Teodoro D’ippolito: The First Writer of Treatises on Economia Aziendale

In 1926 Mr. Gino Zappa established Economia aziendale (Concern Economics) in Italy, a discipline synthesizing the conditions and modes of the economic production of goods and services every azienda (concern) carries out. And Mr. Teodoro D’Ippolito, who was one of the most prominent of his disciples, highly contributed with his work Le discipline aziendali • L’azienda corporativa, written in 1940, to the theoretical strengthening of the new discipline. This book had five editions until 1966, each of them with different contents conflation or titles. The present paper deals mainly with the edition of 1940 since it is the progenitor of all other editions, and it even was the first ‘institutional’ essay ever written about economia aziendale in the world. As a matter of fact, it was the only one for over twenty years. However all different editions have always had a high degree of generalism, according to the principles of the Italian school. As a consequence the works D’Ippolito wrote about economia aziendale, besides having a temporal primacy, are still of utmost importance not only from the historical but partly also from the theoretical point of view that prefers azienda as a genus to aziende considered as its species.