The historian Amintore Fanfani’s work has important things to say about the nature of our form of capitalism, and specifically about Italian and European capitalism. In a work, like this, on the classics and the ideas of the civil economy, it is worth bringing Fanfani’s ideas back into the collective memory, even if briefly.

The Protestant Reformation left a profound mark on modern culture, and it should not be surprising that the spirit of modernity and the spirit of the Reformation are tightly interwoven. There was a period of thought from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1930s in which there was great interest in the historical causes and roots of modernity, its relationship to the Reformation, and the reactions against it (we will summarily call this the Catholic Counter Reformation, knowing that the expression was and is ambiguous). Giuseppe Toniolo, Werner Sombart, Lujo Brentano, Gino Luzzatto, Amintore Fanfani and Max Weber were historians and social scientists who made the thought and work of Martin Luther and the other sixteenth-century reformers (Calvin in particular) the axis around which they reconstructed the coordinates of modernity. They gave special attention to the birth of capitalism, which they considered an ethos, or “spirit” of modernity, thus something far more general and pervasive than just the economics (production, savings, circulation and consumption) of European and Western societies. Placing the accent on “spirit” – a very common expression in the modern social sciences from Montesquieu to Weber – meant emphasizing that capitalism was not just material in nature, thus affirming that entrepreneurs, bankers, consumers and other protagonists see the market and companies as much more than the supply and demand of goods mediated by money. This concept was also present in Marx, and in the twentieth century it was developed by such thinkers as Ernst Block and Walter Benjamin (as well as by Weber). If we do not grasp the “religious”, symbolic and “spiritual” nature of capitalism, it is difficult to understand the sola fide that is the basis for speculative finance, and that has lost all ties with the res (the real side of the economic problem).