Beyond Voluntarism and Naturalism: Amintore Fanfani's Neo-Voluntarism as an Economic Doctrine and a Theory of History

This paper aims at investigating Amintore Fanfani’s Neo-Voluntaristic approach, a point of view that takes the form of a mature theory of history and an equally mature economic vision and that, in Fanfani, represents the conclusion of a centuries-old route of improvement of the economic thought, whose historical reconstruction Fanfani had extensively studied during the 1930s and the 1940s. The paper will first outline the Neo-Voluntaristic perspective we can infer from Fanfani’s studies from the late 1930s, and will then examine his most significant contributions to the history of economic thought – that is his early studies on the origin of the capitalist spirit and the ensuing ones about the history of economic doctrines, that will eventually provide a historiographical justification to Neo-Voluntarism itself. We believe that it is from these studies that the features of Fanfani’s cultural character and the premises of his later political commitment most clearly emerge