ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Some notes about Croce and Einaudi on ‘liberismo’ and ‘liberalismo’
Author: SOLIANI Riccardo
ABSTRACT 11° ESHET ANNUAL CONFERENCE Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg 5 – 7 july, 2007 Some notes about Croce and Einaudi on ‘liberismo’ and ‘liberalismo’ RICCARDO SOLIANI DIEM - FACOLTÀ DI ECONOMIA UNIVERSITÀ DI GENOVA - VIA F. VIVALDI, 2 16126 GENOVA (ITALIA) E-MAIL: soliani@economia.unige.it Benedetto Croce (1866 – 1952) is considered the most important Italian philosopher of Liberalism: his doctrine is called “la religione della libertà”. He has built up a theory of liberty as an inner personal dimension, that must be applied to fully (and critically: he founded the journal La Critica) understand history and political science, namely the real aims of politics: liberty, but also justice and democracy. The relationship between liberalism and free market economy is part and parcel of Croce’s thought. On this point his debate with Luigi Einaudi (1874 - 1961), economist (he was the supervisor of the degree dissertation of Piero Sraffa on Italian monetary policy), Governor of Banca d’Italia and President of Italian Republic (1948 – 1953), is very important. Their public discussion on the respective principles of philosophical and economic liberty, which involved also Wilhelm Röpke, began in 1928 and finished with the Second World War. In short, Einaudi and Röpke maintained that only a free market society can be politically liberal, whereas Croce argued that the political and philosophical liberalism must be at the very top place and can not be linked with only one economic system. As emerges from the critical reconstructions privided by my paper, the position of Croce can be found (obviously, with different nuances) also in his contemporaries Ortega y Gasset, Dewey, Wootton; whereas the opinion of Einaudi and Röpke is shared, as is known, by authors like Hayek and Mises. The debate between Croce and Einaudi, with the participation of Röpke, has been an important moment in the evolution of the Italian culture in a dark historical period, but appears to be almost forgotten today; nevertheless in the final part of the paper I argue that the issues under discussion are really up to date and can offer interesting hints about the current political and economic choices in Europe; moreover they are an important contribution of Italian culture to the constitution of contemporary liberalism.
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