. She was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a nobleman from Verona who had moved to Turin on business. Three children were were born from the marriage, Mario (1904), Roberto (1906) and Giulio (1912) as well as Maria Teresa and Lorenzo who died prematurely.

The family split their time between Turin and Dogliani, a place in the countryside where Luigi had bought the S. Giacomo farmhouse, the basis of a property which he extended and improved over the years.

Einaudi’s first book, "Il Principe mercante" (The merchant prince) was published in the year 1900. There, Luigi Einaudi drew the portrait of a successful Italian textile entrepreneur. The young liberal scholar praised the work of Italians who had "come up through hard work and courage, from humble labourers, to prominent economic positions". He magnified "self-made men" who were the "living embodiment" of "intellectual and organisational qualities", those "eminent individualities who were able to [emerge] from the grey and anonymous crowd by greatness of intellect, by daring enterprise or even by a fortunate combination of favourable circumstances". In 1900, he also published "La rendita mineraria" (The mining income), a challenging study published within UTET’s prestigious "Biblioteca dell’economista" (Economist’s Library). In 1902, he published his third monograph: "Studi sugli effetti delle imposte. Contributo allo studio dei problemi tributari municipali" (Studies on the effects of taxation. A contribution to studying Town taxation issues). All these writings ensured that, by the early 20th century, young Einaudi not yet in his Thirties years of age,was an established exponent of the most prominent Italian economic science, particularly in the field of Fiscal Finance. Together with Pantaleoni, Pareto, Barone, de Viti de Marco and Ricci, he was and would remain one among the Italian economists deserving international prestige. In the years that followed, he conducted important research on the History of finance under the Savoy monarchy as well as studies on Financial Law: "Intorno al concetto di reddito imponibile e di un sistema di imposte sul reddito consumato" of 1912, (Around the concept of taxable income and of a taxation system based on consumed income) a fundamental work on the core of issues he had been addressing since 1909 on the topic of earned and consumed income; and "Corso di Scienza delle finanze" (Course on Financial Law)Cof 1914. Thanks to the sound reputation he had acquired, Einaudi collaborated as a columnist first with "La Stampa" (from 1896), then with Corriere della Sera (from 1903); in 1908, he began a collaboration with The Economist which went on until 1940.

² t/n: quotations from http://digamo.free.fr/schumphea.pdf

In 1908, Einaudi became the editor of "Riforma Sociale". The journal had been founded in 1894 by Francesco Saverio Nitti and the Turin publisher Luigi Roux. They intended to give their contribution in tuning the Italian liberal institutions to the dynamics and conflicts of the emerging industrial society. Under Einaudi’s guidance, "La Riforma sociale" proclaimed a liberal, classical and reform-oriented vision at the same time, a legacy from the great English and Italian tradition of John Stuart Mill and Cavour. An entourage of valuable collaborators built up around Einaudi. They would become the core of the "Turin School of Economics" whose doctrine and originality would receive wide recognition in the following years. Together with Pasquale Jannaccone and Giuseppe Prato, respectively co-director and editor-in-chief of "La Riforma Sociale", Attilio Cabiati joined the school when moving to Turin at the beginning of the century.

At the outbreak of World War I, Luigi Einaudi was on the interventionist side of the Entente. In this period and in the immediate post-war period, Einaudi’s thinking was characterised by a strong ethical and political tension and by a particular focus on international issues. Two famous collections bear witness to this: the "Lettere politiche di Junius" (1920) (Junius political letters) and "Gli ideali di un economista" (1921) (The ideals on an economist), where he outlined his "ideals": "the educational school, England, the unification of Italy through the history of Piedmont, the need for supernational governments". During the war, Einaudi was called by Filippo Meda, the Finance Minister in the Boselli government to take part in a parliamentary commission charged with the study and preparation of the tax reform. He played a primary role in the drafting of the project, which however was not implemented. On 6 October 1919, he was appointed Senator of the Kingdom at the proposal of the Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti. One year later, he was appointed director of the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences at the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, a post he held until 1926. The "biennio rosso" (1919-1920) characterised by the revolts by peasants and workers to occupy land and factories was interpreted by Einaudi as a period of regression of "civilisation" and laceration of the social fabric. In this context, Einaudi hoped that fascism would restore order. He shared with other liberals the illusion that the new regime could then be brought back into the structure and institutional dynamics of the liberal state. At the end of 1923 "La bellezza della lotta" (The beauty of struggle) was published: an effective synthesis of Einaudi’s liberalism to preface "Le lotte del lavoro" (1924) (Struggles for labour). After Giacomo Matteotti was murdered, the political situation deteriorated quickly in Italy. On 6 August 1924, Einaudi launched his cry of alarm in the article "Il silenzio degli industriali" (The silence of industrialists). On 5 December, he voted against the draft budget of the Ministry of the Interior for the 1924-25 fiscal period. In 1925, he published the Preface to John Stuart Mill’s Freedom. There, he warned: "Woe betide whomever fell without contrast from the natural aspiration to liberate from the bestial civil war into which the political struggle of Italy had degenerated between 1919 and 1921 into absolute conformity to the nationalistic gospel imposed by fascism! This would be the death of the nation". On 1 May 1925, the Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals drafted by Benedetto Croce was published. Einaudi was among the first signatories. On 28 November, he resigned as a contributor to the Corriere della Sera following Luigi Albertini’s forced resignation from the editorship and the new ownership of the newspaper by the Fascist- friendly "F.lli Crespi e C.". In 1926, he was ousted from teaching at Bocconi and at Polytechnic of Turin, again for political reasons.

³ t/n: in the Italian version of the text

In 1925 -1926, the regime forced Einaudi to sever two of his main channels of communication with his audience: his collaboration with the Corriere della sera, following the ousting of the Albertinis, and his post at Bocconi where he had been teaching since 1904. He retained his university professorship in the Faculty of Law in Turin, but to keep it he had to submit to the odious obligation of swearing an oath of loyalty to the regime imposed in 1931. Like many other anti-fascist professors, the decision cost him no small torment. He went to Naples to see Benedetto Croce who advised him to take the oath because otherwise he would be replaced by a professor of fascist faith, and the students would be educated in that faith. In the Faculty where he taught, Achille Loria and Gioele Solari who were his friends and who had always sided with reformist socialism also swore in this spirit.

After 1922, the Riforma was seemingly losing its attractiveness. After he was forced to leave Corriere della Sera, Luigi Einaudi threw himself headlong into the task of giving a new thrust to Riforma. He acted in the simplest way: by writing a whole set of articles on the Fascist monetary policy in the second decade of the century. Actually, he shared the strategy since inflation had been curbed and the exchange rate at "quota 90" ⁴ had been successfully preserved. In the 1930s, came the articles on the international economic crisis, the interventions on Keynes and those on corporatism. In the three years following, the journal became more pleasant to leaf through for the good taste of his son Giulio who had become a publisher. Colourful Olivetti advertising had been added together with a new modern printing style. With the closure of Riforma Sociale in 1935, the regime cut short the life of a living, breathing creature. Tirelessly, Einaudi founded the "Rivista di storia economica" in 1936 (Review of economic history), with old and new contributors. Through this erudite review, he continued to intervene on contemporary problems, albeit indirectly and allusively.

⁴ t/n: in the fascist period Mussolini negotiated exchange rate 1£=90 Lit - before that was 1£=150Lit

The drama of the war and the consequent fall of Fascism created the conditions for Einaudi to be reinstated to public life, even if only for a short period. On 4 September 1943, during the 45 days of the Badoglio government, Einaudi took up the post of dean at the University of Turin. But already on the 22nd of that month, hunted by the Nazi-Fascists occupying the North, he and his wife were forced to make a perilous escape across the Alps. His diary maintains an impassive tone.
However his narrative is really engaging. At the border of Col Fenêtre, he risked to be rejected: he was extremely cool when he told who he was and gave he the name of his colleague from the University of Geneva, William Rappard. The next day, they were in Martigny and then in Lausanne. Also, they were blessed with the joy to meet their son Giulio at the refugee camp where they had settled. This one had crossed the border on 15 September, an officer in the Alpine troops. The refugee Einaudi was no ordinary person. He soon left the Orphélinat refugee camp. From Lausanne, the couple moved on to Basel in a small flat where Margherita, the widow of one of Roberto Michels’s sons hosted them. Luigi and Ida made a virtue out of necessity. Margherita was a concert pianist, and perhaps for the first time in his life, Einaudi approached chamber music with delight even though Cabiati jokingly put it: "he founds the Royal March complicated". In April 1944, they moved to Geneva.

Over forty years earlier, Einaudi had been close to obtaining a chair in Political Economy as Maffeo Pantaleoni successor in Geneva. Now, by to his peer Rappard, he met some of the major Swiss intellectuals such as the historian Werner Kaegi and the economist Edgard Salin. Roepke taught in Geneva, at the Institut des hautes études internationales. Another leading figure was the Swiss Plinio Bolla, promoter of a Comité d’aide aux universitaires italiens en Suisse. In March 1944, Einaudi gave a course to the Geneva university inmates, from there he derived the bulk of the "Lezioni di politica sociale" (Lessons of social politics) of 1949. The most stimulating meetings were with Italians, first and foremost Adriano Olivetti and Ernesto Rossi, a convinced federalist and author with Altiero Spinelli of the Manifesto di Ventotene . Einaudi had reservations about the radical tone of the Manifesto. Nevertheless, in his article "Via il prefetto!" - published on 15 July 1944 in the supplement to Gazzetta ticinese with the inspiring title "Italy and the Second Risorgimento" - he expressed a condemnation without appeal against the centralised and "Jacobin" state inherited from Napoleon, just as he put an important assessment of the partisan movement, because of those "bourgeois" who set out to reform the state from the bottom. The immediate political contingency was not absent either: Einaudi was, in fact, contacted by Maria José of Savoy to organise monarchist propaganda, with a view to the institutional referendum once the war would be over.

Back to Italy, on 10 December 1944, Einaudi took up the post of Governor of the Bank of Italy in early 1945. The country was facing enormous problems. Inflation had exploded after the armistice of 8 September 1943 and the pricing system had broken down: between the North and the South of the Country, between the city and the countryside, between official prices and the black market. After the Liberation, even if damage to manufacturing facilities seemed small, damage to housing, to the transport and agriculture was enormous. Even the Bank of Italy came out of the war impoverished in its assets and with a weaker inner structure. The restoring of sovereignty and monetary stability, the financing of reconstruction, the re-introduction of the Lira and of the Italian economy into the new global context were the major issues to be faced by Einaudi at the helm of the Bank of Italy and then of the Government. Within his action, each one of these issues is tied to his concern to restore an economy and a state being at the same time the founder and the foundation of freedom for citizens.

After the Liberation, Luigi Einaudi was appointed a member of the Consulta Nazionale. Later, in June 1946, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a Liberal in the list of the National Democratic Union. Within the Constituent Assembly, he was a member of the Commissione dei 75 - in charge of drafting a preliminary version of the Constitution - and in the sub-commission on the constitutional order of the State. On 31 May 1947, he joined De Gasperi fourth government as Vice-President of the Council and Minister of Finance and the Treasury; a few days later, on 4 June, he was replaced at the Finance by Giuseppe Pella and at the Treasury by Gustavo Del Vecchio, to became the holder of the new Ministry of the Budget while retaining his position as Governor of the Bank of Italy. Einaudi’s parliamentary activity at the Consulta and in the Constituent Assembly supported the transition from Monarchy to Republic even if in the 1946 election campaign Einaudi was in favor of the king due to his sub-alpine origin and also for reasons of constitutional balance. As he was to recall after his election to the Quirinal, Einaudi gave dozens of speeches to the Constituent Assembly with "something more than loyal support". In his speeches to the Consulta and the Constituent Assembly, Einaudi dealt with institutional issues (electoral system, bicameralism, local autonomies), economic and social issues (taxation system, international monetary system, planning, monopolies, education), and international issues (Europeism and peace). Even though Einaudi had been initially opposed to the very idea of a Constituent assembly, he later realized in the passionate debates that all this exercise proved not only the evidence of maturity in the reborn Italian democracy, but also the effectiveness of dialectical dispute when thinking is the creative factor for political debate together with social conflict and competition in the economy.

Luigi Einaudi was elected President of the Republic on 11 May 1948 at ballot four, with 518 votes from the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Liberal Party and the Republican Party. The Socialists and Communists supported Vittorio Emanuele Orlando who casted 320 votes. In his swearing-in speech, Einaudi wished to emphasize that the difficult present derived from a dramatic past: "Twenty years of dictatorship had served the country with civil discord, external war together with material and moral destruction to the Fatherland to such an extent that any hope of redemption seemed vain. And instead, all these sufferings re-elaborated in the Resistance led to protecting "the indestructible national unity from the Alps to Sicily", while the reconstruction of the "destroyed material fortunes" was beginning. Along the lines marked out by the Constitution, he emphasized the central role of the Parliament, the place where "true life is, the very life of the institutions that we freely gave to ourselves" and the need to pacify souls after the mid-century disaster. With the election of Einaudi, certainty was given to the organization of presidency: a special Act of Law defined its endowment and established the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, headed by Ferdinando Carbone from 1948 to 1954 , and by Nicola Picella from 1954. In interpreting and carrying out his function, Einaudi adhered to a profound respect for the dialectics between the political and the parliamentary forces. At the same time, within such established boundaries, he exercised the powers that the Constitution assigned to the President. He claimed and used the prerogatives that the Constitution had ascribed to the President of the Republic, even if this could mean on some issues, such as the power to choose senators for life and constitutional judges, some contrast with the majority which had elected him. During the years of Einaudi’s presidency, Italy healed the wounds of the war, made the fundamental choices for its international position by joining NATO and the rising European institutions, brought Trieste back in the national borders, and launched a vast modernisation of economic facilities. After his term of office ended, Einaudi published Lo scrittoio del Presidente (The President’s writing desk), a volume collecting letters, memoirs, observations, and proposals for modifications suggested by the legislative texts submitted by the government. In the years following 1955, he also published Le Prediche inutili (1959) (Useless preaching) and many other articles in reviews and newspapers which testify to the fruitful intellectual activity carried out by Luigi Einaudi until his death in Rome on 30 October 1961.