Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Monateri, Pier Giuseppe --- "The authoritarian theory of contract" [2017] ELECD 604; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Comparative Contract Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 47

Book Title: Comparative Contract Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804516

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: The authoritarian theory of contract

Author(s): Monateri, Pier Giuseppe

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

The encounter of contract (conceived as an autonomous field of law, as a set of rules, principles, doctrines) with the political strategies of authoritarian regimes brought ground-breaking theories and reshaped the internal articulation of operational taxonomies. This chapter will discuss three main issues. First of all, moving from a comparison among different authoritarian projects (namely the Fascist and National Socialist ones), the analysis will emphasize how private law was variously reassessed by the means of a proclaimed rejection or constraint of Liberal individualism. Secondly, it will be demonstrated how the inaugurated vision led to a new kind of ‘geopolitical’ distribution of legal rules and devices, to a divergent dislocation and re-articulation of competing forces. The morphology of private law was synthetically moulded in order to produce and, meanwhile, deal with a juridical exception: it was framed into a liminal threshold between tradition and innovation. Finally, the critical inquiry will dissect the specific declensions of Italian legal discourse during Fascism, in order to detect the structural dissonance which countered the rhetorical strategies introduced by legal scholars to subvert Liberal determinations with the conservative style preserved by Italian courts in the text of their decisions. Ultimately, the emerged incongruity seems to be responsible for the conscious choices of economic policy, discovering an unexpected contiguity between classic liberal thought and the Fascist appraisal of contract law as a cornerstone of the economic process.