Claudio Napoleoni e l’economia politica

This article provides an overview of Claudio Napoleoni’s economic thought, with particular attention to his engagement with both Marxism and marginalism. The analysis will focus on two fundamental antinomies that, for Napoleoni, run throughout the history of economic thought and crystallize in the antagonism between these two frameworks: on the one hand, the tension between a theory that seeks to describe the specific functioning of a market society and a theory that aims at a universal account of human behavior in conditions of scarcity and, on the other hand, the opposition between a theory that interprets production as oriented toward reproduction and accumulation and one that instead views it as directed toward final consumption. The article will also discuss the epistemological ground that, for Napoleoni, allows for a critical evaluation of the claims of these two theories, i.e. their translation, achieved by Léon Walras and John von Neumann, in terms of general equilibrium. It will then examine the consequences of this epistemological stance, as well as the possibility of identifying, within Napoleoni’s thought, alternative outcomes to the one he eventually ends up advancing in the Discorso sull’economia politica.