On Wednesday 11th December 2024, from 14:00 to 18:00, in Room 3_C of Building D (Piazzale Europa Campus) of the University of Trieste, the seminar entitled ‘Hayek's Nobel at 50 - Culture and the Machine. Deirdre McCloskey on the Industrial Revolution’.

The speaker at the event will be Professor Alberto Mingardi, Professor of History of Political Doctrines at the IULM University in Milan and scholar of Hayek's thought.

The seminar, which will be entirely in English, will be divided into two sessions. The first part, entitled ‘Hayek's Nobel at 50’, will examine the significance of the Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Friedrich A. Hayek half a century ago, in 1974. It will explore the Nobel Lecture ‘The Pretence of Knowledge’, a text that criticised the presumption of certainty in planned economic policies and marked a moment of renaissance for the Austrian school of economics.

The second part, ‘Culture and the Machine’, will focus on Deirdre N. McCloskey's interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. Professor Mingardi will analyse how McCloskey attributes the success of that epochal transformation not only to economic factors, but to a change in culture and values, comparing this reading with the perspectives of Max Weber and Ernest Gellner.

The seminar is open to students, teachers and all interested parties. It will also be possible to participate remotely via the Microsoft Teams platform. For information: https://deams.units.it/it/eventi/317776.