The Meaning of Economic Freedom: Markets, Fairs, and the Origin of the Modern World
The meaning of economic freedom, on a first look, is very simple. It is the ability to sustain oneself on one’s own, with one’s activity. It amounts to a kind of self-sufficiency, a lack of dependence on others. Or, in a slightly – or not so slightly – different sense, it is the possibility to be free to start one’s own enterprise – to set up a farm, a workshop, a firm, anything.
Now, the first complication is that these two things are not identical. The first case evidently goes back to timeless times, the distant prehistory, when every human being, or family, or community, sustained oneself on its own, without the control of another group, or a central authority. However, for our modern worldview, this did not mean freedom, as supposedly our ancestors were fighting for survival in a hostile environment – Nature. This immediately brings in an enormous subject area, which we have to put aside, except for making the comment that to consider “man,” or the human being, or human Being, as slave of nature, is a par excellence Gnostic vision of the world, which is captured in the tale of Prometheus: poor mankind needs some support, or brave enlighteners, who could alleviate its lot. But this is so, again, only if one adopts a Gnostic world vision. We are at home in Nature; in a Christian perspective, we are created this way, and any generalised difficulty with it is our own making.
Still, in much of human history, “people” were not free also in the sense of being subject to other groups, or various kinds of centralised authorities – which is especially true with the rise of civilisation. This produces the paradox of Rousseau, which is more interesting and is not inherently Gnostic: men were born free, but now are everywhere in chains. This is a valid point and, in a way, this is also behind the American Dream itself: it is the right, and possibility, for one to carve a place on his own, and to live there with one’s family. The problem is that Rousseau identified the problem with private property, which is historically incorrect – we would need to bring in the archaeological issue of the emergence of settlement, which cannot be done here; and this led eventually to various forms of totalitarianism. However, hardly anyone today lives in this kind of freedom – so, in this sense, we cannot say that “we” now live inside economic freedom.
The second case seems, then, to incorporate the dominant modern meaning: the right to start, in principle from scratch, one’s own “business enterprise.” It is the granting or the prohibition of this right that was the major dividing line between the main ideological camps of the 20th century: it was a sacrosanct right in the US, in Western Europe, and the “free world,” while this was denied in the Soviet Union and in all communist or state-socialist countries, and their allies.
The denial of this right, going back to the economic ideas of Marx and Lenin, is justified in the clearest manner in an anecdote conveyed by the great economic historian Fernand Braudel. Viktor Dalin, a Soviet professor of economics told him that according to Lenin “even within the socialist world, the village market, having once regained its freedom, might well reconstitute the whole tree of capitalism.”[1]
It does not matter whether the claim can be traced actually to Lenin’s writings; it is enough that this was the “positive unconscious” or “historical a priori” of Soviet economists – that it animated Soviet Communist thinking. The main point is not whether this argument can be validly used or not to justify the limiting of freedom, but that it is absurd, non-sensical. This is because what is now widely called “capitalism” – which however again is a serious misnomer, coined by socialists, and it is a major problem that this misleading word gained a wide usage by now – did not develop out of local markets, but out of fairs. This point is best shown in the classic work of Fernand Braudel, especially The Wheels of Commerce, volume 2 of Civilization and Capitalism, but amazingly the full consequences of this fact were not brought out, either by him or anybody else: he denigrated the ideas of Max Weber, while his main follower, Immanuel Wallerstein was a Marxist. This paper claims that in light of this simple fact of economic history we not only should revalue the meaning of economic freedom, but of the economy itself – and of the entire modern world in which “the economy,” or “economic life,” came to play such a predominant role.
Ricardo and the History of Exchange
We should first turn to the common source of both classical and Marxist political economy, the 1817 work of David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Ricardo there gave a fictional account on the origin of the modern economy in gradually expanding exchange, going back to barter, then the invention of money, the emergence of markets, until they have become ever bigger and more efficient, culminating in his present. Economics still today is fundamentally based on this story, believed by all economists, who consider that any attention to further details in economic history is irrelevant, only resulting in being lost in meaningless trivia.
But this is not so. A market and a fair are very different things, culturally, socially, politically, and even “economically.” Whether consciously or not, Ricardo confused markets and fairs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the modern economy did not grow out of fairs directly, but through a major intermediary, the single most important instigator or spark for the rise of the modern world, the stock-market. But Ricardo’s work says nothing about the stock-market, even though he was a stockbroker, before writing his book, making a huge amount of money there. Thus, there is reason to doubt that his confusion of markets and fairs, just as his omission of the stock-market, are innocent slips.
The Rise of the Stock-Market
Telling only very shortly the basic facts, fairs, just as markets, existed in many places of the world. At a first level, the distinction between fairs and markets is straightforward. If markets are places where buyers and sellers meet locally to exchange goods, then a fair is a special type of periodic market. In contrast to markets, fairs have a number of special features. Concerning time, markets and fairs have different frequencies. Markets take place frequently, usually weekly, while fairs are much less frequent, often being annual (the German word for “fair” is simply “yearly market”). Their duration is also different: a market lasts at most for a day, but usually only for a morning, while fairs extend to a longer period, a week or so. Finally, fairs also more closely follow the cycle of seasons, taking place either in early or late summer, thus underlining their liminal character. This, however, can be modified if they coincide with other seasonal festivities, like carnivals, or religious feasts.
In terms of space, the distinction is less clear-cut, yet follows a principle. Markets are closely associated with towns. Basically, each town had at least one marketplace, and the daily sociability of towns, just as interactions between the town and the surrounding countryside, largely took place there. It has even been argued that a town is nothing but a permanent marketplace.[2] Fairs, however, only take place in certain select areas, and often outside town limits. They also extended to international as opposed to local trade, thus the activities involved the king or political authorities.
Fairs played a major role in the medieval world, when they became combined with the celebration of the feast days of local saints, and so also with pilgrimages. This was a way to keep the excessive or out-of-ordinary movements characteristic of fairs, and their link to pure money-making, in any culture and always considered as problematic, under ecclesiastic control. In the 12th and 13th centuries the most important fairs were in Champagne, France; but the real golden ages of fairs came with the Renaissance, especially the late Renaissance fairs.
In the 14-15th centuries the core of fair activities moved to Flanders, where first Bruges, and then, from the 15th century Antwerp became the centre. Flanders as a place has its theoretical importance, as it is an in-between or liminal region bridging the French and Germanic areas, even in language, thus could serve as a trading and in general mediating zone between the two broad cultural areas. At the same time, as a kind of Southern complement, in between 1320 and 1464 Geneva became another major centre of fairs in Europe.
Together with the rise of Antwerp Medina del Campo became a Southern or Spanish centre of international fairs. Medina del Campo has an astonishing history, as it became a major centre in the 15th-16th centuries, thus the time when Spain became the dominant European power. The Spanish kings transferred their residence there, setting up the court, and so for a time, apart from being a world trade centre, Medina del Campo in a way became the “centre of the world.” Then, just as suddenly as it rose to prominence, it sank into the background, losing any further importance.
Apart from places, time also has its importance, as the middle of the 15th century was a major moment of change in fair activities, in many senses, which thus was coincidental with the Fall of Constantinople.
This was the moment when the Geneva fairs declined, as the French kings suddenly had an interest in promoting Lyon into the major trade centre between France and Italy. The decline of the fairs generated a major crisis in the city, providing the little studied or understood background for the rise of Calvinism. However, at the same time, something much more important happened than a shift in the spatial location of fairs: the main fairs have become ever more frequent and longer. Instead of taking place once a year, eventually there were four fairs each year; and instead of lasting for a week or two, they became ever longer, lasting up to six weeks.
This was a radically new development, which has never happened anywhere and anytime else. It implied two things. First, it was due to, and further animated, an escalating, spiralling extension of exchange activities. International fairs, which until then were exceptional events, rare occasions for the exchange of rare goods, combined with special social and cultural activities like carnivals, pilgrimages, and other festivities, now came to involve regularly an ever-larger number of people, activities and goods. It is in this increase that the origins of what we call “economic growth” is to be searched. This is a most important theoretical point: the idea is not that people before the modern world were unenlightened, or primitive; it is that something like “economic growth” never existed. People always made certain improvements in their activities, this is indeed part of human nature, but this cannot be described in any way as an “economic growth.” This point will soon be revisited in some detail.
Second, as a simple calculation shows, four times six weeks amounts to about half the year, or fairs not only became the driving force for the spiralling increase of exchange, but also started to become almost permanent. This led the main operators of international fairs, the richest and most powerful merchants and bankers, to the idea of maintaining contact, and “do business,” during the whole year, or permanently. In other words, the fair, from a rare event, became something like a permanent institution. And soon, in fact, a building and an institution came to be established where the business that previously was conducted during fairs was now continued even in the absence of an actual fair: this was the stock-market. As it is a well-known fact of economic history, the first stock-markets came to be organised in the 1530s in Lyon and Antwerp, or in the two cities which by that time had the greatest and longest fairs.
The Permanentisation of Fairs in the Form of the Stock-Market and its Significance
The steady and evidently inexorable expansion of international fairs, resulting in their permanentisation in the form of the stock-market, was one of the most momentous developments in world history, probably the single most important factor behind the emergence of the modern world. It is therefore quite astonishing that this process so far has not received due attention.
Such neglect was probably due to a combination of factors. To start with, this “permanetisation” was a gradual process, did not have the character of a revolution, where the “order of things” suddenly and dramatically changes. It was this character of such a slow and gradual transformation that was recognised, centuries later, first in the Scottish Enlightenment, in the gradual but presumably inexorable rise of the “civil society,” and later in the various theories about economic growth or economic development. However, these theories offered a general, universalising, and ideological justification of a concrete and contingent process. It was not “in the nature of things” that fairs must keep expanding and eventually become permanent; this was not part of an inexorable process of historical change. It was the singular result of the concrete activities of certain people – at a concrete historical moment. But when? And why then?
Leaving aside these questions for the moment, let’s turn to the second main point: who could these have been? Where they could have come from? How could it happen that an activity that until then was barely tolerated in Roman Christian Europe, money-making, limited to certain ports, like Venice, Genoa and Pisa, step by step became the single most important activity governing social life? It is here that a temporal coincidence starts to assert itself into the centre of attention: the mid-fifteenth century, which was the time when the developments leading to the permanentisation of fairs started to pick up momentum, was the moment when the Byzantine Empire collapsed.
For a series of reasons that is not possible to review here in detail, but which should be researched, and in great depth, the Byzantine Empire is one of the least studied themes in Western historiography, and even in historical sociology. It is quite astonishing that the main figures of comparative historical sociology, starting with Max Weber, while extended their investigations back to Antiquity, and to other civilisations like China, India, or the Islam, failed to devote even a minimal attention to the Byzantine world. This even includes Eric Voegelin, who in some draft plans about the fourth volume of his Order and History project considered a short discussion of Byzantium in a section on “orthodox Empires,” but without any emphasis, and it was not realised: in the actual Volume Four the Byzantine world is only fleetingly mentioned as a background to the rise of Islam.
There was only one moment in which Voegelin came close to develop an interest in the Byzantine world, and this merits some attention. In late 1956 he travelled to Vienna, just in time to encounter the wave of refugees from Hungary, who escaped after the Soviets have crushed the anti-communist popular uprising. His related impressions are contained in a 29 December 1956 letter to his friend Robert B. Heilman: the situation was “[q]uite interesting at the moment, because the impact of the Hungarian affairs makes itself strongly felt (even in the streets and hotels: Vienna is full of Hungarian emigrants). What strikes one in talking with these people (historians, journalists, etc.) is the long-range view which they take: the manifold of the Byzantine and Asiatic cultures […] they regret that so little is really known in the West about the undercurrents of experiences and ideas in the East. They consider it the most important task for science, to find out a good deal more about Eastern living culture than is known in the West today. The Western literature, including the American, about Communism—based as it is on the reading of a few books and articles of persons who hold the limelight—they consider ludicrous.”[3] However, Voegelin would soon return to the States, then move to Munich, and overall forget, like practically everyone in the West, both the Hungarians and their heroic stand again Bolshevism, and the great importance of Byzantine matters.
This general oversight is all the stranger as the classic, even foundational work of modern historiography, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is largely devoted to Byzantine history. However, it ends with the Fall of Constantinople, and due to the focus of his work Gibbon limited his attention to what was happening with and inside the Eastern Empire, not investigating the impact of the Byzantine world on medieval Europe for the long centuries even before the collapse.
Of course, at a very general level, the negative, indirect impact of the Fall of Constantinople has been incorporated into standard historiography, in the sense that the Ottoman conquest closed the Eastern trading routes, pushing traders to search for Western routes, eventually resulting in the discovery of America. But the possible, and indeed effective, direct impact of persons and groups who migrated out of the collapsing Empire into the Central and Western parts of Europe was all but completely ignored.
This again had its evident reasons. The Byzantine refugees who moved to Europe were first of all and indeed refugees, so foreigners who had to integrate, as smoothly as possible, into the receiving nations, remaining all but invisible in their difference. This was all the more the case as, second, they were considered as heretics. Thus, they either had to hide their true beliefs, in case this mattered to them – and the major theological differences between the Eastern and Western churches were not simple trifles; or, in case this did not matter for them, they had good reasons to hide even more their Byzantine origins or roots. Third, and to further complicate matters, for the entire time during which the Eastern Empire survived the collapse of the Western part, the Byzantines, or the “Greeks” – or, as they called themselves, the “Romans” – considered themselves vastly superior to the Western Latin heretics, and so, in their then current dire need had no scruples whatsoever to mislead, in any way, their Western hosts. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a great part of the Byzantine refugees, and certainly their most influential contingent, had occupations that were at the margins or limits of legal and moral toleration, as many of them were mimes, buffoons, or other kind of actors; court sophists, rhetoricians or other kind of “court intellectuals” – and we should immediately note that in the Byzantine world these two groups were very close to each other, as, for e.g., the schools of Sophists taught not only rhetoric, but also acting; alchemists and other holders and transmitters of various kinds of occult knowledge; and finally, perhaps most importantly, all kinds of merchants and experts in international trade and court finance. In fact, these groups were all quite close to each other, not only because they were all part of the same Constantinople “court society,” but because their activities were closely built upon each other – already in Byzantium, but especially in their new “home,” the West.
I can only mention a few examples, trying to bring out their significance for this article.
Charlatans
The first concerns the term “charlatan.” Since long the word has an exclusively pejorative use, but originally it had a rather specific meaning, denoting a new kind of ambulant merchant, appearing in late Renaissance fairs. The first use of the word is from 1498, while the first image of a charlatan can be dated to 1483. A burgeoning of discussions about the new plague of charlatans, suddenly inundating the squares of the main cities in Italy, can be traced to the early decades of the 16th century. While false beggars and cheating merchants existed in all times and places, evidently something strikingly new was happening in the last decades of the 15th century. Charlatans appeared at the same time as buffoons and mimes, and often together; they were selling miracle-working elixirs and similar products, prepared using techniques of alchemy; made innovative use of the new technique of printing, to print leaflets in large quantities advertising their products; one of their most cunning and successful trick was the printing of indulgencies, in this sense being directly the source of Luther’s act and the rise of the Reformation; made use also of the mimes and buffoons to advertise their products, and such fairground advertising spectacles were at the origins of modern theatrical troupes: it is out of them that Commedia dell’Arte emerged, the first theatrical impresarios being technically charlatans.
The contribution of charlatans to the rise of the modern world was fundamental, and yet it is completely ignored by historians and historical sociologists. This is because in the modern world they gained prestige – and this can be best seen in the semantic history of the word, as it is rooted in Italian prestigiatore, which meant a kind of fairground illusionist and entertainer, very close technically to charlatan.
Leonardo da Vinci and the Gnostics
Leonardo da Vinci was certainly one of the greatest geniuses in world history. The date of his birth, April 1452, all but coincides with the invention of the press (around 1450), and the Fall of Constantinople (in 1453) – the latter two itself being a most particular and highly effective coincidence. Leonardo was obsessively preoccupied with the conditions of his birth, or rather conception, as he was not simply a natural child, growing up in between two families, but somehow came to assume the idea that the minimal contact between his father, a notary, and his mother, a simple servant, were hardly sufficient to produce a child. At any rate, his entire thinking, and work, became largely influenced by the sudden proliferation of Gnostic and alchemical writings in Europe, a result of the quick and widespread printing of such manuscripts, brought over by Byzantine refugees. His surviving masterpieces have given rise to an entire industry of speculations concerning the hidden motivations and meanings behind these works, including the character of the contact between Mary and the angel in the Uffizi “Annunciation,” or in the various versions of the “Virgin of the Rock,” to give only two examples. His work was only one of the most visible channels by which this obscure undercurrent entered the mainstream of European society – Marsilio Ficino and his circle being another, while the entire Medici family was certainly the most powerful and influential, crowned by the literal obsession of Cosimo I (1519-1574), the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with alchemy. The Medici family made its money through banking and commerce, and always entertained particularly close ties with the Byzantine world. Wherever we look, if we look carefully, we stumble upon the same connections, at the source of the modern world: between money-making and alchemy (in fact, alchemists were supposed to look for the way to transform base metals into gold, or literally “make money”); Gnosticism; and the Byzantine Empire.
The Press
The rise of printing and the press, touched so far repeatedly but only in a fleeting manner, require some more attention and words. The discovery of printing was not simply a universally valuable technological invention that was beneficial to everyone but was at the same time a delicate business venture that required the prior advancing of significant sums. In fact, details about the early history of printing are little known due to the fall-out between Gutenberg and his early business partner, Johann Fust (the family of whom, strikingly, from 1506 came to be called “Faust” – just the year when the magician Dr Faustus is first recorded as a performer of magical tricks). Furthermore, the decision concerning what to print was a question of power, thus this technological invention generated considerable power, inside Renaissance Europe, for those who became professionally and financially involved in the printing business. This explains, among others, the early printing of a significant amount of Gnostic, alchemical, hermetic, and similar writings, which until then only circulated, if at all, “underground,” read and diffused by rather obscure and often heretic monks. Now this became, so to say, a “public treasure.”
The central issue, to draw the consequences, is that while the press is hailed by its ideologues, from Habermas to Popper, as instrumental for generating an open and free public sphere, fountainhead of democratisation, the rise of printing did not mean that whatever previously was available only to the select few now became accessible to large number of people, but that the “supply” of printed books, what actually became available for buying and reading, was carefully decided by a relatively limited number of people, who had their own agendas – or, rather, who in this manner suddenly became empowered to pursue and impose on the “public” their own agendas. And this was because the books produced had to be sold, thus had to anticipate a certain demand; but with the ”objectivity” of this “demand,” and the “necessity” of satisfying it, there are immediately two problems. To start with, what people “want” as an expressed preference might not be what they really need. The identification of the two, in our world, culminated in the kind of cinema that is dominant now, with scenes of violence and sex. Second, such “demand” can be easily incited and manipulated, through publicity, commercials, advertisement, and so on – each word deserving a book-length treatment on its own – and the rise of printing was the main instrument in escalating such inciting of “demand.”
This suggests placing the accent on the character and motivations of the early printers and those who financed them – at least, on some of these. Here I can only mention that the first main centre of book publishing came to be Venice, by the end of the 15th century. Venice was not only famous for his long-term contacts with the Byzantine Empire, but was also the place where most Byzantine refugees came after 1453. The daily interaction between the refugees and the local community – in fact, on a broader scale, between the Byzantines and Western Christian culture – was quite delicate since the start, and in many senses. The most important point is that the Byzantines, whoever they were – as the Empire collected people from many regions, all around the world, but especially the East, in particular the Middle East – did not cultivate benevolent feelings towards their Western hosts.
About this, another book should be written, if it were possible to find enough concrete evidence. Let me quote here, as a prelude, from a letter written by Albrecht Dürer to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer in 1506 from Venice: “I wish you could be here in Venice. There are so many nice fellows among the Italians who are increasingly accompanying me, showing characteristics that should warm up the heart: they are studious, intelligent, good players of the lute and the flute, connoisseurs of painting, and many noble minds, men of true virtue, who show towards me much honour and friendship. But there are the most treacherous, lying and thieving ruffians around here, who have no equals anywhere in the world. And if one hadn’t known them, one could think that they are the most gentle persons who exist on earth. I myself must laugh with them when they are talking with me. They know that people know their malice, but it does not bother them.”[4]
Permanent Fairground and Economic Freedom
The idea of economic freedom, in our world, is associated with free markets. The call for free markets, the defence of free markets, is a fundamental ideological weapon and banner of the United States, and Western Europe; and it is the denial of free markets that distinguished, in the past, the Soviet Union and its ideological allies.
This short article hopefully called attention to the real and major problem with this idea: it is that the origin of the modern economy is to be searched not in markets, but in fairs. Markets, in fact, were always free, in the sense that members of the local populace, without much need for regulations and permissions – at least in the long past – were free to bring there their produce and merchandise, and to sell it to whoever wanted to buy it. Fairs, however, were never “free” – the idea has no meaning. The right to hold fairs was granted to certain places, and not to others; and participation in a fair was much regulated. There was an obvious reason for this: in a local market people of the neighbouring areas regularly met, they knew each other, thus knew their buyers and sellers, knew whom they could trust and whom couldn’t. A fair was something completely different, so there was a definite need to keep away and control quacks.
The stock-market, as a permanentisation of fairs, was something completely different again. Its emergence and impact is still not understood; its working is hardly presented in economics textbooks. For a long time, such textbooks – it is astonishing even to mention! – did not discuss the stock-market, were only talking about “markets,” as if the two were the same; then, they started to insert a digression on the 1929 crisis as a historical episode; and by now they contain a short treatment explaining stock-market behaviour through the theory of “random walk,” which argues that it is not possible to predict or explain wins or losses in the stock-market, as this is completely random. Which is kind of extraordinary, as economists claim, in their major textbooks!, that winning on the stock-market is practically identical to winning in Las Vegas: it is pure chance.
This, to say the least, is rather amazing, as some people are systematically winning on the stock-market, and enormous sums. Like George Soros, as it is well-known. He must be a real favourite of goddess Fortuna! Actually, Soros wrote a book about how he managed to win so much money, with the candide title The Alchemy of Finance, in which he wipes the floor with “random walk” theory, even economic theory in general, but only reveals something like a “magical touch” behind his recurrent investment successes: somehow he always had the ”knack” about what and when to buy or sell; so we must follow our instincts in order to win. But such an idea is certainly just as ridiculous as “random walk” theory: he cannot seriously believe that we believe this. But who could find out the truth? And how?
So, what I suggest, most provisionally, is to go back to the origins and try to do now what should have been done then. Small markets, small producers, and small firms indeed should not be regulated, but left free to do what they are doing. Which, by the way, should be better called “free activity,” as human freedom cannot be reduced only to “economic” matters – whatever they are; and this question will certainly be revisited in the following articles. But, just as fairs, stock-markets should be regulated, as they are not simply private but, by definition, public entities.
I do not know what this means, or should mean, at the moment, and cannot pretend to be so irresponsible as to suggest, from the top of my head, a solution. But I can point towards it by a concrete example.
Current economic policy makers, as good Kantian universalists, always suggest or make general regulations. Thus, if there should be a minimal wage, then this minimal wage, as a “law,” should be upheld by every single enterprise.
I think that this is wrong, and perhaps there is a better way. In my view, and in line with the idea of “economic freedom” I try to explore, any private enterprise should have the right to pay as much to their employees as it wants; also, to set up working hours and other conditions as they think best. The state, or the public authority, should not interfere with this. However – and this is a big however! – the situation is completely different if the company is listed, or owned, through the stock-market. In this case, we are to do not with a private enterprise, strictly speaking, but with a public organisation, which requires a quite different kind of legal control. In such cases, the different sides have quite different powers, and possibilities – note that “possible” has the same etymology as “potential,” or “potent,” in a Latin term denoting “power” – and so public authorities and regulations should intervene.
This point so far did not receive attention, as the stock-market developed out of “private” money-making, and so for a series of reasons was left, sort of, on its own. This must end; the idea of free private enterprise must be separated from the stock-market, and must be saved, in so far as valuable – which still requires much further discussion! – from being identified with the stock-market.
The stock-market is widely considered as a uniquely efficient way to promote economic growth and to solve economic coordination. This might be the case. But, first of all, we still need to see what distinguishes matters which are economic from those that are not; and in what way the unleashing of something like the stock-market interferes with the basic concerns, and freedoms, of human life.
The next articles will try to discuss these and similar matters. But here, at the end of this first article, I just wanted to put down “on the table” a concrete, preliminary suggestion.
NOTES:
[1] Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1977, p.62.
[2] Carlo Cipolla, Storia economica dell’Europa pre-industriale e altri saggi, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005, p.35.
[3] Charles R. Embry (ed.) Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters 1944-1984, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004, p.164. Concerning the last point, this is why it took the arrival of Pope John Paul II, and his papal diplomacy, to alter the Western attitude toward Communism: “the old Ostpolitik was designed and executed by men who did not understand communism because they have not lived it.” John Tanyi, The Cross and the Flag: Papal diplomacy and John Paul II’s struggle against the tyranny of the possible, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2024, pp.89-90).
[4] Albrecht Dürer, Lettere da Venezia, Milan: Electa, 2007, p. 32.
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