Acknowledgements
This work draws on a scholarly collaboration started almost twenty years ago when Adrian was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and part of a group of researchers attached to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and Roberto was a visiting fellow at CRASSH, where we were both hosted by its director Ludmilla Jordanova. Our cooperation took shape as part of a collaborative project on ‘Migration of Ideas’ jointly sponsored by CRASSH and by the Institute of Advanced Study of the University of Bologna and continued shortly afterwards thanks to our joint involvement in the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge. In subsequent years, we continued an intense intellectual exchange through a variety of joint writing projects from the history of ideas to the theory of civil society and the theory of political economy.
We owe a debt of gratitude to our respective institutions and scholarly circles. Adrian would like to thank his teachers and colleagues for their wisdom and support, starting at the University of Cambridge with Solomos Solomou who as director of studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, taught him macroeconomics in a historical perspective; Sheilagh Ogilvie whose teaching on economic history and the first industrial revolution was inspirational; Ha-Joon Chang who emphasised the plurality of state intervention in the economy; Partha Dasgupta whose focus on ethics and ecology was formative; and Willem Buiter who combined scholarly rigour with humour in unique ways during supervisions for the final-year undergraduate dissertation. Adrian is also very grateful to his teachers at the London School of Economics and Political Science, notably John Gray who taught him the meaning of philosophical scepticism and some of the myths of modernity and Paul Kelly who introduced him to modern contractual theory, as well as to Jean-Marie Donegani and Marc Sadou at Sciences Po Paris who broadened his interests in intellectual history.
Adrian would also like to thank numerous colleagues and friends for their generosity and support over many years, including Russell Berman, Simona Beretta, Maxim Bratersky, Leonid Grigoriev, Wayne Hudson, Ron Ivey, Patrick Mardellat, Giovanni Marseguerra, John Milbank, James Noyes, Marcia Pally, David Pan, Catherine Pickstock, the late Pier Luigi Porta, Alberto Quadrio Curzio, the late Roger Scruton, and Larry Siedentop. He owes a special debt of gratitude to Luigino Bruni, Jon Cruddas, Maurice Glasman, Brian Griffith, Andy Haldane, Robert Skidelsky and Stefano Zamagni whose work has been an inspiration over many years. At the University of Kent, he would like to thank Nadine Ansorg, Iain MacKenzie, Richard Sakwa, Ben Turner, Richard Whitman, and David Wilkinson, and at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research Arnab Bhattacharjee, Jagjit Chadha, Peter Dolton, Larissa Marioni, Stephen Millard, Max Mosley, Barry Naisbett and Lucy Stokes. More recently, he has worked closely with colleagues as part of the Productivity Institute, including Bart van Ark, Diane Coyle, Philip McCann, Steve Roper, Tony Venables, and Andy Westwood.
Adrian is also indebted to the institutions that have supported his studies and research, starting with the Faculty of Economics and Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Sciences Po Paris, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and the Australian Catholic University where he spent his research sabbatical in 2017–18.
Above all, he is deeply grateful to his parents Reinhart and Brigitte, his wife Elena, and his children Alexander and Katya for their support and patience for so long – especially the evenings, weekends, and holidays spent working on this book.
Roberto is grateful to the teachers, colleagues, and students who have been inspirations and companions in his intellectual journey from Bologna and Oxford to Padua, Cambridge, again Bologna, and in most recent years the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. He is especially grateful to Alberto Quadrio Curzio who prompted his interest in the theory of production and in the history of economic analysis during his formative years at Bologna and has been a continuing intellectual and personal inspiration ever since; to the late Luigi Pasinetti, for his pioneering research on the structural dynamics of production economies and for his exemplary commitment to a lifelong research programme; to Michael Landesmann, the Oxford and Cambridge friend with whom some of the production analytical tools developed in this book, and in particular the ‘relative invariance’ criterion, were conceived and developed; to Harald Hagemann, for the joint work on sequentially constrained transitional paths that has been central to the constitutional heuristic presented in this monograph; to Mauro Baranzini at Oxford, Cambridge, and Lugano, and D’Maris Coffman at Cambridge and London, for many years of collaborative research at the interface between structural dynamics, socio-institutional transformation, and the framing of economic policy; and to Ivano Cardinale at Bologna, Cambridge, and London, with whom some of the core ideas behind the theory of political economy presented in this book were envisioned and developed. Roberto would also like to express his deep gratitude to the late Paolo Grossi for the enlightening discussions on matters of constitutional law in historical perspective that have shaped the final stages of this project.
Among the many colleagues and friends with whom key concepts of this book have been discussed over the years, Roberto would like to thank Amartya Sen, David Soskice, Carlo D’Adda, Stefano Zamagni, Emma Rothschild, Patrizio Bianchi, Lorenzo Ornaghi, Faye Duchin, Alessandro Vercelli, Silva Marzetti, Jan Kregel, Maria Carla Galavotti, Bernard Grofman, Douglas Hofstadter, Wang Hui, Mario Amendola, Albert Steenge, Amit Bhaduri, Sheila Dow, Richard Arena, Antonio Andreoni, Ha-Joon Chang, Partha Dasgupta, Martin Daunton, Ian Donaldson, John Morrill, Craig Muldrew, Frank Perlin, Sophus Reinert, Luisa Brunori, Malcolm Pines, Heinrich Bortis, Lilia Costabile, Aura Reggiani, Sunanda Sen, Mike Gregory, Marco Di Tommaso, David Ibbetson, Michele Caputo, and Ajit Sinha. He recollects with gratitude the inspiring conversations with teachers and colleagues who have passed away, notably John and Ursula Hicks, Michael Bacharach, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Francis Seton, Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Phyllis Deane, Geoff Harcourt, Polly Hill, Timothy McDermott, Nicola Matteucci, Carlo Poni, Jack Goody, Ronnie Ellenblum, Izumi Hishiyama, Patrick Suppes, Andrew Skinner, Istvan Hont, and Pier Luigi Porta.
He would also like to express his gratitude to the institutions that supported his research in various ways, and primarily the University of Bologna (Faculty of Political Sciences, Faculty of Economics and Commerce, and Department of Economics), Linacre College in Oxford, Clare Hall and Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Bologna Academy of Sciences, the Lombard Institute of Sciences and Letters, the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Epistemology and History of Science at the University of Bologna, the Research Center in Economic Analysis and International Economic Development (CRANEC) at the Catholic University of Milan, the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College and Darwin College in Cambridge, the International Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory of the International Balzan Foundation, the Italian National University Centre for Applied Economic Studies, and the Babbage International Policy Forum at the Institute for Manufacturing in the University of Cambridge.
Last but not least, Roberto would like to express his deepest gratitude to his wife Cristina and his son Luigi for their continued support in the long intellectual journey from start to completion of this project.
It has been a great pleasure for us both, as colleagues and friends, to work together on this book.
