1. Ideologies and Political Economy in the Nineteenth Century

According to Schumpeter, the roots of economics are to be found in social philosophy and in the concrete business experience of daily life, particularly in eighteenth-century’s Britain. The discussion of economic activity takes different turns in Britain and Germany: in the former, intermingling those two roots, it is based on an individualistic point of view; in the latter, on the State as the centre of social and economic life. Adam Smith, philosophically motivated by Moderate Enlightenment, is seen as the founder of the Classical School of political economy, and the embodiment of a “cosmopolitan” economic liberalism, valid at any time and place. Later in the nineteenth century, political economy is heavily influenced by positivism, and economic phenomena are studied similarly to natural sciences. The attention of the neo–classical economist is focused on individual’s marginal utility, and the whole equilibrium of the economic system is explained in mathematical terms, as with Walras and Pareto, implicitly supporting a conservative view of society. In Germany, the central role of the State finds a Hegelian basis and political economy is characterized by an accentuated historicism, through the works of the protectionist List, and of the exponents of the Historical School of Economics, in a sort of economic “nation-building”. The centrality and development of the nation, and an insistence on social reform in a non-Marxian approach, are emphasized within a framework of path-dependence. The same Hegelian root can be found in Marx and his historical materialism. Social classes, already present in the analysis of the Classical School and then disregarded by neo-classics, are seen in a totally different, confrontational perspective, resulting from society’s capitalistic structure: a structure to be deterministically overcome by the proletarian revolution or by the fall of the capitalist’s rate of profit.