1. Introduction
Debates about the nature of political economy have long oscillated between two models. On one side stands the contractarian tradition, formally articulated in the modern sense by Rawls, but inherited from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, which treats political order as the product of an agreement among self-interested individuals (Rawls, Reference Rawls1999). On the other side stands the institutionalist or sovereign model, in which the state is regarded as the ultimate locus of political authority and the economy as a subordinate domain governed by policy instruments and regulation (Chang, Reference Chang2000; Elliott, Reference Elliott1978). Both approaches, in their different ways, presuppose a separation between polity and economy: the first reduces the political to the aggregation of economic preferences, while the second necessarily subordinates economic activity to administrative command.
Yet this dualism has come under increasing strain. Neither contract nor command provides an adequate account of how social orders endure or transform. Over the past half century, the erosion of state capacity, the fragmentation of markets and the globalization of production have revealed that political and economic orders are not simply juxtaposed but interdependent (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023). They are linked through relations of reciprocity, coordination and collective imagination that cannot be captured by the binary logic of either markets or states.
Among recent attempts to rethink this relationship, Adrian Pabst and Roberto Scazzieri’s The Constitution of Political Economy: Polity, Society and the Commonweal (2023) stands out for its ambition. They propose that political economy should be understood constitutionally: as an order of interdependencies between the economic body and the body politic, mediated by society and grounded in both structure and disposition. Their central claim is that economic and political life form a single field of relations structured by proportionality and sustained by dispositions, which is to say habitual orientations that render cooperation and persistence possible.
This constitutional view marks a departure from both neoclassical and institutionalist paradigms. Rather than positing a pre-existing equilibrium or an imposed hierarchy, Pabst and Scazzieri describe a dynamic order that is at once structural and civil. Structures express enduring patterns of interdependence between factors of production, institutions and collective purposes, while civil dispositions provide the moral and imaginative resources that enable coordination over time. Political economy, in this sense, is neither the management of scarcity nor the administration of interests, but the continuous constitution of a common world.
The purpose of this essay is to situate Pabst and Scazzieri’s constitutional political economy within a longer lineage of European thought and, in particular, to draw attention to striking affinities with Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843). Gioberti, a philosopher and priest active during the Italian Risorgimento, argued that national renewal depended not primarily on legal or institutional reform but on a prior regeneration of moral and civil life. His concept of primato morale e civile (moral and civil primacy) asserted that political forms derive their legitimacy from an antecedent moral order of vocation, sociability and association.
Although Gioberti’s work belongs to a different historical and intellectual register, his conviction that polity and economy are mutually constitutive anticipates the constitutional turn in contemporary political economy. Both frameworks insist that durable social orders rest on proportionality and reciprocity among their parts; both regard moral and intellectual dispositions as integral to the viability of economic structures; and both treat transformation not as rupture but as the unfolding of potentialities latent within an inherited order.
The comparison pursued in what follows is thus not genealogical but analogical. It does not claim a direct line of influence from Gioberti to Pabst and Scazzieri, but rather that both articulate cognate responses to the perennial question of how social and economic life can be organized for the common good. By setting them in dialogue, the essay aims to illuminate how a constitutional understanding of political economy, one that is both structural and civil, might offer resources for contemporary debates on legitimacy, inequality and ecological transition.
2. Gioberti and the Primato morale e civile
Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52) was among the most original yet least understood thinkers of the Italian Risorgimento. A philosopher, Catholic priest, and patriot, he sought to reconcile spiritual renewal with national regeneration. His Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) was both a philosophical meditation and a political manifesto, written during his exile in Brussels. Its argument turns on a simple but surprising claim: that the rebirth of Italy required first the restoration of its moral and civil primacy, for ‘la forza d’una nazione sta nel valore morale e civile del suo popolo’ (‘the strength of a nation lies in the moral and civil worth of its people)’, Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1843, I:12).
For Gioberti, primato did not mean domination over other nations, but an inner vocation: the spiritual and civil excellence that had once made Italy the tutor of Europe. Political unity could not be imposed by force or decreed by legal fiat; it had to emerge from the cultivation of moral dispositions and associative practices that sustained the life of the nazione civile. ‘La civiltà è una forma di religione’, he wrote: ‘civilisation is a form of religion’ (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1843, II:31). Political forms would thus follow from an already renewed moral and civil order.
Gioberti’s political philosophy was grounded in his metaphysics of the ‘ens’ (or God, or only being), who alternatively creates or redeems ‘existentias’ through which he sought to reconcile divine creation with human freedom (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1911). The same logic governed his political vision: the divine act of creation sustains the world, but human beings participate in this creative order through their civic and intellectual activity. The state, accordingly, is not a mechanical contrivance but an organism animated by shared moral purpose (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1911). Its constitution arises not from contract but from vocation.
This view set Gioberti apart from both liberal individualists and reactionary absolutists (Haddock, Reference Haddock1998). Against the former, he argued that no nation could survive on private interest alone; against the latter, he insisted that sovereignty derived from the people’s moral self-constitution rather than from dynastic right (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1911). The true foundation of politics was neither will nor command, but the moral interdependence of citizens bound together in pursuit of the common good.
Gioberti’s position was also in dialogue with other liberal Catholic philosophers of the period, particularly Antonio Rosmini-Serbato and, later, his intellectual biographer, Bertrando Spaventa (Reference Spaventa1854; Reference Spaventa1862). Rosmini’s Filosofia del diritto (Reference Rosmini1841–45) proposed that society arises from the moral personhood of individuals, while Spaventa’s post-Hegelian idealism interpreted the Italian intellectual tradition as a continuous process of self-consciousness. Gioberti stood between them: more ecclesiastical than Rosmini, more civic than Spaventa, who subsequently also drifted from his Catholic faith (Croce, Reference Croce and Ainslie1913, 459–460). In Croce’s later judgment, Gioberti represented ‘the last theologian and the first lay philosopher of the Risorgimento’, for he sought to translate metaphysical principles into civic pedagogy (Croce, Reference Croce1921, 137–138; Pertici, Reference Pertici2012; Pabst, Reference Pabst2012).
In this sense, Gioberti anticipated later conceptions of the social organism that would become central to nineteenth-century political economy and sociology (Haddock, Reference Haddock1998). Like the solidarists of the Third Republic or the corporatist theorists of early twentieth-century Europe, he viewed the economy as an arena of cooperation among functionally distinct but reciprocally dependent parts. Yet unlike later secular thinkers, he located this interdependence in a theistic ontology: the unity of the social body reflected the unity of creation itself.
Gioberti’s emphasis on moral and civil dispositions as the ground of political life has often been dismissed as idealism (Croce, Reference Croce1921). Yet his was a profoundly practical idealism, directed towards institutional reform and national independence. The Primato combined philosophical speculation with concrete proposals for educational renewal, administrative reorganization and economic modernization. Its ultimate aim was to create a polity capable of self-government because it was already morally constituted. As he put it, ‘dove la nazione è educata, il governo è superfluo’ (‘where the nation is educated, government is superfluous’) (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1843, III:207).
Gioberti’s conception of education was not limited to formal instruction. It included the cultivation of civic virtues through associations, guilds and academies, those mediating institutions that nineteenth-century Italy largely lacked (Haddock, Reference Haddock1998). In this respect, Gioberti anticipated the solidarist thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Léon Bourgeois’s doctrine of the solidarité and Giuseppe Toniolo’s Catholic social economy both echoed his conviction that social harmony depends on the moral formation of citizens (Bourgeois, Reference Bourgeois1896; Toniolo, Reference Toniolo1909). Gioberti’s nazione civile was the prototype of what later thinkers would call ‘civil society’.
To modern readers, Gioberti’s synthesis of theology, politics and economics may appear remote. Yet his intuition that legitimacy depends on moral and civil preconditions resonates with contemporary efforts to rethink the foundations of political economy. His notion of primacy can be read as a proto-constitutional vision: an insistence that durable political orders rest not on the aggregation of interests but on the proportional coordination of diverse activities within a shared moral horizon. In this sense, Gioberti’s legacy belongs not only to Italian nationalism but to the longer European conversation about moral economy and civic virtue.
3. The Constitutional Political Economy of Pabst and Scazzieri
Adrian Pabst and Roberto Scazzieri’s The Constitution of Political Economy: Polity, Society and the Commonweal (2023) sets out to recover a conception of political economy as a civil and constitutional order. Against both neoliberal economics and technocratic statism, they argue that polity and economy form a single field of interdependent relations whose coherence depends on proportionality and viability. Their approach builds on earlier work by Scazzieri (A Theory of Production, 1993) on the structural logic of production systems, and by Pabst on the moral and relational dimensions of politics. The result is a synthesis of structural realism and civic humanism, articulated through a distinctive vocabulary: ‘viability, proportionality, systemic interest, and disposition’.
For Pabst and Scazzieri, political economy is constitutional not merely in the sense of being shaped by legal frameworks, but also because it embodies an underlying order of interdependence that both constrains and enables collective life. They define constitution as ‘a generative order of relations among parts that persists through transformation’ (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 9). This order is ‘structural’ in that it specifies the relations of production, exchange and governance (Pasinetti, Reference Pasinetti1981; Simon and Hawkins, Reference Simon and Hawkins1947); but it is also civil, because its persistence depends on shared dispositions of trust, prudence and cooperation.
Their central claim is that economic and political systems achieve stability not through equilibrium or domination but through proportionality, the balance between activities and institutions that allows for mutual adjustment. Proportionality, in turn, rests on viability: the capacity of a system to reproduce itself while adapting to change. In this respect, Pabst and Scazzieri’s framework resonates with both classical political economy and systems theory. Like Adam Smith (Reference Smith1759), they view the economy as an order of moral sentiments as well as material exchanges; like Pareto (Reference Pareto1906) or Leontief (Reference Leontief1966), they recognise that the viability of a system depends on proportional relations among its parts.
Yet Pabst and Scazzieri move beyond both moral and mathematical equilibrium models. For them, proportionality is not a static condition, but a process sustained by dispositions: habitual orientations that incline agents towards cooperation and prudence. These dispositions are not reducible to incentives or norms; they constitute the moral infrastructure of the economy. Without them, structural proportionality would collapse into coercion or chaos. In elaborating this framework, Pabst and Scazzieri reject the reduction of political economy to either moral philosophy or technical management. They seek instead to re-establish it as a science of relations, one that bridges ontology, ethics and institutional design. The constitutional order they describe is not imposed from above but arises from within the interdependence of its parts. In their account, ‘constitution is not the creation of order ex nihilo, but the articulation of an already existing interdependence’ (Pabst and Scazzieri, Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023, 42).
This view restores to political economy a dimension that both classical liberalism and modern economics had lost: its concern with the commonweal. For Pabst and Scazzieri, the economy cannot be understood apart from the polity and the society that sustain it; nor can justice be reduced to efficiency. The purpose of economic and political coordination is the realization of a common good that is both material and moral. The market and the state are instruments within a wider constitutional order whose aim is the flourishing of the whole.
Scazzieri’s earlier writings on production systems provide the analytical foundation for this perspective. His theory of tasks and processes conceives production as a network of interdependent activities governed by proportional relations (Scazzieri, Reference Scazzieri1993). Pabst, drawing on Augustine and the Christian-Platonist tradition, adds a moral and theological dimension: the commonweal arises from the disposition to love one’s neighbour as oneself. Together they propose a vision of political economy that is neither purely technical nor purely ethical but constitutional in both structure and disposition. In methodological terms, Pabst and Scazzieri’s constitutional political economy represents a convergence of analytical and humanistic inquiry. It unites structural realism, the analysis of relations and proportionalities, with civic humanism, the cultivation of virtues and associations. The result is a theory capable of addressing both the formal conditions of systemic viability and the moral dispositions that make it sustainable.
Such an approach redefines what it means to study political economy. It is not a matter of predicting equilibria or prescribing policies, but of understanding how structures and dispositions co-constitute the common life of a polity. This perspective brings them unexpectedly close to Gioberti: both see political economy as a moral-civil constitution rather than as a set of contracts or commands.
4. Convergences
The most striking convergence between Gioberti’s Primato and the constitutional political economy of Pabst and Scazzieri lies in their shared rejection of any separation between the moral (or dispositional) and the structural. Both conceive political economy as an ‘order of relations’ sustained by dispositions that are at once ethical and functional. For Gioberti, the vitality of the nation derived from its ‘valore morale e civile’, the moral and civil worth of its people; for Pabst and Scazzieri, the viability of the polity-economy complex depends on proportionality and the dispositions that make proportional adjustment possible. In both cases, structure and disposition are mutually implicating.
4.1. Constitution before contract
Gioberti’s insistence that the state is an organism rather than a machine anticipates Pabst and Scazzieri’s idea that constitution precedes contract. The social order is not an artefact of will or calculation but the unfolding of an existing interdependence. Where Hobbes or Rousseau imagined individuals founding society through consent, both Gioberti and Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023) begin from relation rather than isolation. Political legitimacy arises from recognizing and articulating these prior relations. This inversion, constitution before contract, marks a profound continuity between a nineteenth-century Catholic philosopher and two twenty-first-century pluralists.
4.2. Civil association and moral disposition
Each author treats association not merely as instrumental cooperation but as a moral form. Gioberti’s nazione civile was a network of associations animated by charity and mutuality; Pabst and Scazzieri’s civil economy likewise depends on habits of trust and prudence. The language differs, Gioberti’s is theological, their dialect is civic humanist, but the underlying anthropology is similar: humans are relational beings whose freedom is realized through sociability, not apart from it. Association is thus both the means and the substance of constitutional order.
4.3. Proportionality and harmony
Gioberti’s metaphysics of participation, expressed in the formula ‘being creates existence’, implies that the parts of creation are proportionally related to the divine source and to one another. Harmony, in his political vocabulary, was the earthly reflection of divine order. Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023), 40), drawing heavily on Richard Cumberland, as well as Shaftesbury, and Paolo Mattia Doria, translate this intuition into a secular idiom: proportionality describes the relational balance among functions and institutions that ensures viability. What Gioberti calls armonia, they call systemic proportionality; what he understands as divine participation, they describe as mutual constitution. Both frameworks thus share an ontology of relation.
4.4. Transformation within continuity
Another convergence concerns the relation between persistence and change. For both, transformation does not abolish continuity but presupposes it. Gioberti’s notion of national regeneration assumes that the new Italy will arise from the recovery, not the negation, of its moral patrimony (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1843). Similarly, Pabst and Scazzieri insist that innovation is legitimate only when it preserves viability, that is, when change maintains proportional coherence. They thereby reject both revolutionary rupture and static conservation in favour of developmental continuity.
4.5. The commonweal as telos
Finally, both systems are teleological. Gioberti’s Italy is called to realise a providential vocation; Pabst and Scazzieri’s polity-economy aims at the commonweal. In each case, the end of political economy is not wealth but flourishing ‘felicità pubblica’. The measure of success is the integrity of relations rather than the magnitude of output. Here, moral and material orders coincide; justice and productivity are two faces of the same proportional harmony.
These convergences suggest that the constitutional turn in contemporary political economy revives, albeit in secular form, a tradition of thought that runs from the Italian civil economists, namely Genovesi (Reference Genovesi1765–67), Beccaria, Reference Beccaria1769, and Gioberti (Reference Gioberti1843), to modern structural and relational theories. This lineage recalls that economic structures cannot endure without the dispositions that animate them and that the task of politics is to nurture those dispositions through institutions that express the moral intelligence of a people.
5. Divergences
For all their affinities, Gioberti’s Primato and Pabst and Scazzieri’s ‘political economy of constitutions’ diverge sharply in foundation, scope and tone. Their similarities arise from a shared intuition of relational order; their differences reflect the distinct metaphysical and historical horizons within which that intuition is worked out.
5.1. Theological teleology versus pluralist constitution
Gioberti’s framework is inseparable from a providential theology. His conviction that Italy is destined to recover a divinely ordained primacy renders the moral order teleological in a strong sense: the nation fulfils a transcendent purpose. Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023), by contrast, describe a constitution as ‘open-ended’. Their commonweal has no single telos beyond the maintenance of viability and the flourishing of plural goods. Where Gioberti’s order is hierarchical and descending, theirs is dialogical and recursive. Providence is replaced by proportionality.
5.2. Unity and difference
Gioberti conceives the nazione civile as a moral whole whose internal distinctions are harmonized by a common vocation. The modern constitutional economy accepts difference as constitutive: institutions, functions and values remain in tension. For Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023), proportionality does not abolish conflict but renders it productive by channelling rival interests into reciprocal adjustment. Their pluralism stands in deliberate contrast to Gioberti’s organic unity.
5.3. Authority and mediation
In Gioberti, mediation occurs through the Church, which embodies the link between divine truth and civic life. The Papacy figures as the ‘centro morale dell’umanità’, the moral centre of humanity (Gioberti, Reference Gioberti1843, II: 55). Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023), writing in a secular context, transfer this mediating role to institutions of civil society (e.g. guilds, universities, parliaments, professional associations) that express practical wisdom rather than revealed truth. Their mediators are corporate rather than sacerdotal.
5.4. From vocation to viability
Gioberti grounds political legitimacy in vocazione: the sense of divine calling that confers dignity upon national life. Pabst and Scazzieri ground it in viability: the empirical capacity of systems to persist through proportionate change. The former speaks the language of destiny, the latter of stability. Both concern continuity, but Gioberti’s framing is metaphysical, whereas theirs is systemic. As a result, Gioberti’s moral economy risks sanctifying the given order, while nineteenth-century Catholic controversialists might argue that constitutional economy risks relativizing moral purpose to functional performance.
5.5. Temporal perspective
Gioberti writes within a revolutionary century and addresses a people seeking unification; his thought is future-oriented but anchored in redemption of the past. Pabst and Scazzieri write in an era of institutional fatigue; their concern is not foundation but renewal. For Gioberti, constitution follows from creation; for them, it is an ongoing labour of maintenance. His metaphysics of creation becomes, in their hands, an ethics of repair.
5.6. Language and style
Even at the level of prose, the divergence is telling. Gioberti’s syntax imitates scholastic Latin and early modern French; his paragraphs are architectural, built by accretion. Scazzieri writes English as if translating Italian or French philosophy, with a structuralist density that recalls Braudel and Pareto (Braudel, Reference Braudel1981–1984; Pareto, 1906). Pabst’s contribution adds Augustinian cadence and civic earnestness. The result is a hybrid style that, for all its abstraction, seeks communicability rather than sublimity.
These divergences mark the historical distance between a theology of vocation and a constitutional science of relation. Yet they do not cancel the underlying continuity: both projects attempt to reconcile transcendence and immanence, disposition and structure, through an account of interdependence. If Gioberti’s vision risks idealism, Pabst and Scazzieri’s risks Weberian disenchantment. Between them lies the enduring tension of political economy itself, that is, the effort to discern moral meaning in material form.
6. Contemporary resonances and conclusion
The dialogue between Gioberti and the constitutional political economy of Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023) is more than an exercise in intellectual archaeology. It discloses a set of principles that speak directly to the present crisis of political economy. Across Europe and beyond, the institutions that once mediated between state and market, that is, parties, churches, unions, professional associations, have weakened. Economic coordination has become increasingly abstract, mediated by digital networks and financial algorithms rather than civic deliberation. The result is a pervasive sense amongst many of dis-embeddedness: the feeling that structure and disposition have drifted apart.
Gioberti would have recognized this as a loss of primato morale e civile; Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023) diagnose it as the breakdown of proportionality and viability. Both would agree that technical reform alone cannot restore legitimacy. What is needed is a renewal of moral and civil dispositions capable of sustaining a shared constitutional order. The challenge, in other words, is not merely to design better institutions but to re-cultivate the habits that make institutions work.
This perspective has practical implications. A political economy of constitutions; inspired by both Gioberti and Pabst and Scazzieri would treat policy as an act of mediation rather than control. Economic governance would aim to strengthen the relational infrastructure, particularly education, civic association, deliberative forums, through which proportionality and disposition are maintained. It would regard the market not as a self-regulating mechanism but as a moral space structured by trust and reciprocity. It would view the state not as a sovereign command centre but as a coordinating intelligence within a wider organism of society.
In the European context, this question acquires constitutional depth. Since the Maastricht Treaty (EU, 1992), the European Union has struggled to balance market integration with social cohesion, developing the notion of a social market economy and the principle of subsidiarity as attempts to reconcile unity and difference. Both principles echo the logic of proportionality that Pabst and Scazzieri identify as the condition of systemic viability, while also recalling Gioberti’s vision of a polity whose parts are harmonized through moral vocation rather than uniform control. The EU’s constitutional architecture, its multiple centres of authority, overlapping jurisdictions and emphasis on mutual recognition, can be read as a secular experiment in proportionality without providence, a logic clearly reflected in the Lisbon Treaty (EU, 2007).
At the same time, the European project’s legitimacy crisis reflects a deficit of the moral and civil imagination that Gioberti regarded as indispensable. Economic governance conducted through technocratic metrics of convergence and deficit reduction risks hollowing out the civitas europea by eroding the dispositions of solidarity and trust that once underpinned integration. A constitutional political economy grounded in viability alone cannot endure without a renewed conception of the commonweal. In this respect, Gioberti’s call for moral regeneration retains critical relevance: without renewed civic formation, proportionality collapses into mere compliance.
The ecological transition intensifies this challenge. The European Green Deal and parallel initiatives elsewhere acknowledge that sustainability requires not only technological innovation but a transformation of values and habits. The concept of moral capital, that is, the reservoir of trust, reciprocity and civic virtue that supports collective action, has re-entered public debate (Millbank and Pabst, Reference Millbank and Pabst2016). Economists from Kenneth Arrow (Reference Arrow1972) to Elinor Ostrom (Reference Ostrom1990) have shown that social trust reduces transaction costs and enables long-term cooperation, but they have rarely connected it to questions of vocation or collective purpose. Here, Gioberti’s and Pabst and Scazzieri’s frameworks converge; both treat moral disposition not as residual culture but as a constitutive element of political economy.
In this light, the political economy of constitutions offers a framework for re-imagining governance under conditions of complexity. It suggests that viability depends on more than feedback mechanisms: it requires moral imagination. The enduring insight of both Gioberti and his modern interlocutors is that political economy is not merely about resources or rules, but about the constitution of meaning.
At the same time, the comparison warns against nostalgia for organic unity. The pluralism of the modern world cannot be compressed into Gioberti’s providential hierarchy. What can be recovered from him is the conviction that moral formation precedes political form: that the health of institutions depends on the virtues of those who inhabit them. Pabst and Scazzieri (Reference Pabst and Scazzieri2023) translate this insight into a secular idiom: constitutional viability rests on the cultivation of civic dispositions. In both cases, the task of leadership is educational before it is administrative.
In conclusion, the dialogue between Gioberti and the Pabst and Scazzieri may be read as a meditation on interdependence under strain. Each, in his own language, insists that political economy is neither a technical system nor a moral abstraction, but a living constitution sustained by imagination and reciprocity. Gioberti reminds us that no polity can survive without a moral vocation; Pabst and Scazzieri remind us that vocation must be articulated through viable structures. Together they suggest that the future of political economy lies in re-joining what modernity has sundered: structure and disposition, viability and virtue, proportionality and purpose.
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The author used AI-assisted tools (ChatGPT5 2025) for proofreading, language editing and bibliographic standardization. All conceptual analysis, interpretation and argument are the author’s own.
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This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
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