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The sections of part II of the present essay (§§ 9–17), On Some Abstract Hypotheses Concerning the State and on Their Historical Value, are those in which Einaudi redefines his position in the Italian tradition of public finance by engaging in a comparative assessment of his position with that of De Viti De Marco and Fasiani and, in turn, went back over the earlier discussion with Fasiani on the types of state but set it as a background and gave a more explicit account of his perspective, with particular reference to the last two chapters of MPJT–‘The Supreme Paradox of Taxation’and ‘Historical Schemata and Ideal Schemata’–which constitute a fundamental step in his long (and unconcluded) quest for buon governo (lato sensu taken to mean good polity, thus good government and good society), which is here re-examined and developed further through the dialectical opposition between non-state and state.

However, it is important to underline straightaway that Einaudi’s critical enquiry was guided, as he wrote in the old abstract, by the attempt to put forward a critical view of the ‘concept of a state which, in pursuit of its own ends, focuses only on the individual or only the collective community’(Editorial Foreword, par. 3). Given the fact that the different approaches developed by the Italian tradition of public finance can be understood within the dichotomies individual/collective, voluntary/coercion, economic/political (Bellanca 1993, Fausto 1998), such a statement by Einaudi remarks his intention to redefine his position in this tradition, where the cooperative and the modern type of state seems to be stylized so as to represent the limits, respectively, of the …