16 Apr 2024 | 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Italian Senate
Malagodi and Liberal International (RDR)
The round table aims to reflect on the figure of Giovanni Malagodi, the father of liberalism’s reforms, as a European and international liberal.
The round table aims to reflect on the figure of Giovanni Malagodi, the father of liberalism’s reforms, as a European and international liberal.
Giovanni Malagodi was one of the most influential exponents of the Italian Liberal Party, of which he was national secretary from 1954 to 1972. The 1967 Oxford Declaration itself, an update of the 1947 Manifesto on which the International was founded, was prepared in first draft by the great Italian liberal.
Alongside his profound humanistic education, Malagodi combined an uncommon philosophical culture, further enriched by his cosmopolitan professional experience. He conceived politics as an ultimate clash between fascism and communism on the one hand and democratic liberalism on the other. For him, liberalism had to present itself as a system of values certain of its own truth and unwilling to give way to adversaries with whom no compromise was possible.
Malagodi developed these themes not only at home, but also in the Liberal International: the world federation of parties, as well as of foundations and associations, that drew on liberalism, created in 1947, at Wadham College, Oxford, under the patronage of cultural and political personalities, including the Italians Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi. But it was a particularly Malagodi who marked its history, becoming its President: from 1958 to 1986 and then from 1982 to 1989. The Declaration reaffirmed the supremacy of the individual over the state, and the need to limit bureaucracy, public power and market constraints.
The goals of the proposed RDR are to provide a dialogical debate among European liberal exponents on the subject MEPs with an in-depth and critical overview of the figure of Giovanni Malagodi as a European and international liberal.
Speakers: