The President’s Letter This text, in the form of a letter, was sent to Reset by President Giorgio Napolitano whom we had asked to contribute to a special section marking the fiftieth anniversary of Luigi Einaudi’s death on October 29, 1961. The special section dedicated to this founder of the Republic appeared in Reset no. 127 and included articles by Enzo Di Nuoscio, Paolo Heritier, Paolo Silvestri, Corrado Ocone, Flavio Felice, and excerpts from Einaudi’s correspondence with Luigi Albertini. After I met with Napolitano early last September, the pressure of events forced him to postpone writing until recently. Although much has changed since last October, recalling what Einaudi can teach us remains important above and beyond an anniversary. Einaudi was president of the Bank of Italy from 1945 to 1948 and president of the Republic from 1948 to 1955, but his legacy also includes his writing, his work as economic columnist for Il Corriere della sera until 1925, and his teaching at the Bocconi University where Carlo Rosselli was his assistant.The heart of the matter that we wanted Napolitano to take on is the crisis of Italian politics and the reasons why the values espoused by a father of the Republic as important as Einaudi are no longer evident in the Italian ruling class except in a very few cases. This was also an occasion to reflect on Italian reformism (a tradition that our President represents in all respects) and on lost opportunities across the entire political spectrum.Napolitano’s letter takes full advantage of this occasion and offers many useful suggestions about work—both inquiry and action—that we must continue. We thank him for this.In a letter to the President sent after our conversation last September, I quoted the work of the recently deceased historian Tony Judt. The President refers to this quotation in his text, so I’ll repeat it here: “During the long century of constitutional liberalism…Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen. Whatever their political affinities, Leon Blum and Winston Churchill, Luigi Einaudi and Willy Brandt, David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities. It is an open question as to whether it was the circumstances that produced the politicians, or the culture of the age that led men of this caliber to enter politics. Today, neither incentive is at work. Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies” (Ill Fares the Land, Penguin Press, 2010, pp. 164-165). In the same letter, I mentioned that reading the Einaudi-Albertini correspondence (published by the Corriere della Sera Foundation and excerpted in Reset) reveals the magnitude of the work undertaken by earlier statesmen with such great scientific, political, and moral rigor on a daily basis. “This strengthens my conviction,” I wrote, “that the gap Judt speaks about is quite dramatic.” I asked the President to reflect on the issues raised by Tony Judt’s “open question.” Giancarlo Bosetti, Editor of Reset-DoC