Carlo Lottieri of Instituto Bruno Leoni has recently published a new book, Liberali e non. Percorsi di storia del pensiero politico, which translates (loosely) to Liberal and Not: Historical Paths of Political Thought. Writing in Il Giornale, Giampietro Berti writes that in his book, Lottieri notes that almost everyone (in Europe) calls himself liberal nowadays, but that being liberal today generally involves the rejection of what has historically characterized liberalism. In Liberali e non, Lottieri seeks to clarify and explain what liberalism is, and according to Berti:
It is clear that Lottieri prefers that line of thought that dates back to the Austrian School, and thus to Mises and Hayek, culminating in Murray Rothbard, a line aimed at favoring a spontaneous social order, based on free trade and free contracts, and rejection of any form of legal positivism and state interventionism.
Lottieri’s examination consists of comparisons between a number of pairs of contrasting political theorists including:
Bastiat and Proudhon, Marx and Tocqueville, Mazzini and Cattaneo, Bakunin and Spooner, Mill and Spencer, Weber and Mises, Keynes and Hayek, Leoni and Schmitt, Rawls and Rothbard.
See more here (in Italian).
