The Constitutional Turn in Political Economy: Moral and Civil Primacy and the Conception of the Commonweal

Abstract This essay explores the affinities between Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) and the constitutional political economy advanced by Adrian Pabst and Roberto Scazzieri in The Constitution of Political Economy: Polity, Society and the Commonwea l (2023). Gioberti argued that Italy’s political regeneration required a prior renewal of its moral and civil order, insisting that institutions cannot be legitimate or enduring unless grounded in dispositions, associations and collective vocation. Pabst and Scazzieri similarly reject contractarian and institutionalist accounts of political economy, proposing instead that polity and economy are constituted by interdependencies, proportionality, systemic interests and dispositions. By placing these works in dialogue, the essay highlights convergences in their conception of politics as constitution rather than contract, their emphasis on civil association, their recognition of structural embeddedness and their understanding of persistence and transformation as mutually dependent. At the same time, important divergences are acknowledged: Gioberti’s teleological nationalism and reliance on providential history contrast with the pluralism and secular structural analysis of Pabst and Scazzieri. The comparison suggests that constitutional political economy is best understood as both structural and civil: grounded in coherence, viability and proportionality, but equally dependent on dispositions and collective imagination. In contemporary Europe, where crises of legitimacy, inequality and ecological sustainability prevail, such a civil-structural vision of political economy offers a timely, critical resource for re-thinking the commonweal.