What institutional and economic conditions are necessary for freedom to be meaningful in contemporary democratic societies? How should we understand the relationship between individual liberty, economic inequality, political power, and innovation? In his lecture, Dr Andrea Lorenzo Capussela will focus on these questions and use as a point of departure his new book “The Republic of Innovation: A New Political Economy of Freedom”, which offers a critical reconsideration of freedom as a foundational principle of liberal democracy, distinguishing between freedom understood as non-interference and freedom understood as non-domination.
From the latter perspective, formal rights and the absence of direct interference may be insufficient to secure individual autonomy when people remain exposed to the arbitrary power of employers, economic actors, or political institutions. This conceptual distinction provides a framework for examining how the distribution of economic resources and political influence shapes the effective exercise of freedom.
The lecture will explore the implications of this argument for the political economy of innovation, particularly the relationship between competition, creative destruction, and the concentration of economic power. It will consider how established interests may constrain the emergence of new enterprises and ideas, and whether institutions designed to limit domination can simultaneously strengthen democratic accountability, economic dynamism, and individual autonomy.
During the subsequent discussion we attempt to raise also question related to broader theoretical and practical issues, such as whether equality and freedom are mutually reinforcing and the role public institutions should play in limiting arbitrary power.
The lecture is co-organized by the Institute of Social Sciences and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.
Andrea Lorenzo Capussela is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. From 2008 to 2011, he served as the head of the economics unit of Kosovo’s international supervisor (International Civilian Office), and then as adviser to Moldova’s minister of economy. He holds a PhD in international law from the University of Milan with a thesis on competition policy. Lorenzo Capussela is the author of “State-Building in Kosovo: Democracy, EU Interests and US Influence in the Balkans” (2015), “The Political Economy of Italy’s Decline” (2018), and “Declino: Una storia italiana” (2019).