Epilogue

Abstract

Let us now apply our political economy model of community building not just to San Francisco and Chicago but to the United States and the Kingdom of Italy. America’s genius for creating Americans as compared with Italy’s failure to create Italians had its origins at its founding. Although operating out of different eras, cultures, and continents, the two country’s leaderships remained subject to a universal imperative: maximizing the utility value of whatever human and material resource might be lying to hand. This is not of course the rhetoric they used: it is where things inevitably settled down to on reaching their natural level. Although all political leaderships claim to promote the common good,” the actual details of this grand concept will be hard to agree on, as different parties pursue different and often conflicting agendas. The force coming closest to advancing all the agendas at once, however, will be the normal functioning of the political economy. Surveying each team of founders’ special bloc of underused resource—the thirteen British colonies, on the one side, the various principalities of preunification Italy on the other—both teams reached a similar conclusion: to achieve this objective they would need to throw off the foreigner’s yoke and create a new nation. Their people’s wealth, freedom, cultural richness, and military power, they reasoned, were bound to increase if pulled together under the aegis of a new political order.