The Competition Law Working Group welcomes Andrea Lorenzo Capussela for a conversation on his latest book, The Republic of Innovation: A New Political Economy of Freedom.
Abstract
The liberal conception of freedom – ‘non-interference’ – is a significant and unrecognised obstacle to overcoming the defects of neoliberal economic policies. Despite fairly widespread consensus on the main remedies, in fact, since the 2008 crisis reforms were markedly fewer and less systematic than during the first two decades after the neoliberal turn.
Besides removing that obstacle, the republican conception of freedom – ‘non-domination’ – can guide efforts to reform western (and other) societies into fairer and more productive ones. For a strong synergy exists between republican theory and Schumpeterian growth theory. The main points of convergence are two.
First, both theories fear the political influence of large concentrations of economic power. In the Schumpeterian view, such influence will slow down innovation, and therefore productivity growth, if it allows incumbents to close their markets to more innovative firms. In the republican view, such influence deprives citizen of equal and effective control over public authorities. Both theories, therefore, converge in advising for a stricter approach to competition policy.
Secondly, innovation ultimately stems from talents dispersed randomly across the population. Empirical research in fact shows that ‘family disparity causes us to lose potential Einsteins’ (Aghion et al., 2021). Republican theory posits that for citizens to be free, they must be assured a robust sphere of self-determination, in which one may be one’s own master: a sphere defined by the fundamental rights of citizens, and buttressed by sufficient public resources – health, education, social protection, information – to allow each to exercise those rights according to their own volition. Within such a sphere, citizens could better discover and develop their talents: the closer a society moves to that ideal, therefore, the more innovative it is likely to be.
Speaker
Andrea Lorenzo Capussela is the author of The Republic of Innovation: A New Political Economy of Freedom, The Political Economy of Italy’s Decline, and State-Building in Kosovo. He writes for Le Grand Continent, Domani, and the Financial Times.
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