Giorgio Lunghini

University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia · scienze sociali

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of productionprevails, writes Marx in first page of Capital, presents itself as “an immense accumula-tion of commodities” - and art itself is now a commodity. The uniqueness of a work ofart is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition: and that whichwithers in the age o...

The Principia Ethica of G.E. Moore highly influenced the Society of the Apostles and the Bloomsbury Circle, and hence the ‘vision’ of J.M. Keynes. In Schumpeter’s words: “General Theory is the final outcome of Keynes’s protracted struggle to make his vision of our era analytically operational”. The Closing Notes on the social philosophy which the G...

Giorgio Lunghini La metafora in economia: tropo o trucco Le cattive metafore producono cattive politiche. P. Krugman La metafora economica più volgare è: "Il tempo è denaro", e non essendo afflitto da questa passione morbosa cercherò di sottrarvene poco. Nell'uso di metafore l'economia è forse la disciplina più indisciplinata, nella letteratura teo...

Are the causes of the current crisis financial causes or real causes? The question is pointless, since in the structure of a capitalist economy ? of a monetary economy of production ? the real elements and the monetary and financial elements are closely intertwined. This is why the capitalist equilibrium ein Zufall ist, according to Marx; it can on...

La produzione teoretica di Thomas Nagel è copiosa e varia, ma il suo contributo più noto è What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. Il tema di Nagel è qui un tema ormai classico nella filosofia moderna: il rapporto tra mente e corpo. Sembrerebbe un tema di poco interesse per l’economista; mentre credo che dovrebbe esserlo, poiché la questione del riduzionismo...

Keynes's General Theory is a classic, and classics should be read or re-read directly, without any scholarly mediation. Some methodological and substantive elements of the General Theory are constitutive of the GT itself. These elements give the most fruitful hints, if you want to grasp the important points of the current economic crisis. Unfortuna...

Keynes’s General Theory is a classic, and classics should be read or re-read directly, without any scholarly mediation. Some methodological and substantive elements of the General Theory are constitutive of the GT itself. These elements give the most fruitful hints, if you want to grasp the important points of the current economic crisis. Unfortuna...

Luigi L. Pasinetti's, "Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians" deals with the (unaccomplished) Keynes's revolution in economics. Why did it not succeed to the extent that Keynes and his pupils had hoped for? This book addresses this and other questions by tracing the historical development of Keynesian economics. Part I of the book contains the author...

Bruno de Finetti gave many important contributions to economic theory and on economic theory. De Finetti’s main contribution is his own concept of probability, which is both an answer and a critique to the question put by J.M. Keynes: «[Under uncertainty] there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply d...

Sraffa e il contesto Piero Sraffa’s “Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities” (1960) is a critique of the “modern theory” of value and distribution; on the other hand it aims to a re-construction of the “classical theory”. Both classical theory and modern theory are defective. The defects of classical theory, however, can be cured, wherea...

Lord, I knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strewed. Matthew, 25, 24 A foreword Mainstream economics is characterised by a general lack of interest in the topic of the distribution of income between classes. Considering the increasing importance of finance and banks in contemporary...

Luigi Einaudi writes on and against J.M. Keynes in some twenty articles, from 1917 to 1950. He is always laudatory with Keynes as a "littérateur", and he is always acrimonious about Keynes's political economy. Did he really understand Keynes's theory?

Benedetto Croce e l\'economia politica Three major issues of Benedetto Croce’s view of political economy are discussed. 1) The role of history vs. natural order (or equilibrium) in the economic discourse: the belief in a natural order, ensured by the market’s capacity for self-regulation, introduces a determinist element into the analysis and sugge...

In this note we put forward briefly some arguments which convince us that the "microfoundation problem" is ill-posed (at least, as it has been studied traditionally). First of all, that the only valid microfoundation is the walrasian one is no longer a tenable position. Secondly, even in this respect, the most usual hypothesesis accepted by the pro...

At the Madrid conference of 1930 (Keynes, 1930), J.M. Keynes maintained that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism would be proved wrong in our own time: the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaires who consider the balance of our econ...

So many things have happened since those days of 1883, so many Marxisms, so many Keynesisms, that Kapital and the General Theory could have been taken from the shelves of the British Museum and read as they should be, as pure and simple classics.

Why had so few economists foreseen the crisis? The main reason is that economics has turned into a branch of applied mathematics, detached from real world institutions. In a monetary economy of production, real factors and financial factors are intertwined, and crisis is consequently no mere chance. Keynes and Marx show that the opposite is true: e...

Se si leggono gli scritti keynesiani di Ferdinando di Fenizio sullo sfondo uniforme della manualistica d'importazione, risalta l'intelligenza dell'autore e la ricchezza intellettuale di quei tempi. Rileggere da vecchi gli scritti dei propri maestri, d'altra parte, ha una funzione terapeutica. L'aria di sufficienza che i giovani hanno spesso verso i...

In recent years the stable and biunivocal coupling of the production of commodities and the employment of living human labour has changed. It is still true that if production declines, employment falls, but the opposite, if production recovers then employment also recovers, is no longer true. This stylised fact demands an answer to three questions:...