Tra Economico e Politico. Crisi e ruolo delle istituzioni in Keynes e Hayek

Abstract

The doctoral research work focused on problematizing, from a philosophical legal and political point of view, certain aspects of the thinking of the two best-known and most relevant economists of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August Hayek. The economic and social philosophy analysis of the works of the two authors was put under the scrutiny of two lines of inquiry: first of the relationship between the sphere of economics and the sphere of politics, and then, closely related to the first aspect, the different declinations of the concept of crisis. In the first part of the research, moving from a philosophical questioning, the concept of the modern was investigated from the constituent character that the relationship between the Political and the Economic has assumed. Within this framework it was possible to examine mainly, two fundamental concepts of the legal philosophical lexicon: that of the individual and that of the State. In the second part, however, the same issue was analyzed in the light of the thought, first, of the Cambridge economist and later of the Viennese. In the second chapter of the thesis, in fact, three topical moments are distinguished that allow the notion of Keynesian crisis to be delineated, highlighting the tension between economic science and politics. First, the monetary question, which intensely marks Keynes' thinking between the 1920s and his death in 1946, then reflections on the crisis of the liberal order that opened with the end of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, and finally, Keynes' diplomatic work during the two world wars define three determinations of Keynesian work. In the third chapter, the figure of Hayek is developed in two directions: the purely economic work developed between the 1920s and early 1940s, when the Viennese's analysis focused on the definition of the business cycle and the identification of crisis as an intervention by public authorities in the naturalness of the cycle; secondly, however, the research focused on the works of his maturity, when the new Hayekian definition of crisis, the one revolving around the notion of catallaxy, assumes and highlights the anti-modern bearing of Hayek's political philosophy. The whole reflection is mainly aimed at relating the two authors, both, more generally, from the point of view of their intellectual and biographical relationship, and by highlighting the different normative proposal internal to their interpretation, which the two theorists

developed by differentially tensioning the dyad constituted by the terms Economic and Political. [edited by Author]