Maffeo Pantaleoni: Liberal Economist and the Crisis of the Liberal State in Italy

The article examines the intellectual and political biography of one of the most important (and least known outside Italy) representatives of Italian marginalism, Maffeo Pantaleoni (1857–1924). An outstanding economist and an uncompromising defender of economic liberalism, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries he entered into an uncompromising battle against the tendency towards increasing government interference and the formation of a welfare state. He saw the source of this tendency in the alliance between the economic interests of individual groups of the mass electorate and the political interests of the parliamentary parties. The attempt to find a force to counteract this tendency in the situation of the crisis of the Italian political system after the First World War led Pantaleoni to the camp of Benito Mussolini’s supporters. The peculiarities of Italy’s development after the unification provide the context for understanding the evolution of Pantaleoni’s approach. Pantaleoni himself and his supporters are designated in the article as “pure” liberals. Their approach was emerged as a continuation of the struggle waged by the supporters of economic liberalism led by Francesco Ferrara against their compatriots, the «Germanists» — economists whose approach was similar to that of the German Historical School. This struggle gained particular intensity in the 1870s. In the 1890s, the struggle for the ideals of economic liberalism flared up with new force — this time by the economists of Pantaleoni’s generation. They saw the main threat no longer in hostile ideas, but in the distortions of economic policy caused by the activities of liberal reformists — those politicians who considered it necessary to move away from the ideal of non-interference in favor of active government actions in order to accelerate economic development and smooth out social contradictions. The strategy of liberal reformism, not least due to the irreconcilable criticism of «pure» liberals, turned out to be firmly associated with the name of the Italian politician Giovanni Giolitti. The struggle of the 1890s inflicted significant damage on both sides. But at the beginning of the 1900s the Giolitti era began in Italian history, which ended only with the First World War. The persistent nature of the political distortions, which were initially explained by “pure” liberals primarily by subjective factors — the personality of Giolitti himself and the politicians of his circle — led Pantaleoni to move away from studying pure economic theory and to shift his attention to the peculiarities of political processes in an emerging mass society. This led to a sharp rejection of political movements oriented towards the masses, especially the Socialists, as well as to a pessimistic assessment of representative democracy.