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Abstract: The paper is inspired by a contentious letter that Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa sent to Federico Caffè in September 1978, on the eve of the agreement on the European Monetary System (EMS). Two different conceptions of democracy and of Europe emerge. The concreteness of Caffè, rooted in the “welfare economics” and “social choice” theory, hence in the attention to distributional problems, is still today an option on which to reflect to strengthen the democratic foundations of our societies and to give new impetus to the European project. The alternatives to concreteness are given by technocracy and populist demagogy, two sides of the same coin, which share a common disrespect for democratic pluralism: the former in the name of technical knowledge, the latter in the name of the people.

Keywords: Social Choice; European Monetary System; Compensation Principle; Technocracy; Populism