Abstract

The present reflection intends to give more complete consideration to a passage on labour in the Constitution contained in a previous study, which, in the economy of that work, could merely be asserted and not developed. The intention in the earlier context was to keep a distance from the representation of our economic constitution as having a Labourite mould, according to which the republican Constitution does not recognise, in our economic system, the predominance of the market economy. It was intended to assert on the contrary the compatibility of the decision to posit labour as the foundation of the Republic and the liberal democratic nature of our economic constitution that emerged in that study from its overall reconstruction on the basis of the constitutional dictate: a synergetic compatibility, therefore, of labour and market instead of an irreconcilable antagonism. The present in-depth examination resolves these assertions by including private economic enterprise in the constitutional horizon of labour and by attempting to allude to some systematic consequences deriving therefrom for the interpretation of our economic constitution in the text still formally in force.