FEDERICO CAFFE AND ECONOMIC POLICY AS A DISCIPLINE

The complex personality of Federico Caffe deserves attention for his uncommon qualities, as a man, a teacher and a researcher. He expressed dissatisfaction with reality and traced in his vast and deep knowledge of economic doctrines the need and the possibility for the state to intervene and change the performance of markets in a systematic way. From many points of view he anticipated the formation of Economic policy as a discipline. When this finally sprouted in Scandinavia and the Netherlands he was ready to give it a more systematic structure and spread it to the Italian academy. He was aware of the declining role of the discipline in the last years of his life and could not see its revival due to reconfirmed validity of its core.