Between Continuity and Change in Italy’s Political Economy

Abstract

As the first layer of the context analysis, this chapter investigates the nature and extent of basic dynamics in Italy’s post-war political economy in order to sketch out their far-reaching implications for the conflict over the 2012 labour market reform. The topic of continuity and change in Italy’s political economy is approached in terms of a progressive shift from the Keynesian welfare national state to the Schumpeterian workfare postnational regime. The analysis uncovers key long-term legacies for the observed conflict—first of all the evidence of an incomplete and anomalous shift from the Keynesian to the Schumpeterian dimension of economic reproduction against the background of a basic inability of the main political forces to reconstruct a dominant social bloc since the end of the 1980s.