Luca Martino Levi: Welfare by Decree: The Making of Italian Social-Insurance Legislation 1908-1920
Drawing on legislative records, institutional archives, press accounts, speeches, correspondence, and party congresses, Dr. Levi traces pivotal processes and junctures in the construction of the Italian welfare state in the early twentieth century. He reconstructs this history from multiple vantage points, from top-down analyses of legislative debates and party politics, to foregrounding the agency of workers and labor unions, to detailed exploration of domestic and international contexts and influences. The dissertation is at once an exemplary work of legal scholarship, political history, and social history.