Who follows this column of Ricossian pills he knows that we are trying to help keep his thoughts alive, and perhaps someone will have come to know him and appreciate his stature and style. His work of dissemination shows us his enormous production as a high-ranking elzevirist and essayist, as well as a brilliant editorialist of The print and then de The newspaper (it is known how Montanelli claimed for himself the conquest of the columnist and polemicist Ricossa).
To the monumental Economics dictionaryalongside works such as Current aspects of neoclassical economic theoryor even the powerful criticism of Piero Sraffa’s model that will be added to the volume Unified theory of value, in which the central economic problem of defining value is resolved by bringing the theories of value provided by the different schools back to a single theoretical model. To then get to the fundamental work entitled The end of the economy – Essay on perfectionin which Ricossa introduces the distinction between Perfectionists And Imperfectistsovercoming, among other things, the categories of right and left and analyzing the political consequences and the historical, philosophical and moral origins of the great dream that the ancient nostalgics of the golden age transmitted from generation to generation up to Marx, to Keynes and many other economists, preachers and prophets: the end of economic necessity as a premise for a perfect world!
In the introduction to the volume The courage of freedom, Essays in honor of Sergio Ricossa (Rubbettino, 2022), Alberto Mingardi writes: “The work of Sergio Ricossa, both as an academic economist and as a passionate popularizer and witty commentator, has had and continues to have enormous importance for those in Italy who have the courage and tenacity to refer to the great tradition of classical liberalism. He was able to teach us, in years in which not just calling ourselves liberal but being so was blasphemy, that the freedom we promote is not the freedom of criminals, the license, the positive freedom to do something to others; And the negative freedom of not being subjected to the power of othersto be able to keep your choices as broad as possible.
To live is to choose, and liberalism is the ideology of life’”.
In his diary of 1944 the very young Ricossa wrote: “At school you don’t choose your favorite subject, you choose your favorite teacher, who in my case is Professor Francesco Palazzi. I am libertarian because he is a libertarianand he is because he is a libertine, that is, what I would like to be and am not” (How to ruin a country – Rizzoli 1995).
You don’t choose the subject, you choose the teacher. Liberalists because he was a liberalist.
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