THE IDEAL OF GOOD GOVERNMENT IN LUIGI EINAUDI'S THOUGHT AND LIFE
son the French revolution left in 19th-century society, which has spilled over into the present century, derives to a large extent from this cause.
In the attempt to clarify this position, and accusing his pupil of an excess of "geometrie" spirit conducted in the name of a reason that bordered on "pure logie", Einaudi put forward the following thesis: "a society is sound and lively and vibrant only if it has within itself many incomprehensible things. If the men of a society begin to reason about everything, one can be quite cer-tain that such a society is dose to beaking down".38 This argument could hardly fail to infuriate his pupil, who, feeling he could almost no longer recog-nize or agree with (what was in his view) his master's "illuministic" teaching, objected:
What is this lack of faith in the Goddess Reason? Where do you think we should stop, sir, when developing an argument? Who should decide which points are not to be questioned? As far as I am concerned I am going to continue beating my knuckles against ali the institutions that happen to stand before me in order to try to establish whether they are made of marble or wood or plaster, and I am going to continue ask-ing, just as my old friend Bentham did: "What is the use?", without ever allowing myself to be imposed upon by tradition.
By the time the debate reached this point, a misunderstanding had occurred. The pupil interpreted his master's argument as a sort of invitation to genuflect before tradition (whatever it may be), tradition having been assumed as dog-matic. On the other hand, when the pupil himself effectively professed his un-conditional faith ("trust") in the "Goddess Reason", and also in the criterion for meting out a judgment on "institutions" shaped in the utilitarian-Benthamian mould ("What is the use?"), he unwittingly testified to his belonging to two tra-ditions, illuminism and utiliarianism, no less dogmatically assumed.39
However, it is perfeedy legitimate to conjecture that Einaudi was trying to reformulate the problem of the "invisible" foundations40 (as he would later
38	As noted by Faucci (Einaudi, Croce, Rossi cit.), Einaudi's position against the supporters of authoritarian intervention, and the related argument that there exist many "incomprehensible things", has a certain resemblance to that of Hayek: "even if such power is not in itself bad, its ex-ercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims" (F.A. Hayek, "The Pretence of Knowledge" (1974), in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economies and the History of Ideas (London, Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 42-43).
39	I refer here to the concept of "dogma" as formulated by P. Legendre, Della società come testo cit.
40	On "invisible organizations and invisible concrete foundation", understood as "that which
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