Un pretesto per appunti sparsi (un nuovo libro di Antonio Cardini) (An excuse for some scattered notes (a new book by Antonio Cardini))

This paper gets ideas from a recent book by Antonio Cardini on the History of Liberalism to enquire around the relationship between ideologies and facts. It rises the question whether the long run is the most appropriate time span to let the permanent characteristics identifying a certain ideology emerge. The point of view of the author is the one of somebody who chose to consider a short historical interval (the years across the nineteenth and the twentieth century) to highlight how the few liberal economists of the time shared the common idea that Economics is a true hard science without any character of a normative sort. It is from this context that the idea of freedom as necessary condition for equal opportunities originated. Liberal economists wrote in the general interest of everyone. They could not be partial, and they were against any form of privilege and protectionism