It is apt that Economic Development was published at almost the same time as the great novel of conservative transformation, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Tancredi, the novel’s central character, famously explains to his aristocratic uncle why he is going off to fight with Garibaldi’s rebels: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ This could have served as the hidden epigraph to Whitaker’s ‘Grey Book’. It was a salvage operation. Its primary aim was not to destroy the Catholic nationalist state, but to keep it afloat.
