LORIA, ACHILLE

LORIA, ACHILLE (1857–1932), Italian economist and sociologist. Loria, a native of Mantua, was a professor at the universities of Siena, Padua, and Turin. He considered man's relationship to the amount of available free land to be a vital factor in the history of mankind, holding that the relative scarcity of free land condemned men to subjugation and exploitation by land owners. His deterministic economic theory of history reflects the influence of many 19th-century schools of thought, including those of karl marx and Herbert Spencer. He seems also to have been influenced by the Irish land-reform debate. Loria's voluminous writings include Analisi della proprietà capitalista (1889), Verso la giustizia sociale (1914–20), and Ricordi di uno studente settuagenario (1927). He was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the foremost scholars of his time, and his appointment to the Italian Senate in 1919 was only one of the many honors conferred on him. His stress on the importance of free land in the history of the United States had considerable influence on such economic interpreters of U.S. history as Charles Beard and Frederic Jackson Turner. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Einaudi, in: La Riforma Sociale, 43 (1932), list of his works; idem, in: Economic Journal, 56 (1946), 147–50. Add. Bibliography: D'Orsi Angelo (ed.), Achille Loria (2000). (Joachim O. Ronallxs)