Il dibattito sul liberismo nel liberalismo italiano e la ricezione selettiva e mediata del neoliberalismo

This doctoral thesis examines the debate on liberismo (economic liberalism/free-market doctrine) within Italian liberalism and the selective, mediated reception of neoliberalism in twentieth-century Italian political thought. The central argument is that the distinctive Italian conceptual distinction between liberalismo (liberalism as an ethical-political principle) and liberismo (economic liberalism as a technical instrument) has functioned not merely as an analytical clarification, but as a structural screen that systematically displaced from Italian liberal thought the question of the institutional and distributive conditions of economic freedom. The thesis combines a diachronic approach, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's history of concepts, with a synchronic analysis informed by Michael Freeden's theory of ideological morphology. This dual perspective allows the fragmentation of Italian liberalism to be read not as a deviation from a unified model, but as a structural feature produced by specific theoretical choices that recurred across different authors and historical contexts. The reconstruction proceeds through three main chapters. The first traces the origins of the liberalism/liberismo debate from the post-unification period through the early twentieth century, examining figures such as Marco Minghetti, Francesco Ferrara, Vilfredo Pareto, Benedetto Croce, Umberto Ricci, and Epicarmo Corbino. Particular attention is devoted to the Croce-Einaudi debate, which consolidated the separation between the plane of values and the plane of economic technique in canonical form. The second chapter analyses the tension between liberalism and liberismo in the interwar and postwar periods, focusing on Edoardo Giretti, Piero Gobetti, Luigi Einaudi, Carlo Antoni, and the Italian reception of Wilhelm Röpke's ordoliberal thought. The third chapter examines the procedural reformulation of liberalism in the work of Bruno Leoni, Panfilo Gentile, Nicola Matteucci, and Giovanni Sartori, tracing the trajectory through which Italian liberalism increasingly defined itself as method rather than as a substantive theory of the social order. A central thread of the thesis concerns Italy's selective reception of European neoliberalism, particularly ordoliberalism and the current of thought connected to the Walter Lippmann Colloquium of 1938 and the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947. The thesis argues that the entrenched distinction between liberalismo and liberismo filtered the reception of these theories, assimilating their critique of collectivism while rendering invisible their institutional dimension — that is, the question of who constructs the rules governing economic order and in whose favour. By reducing liberismo to a technical instrument, Italian liberalism systematically avoided asking which institutional arrangements are compatible with freedom and at whose cost. The conclusions offer a genealogical synthesis, tracing from Minghetti to Sartori the structural reproduction of a conceptual architecture that separates moral value from institutional device, and showing how this separation — far from being neutral — produced precise practical effects: it made impossible a systematic political philosophy of economic institutions, and transformed every structural limit of the tradition into a mark of theoretical complexity or equilibrium. The thesis thus reads the distinction between liberalism and liberismo not as an intellectual achievement, but as the index of a question that Italian liberal thought consistently chose not to ask.