ANTONIO ZORZI GIUSTINIANI

Rule of Law, Costituzionalismo, Stato amministrativo in Hayek

N. 193

Summary — Hayek was not only an economist and a social scientist, but also an outstanding legal theorist and a keen student of political institutions. Starting from his famous best-seller The Road to Serfdom (1944), aimed at showing how centralized planning is the first step toward the abolition of personal liberty and the establishment of a totalitarian rule, he devoted to the investigation of the constitutional roots of free government. Hayek’s master-work The Constitution of Liberty (1960) is a restatement of the Western political tradition of Rule of law, whose historical role has been the restraint of State’s monopoly of coercion, the safeguard of individual liberty and the guarantee of all citizens' equality under the law. The growing of welfare policies and the emergence of the Administrative State, where discretionary orders prevent the enforcement of general rules and undermine the constitutional principles, is pointed out by Hayek as the most dangerous threat to liberty. The Author’s last encyclopedic study on legal and institutional topics (Law, legislation and liberty, 1973-1979) is a big doctrinal fresco and, at the same time, a considerable attempt to draft a model constitution for a society, whose political order is centred upon the market and the free competition. Notwithstanding a somewhat utopic view, typical of an apostle of liberty, Hayek must be considered one of the great scholars of the liberal theory of government and institutions.