I’m continuing the reporting on the Vatican Conference on Pursuing the Common Good, still focusing on the representatives of Catholic social thinking, especially those with a detectable socially-progressive bent. After our discussions of the work of Pierpaolo Donati on the relational society and Luigino Bruno on the ecology of communion, here is a review, based on excerpts from the essay from Stefano Zamagni, which was entitled: RECIPROCITY, CIVIL ECONOMY, COMMON GOOD.
Today, we focus on his introduction of the tradition of civil humanism, a tradition of thought that was a discovery for me.
1. From the Introduction by Stefano Zamagni:
“This essay has a triple aim. First, to refresh a traditional Italian line of economic thought, which was rooted in the civic humanism of the thirteenth century and continued, with ups and downs, through the golden age of Italian Enlightenment philosophy in both its Milanese and Neapolitan variants. Second, to explain why it is not a good thing that interpersonal relations continue to be precluded from mainstream economics and why the discipline would do well to adopt a new scientific paradigm, the relational one. … Finally, I will indicate how the principle of reciprocity allows and favours the passage from the traditional welfare state to the civil welfare model.
2. The Tradition of Civil Humanism
“Civil humanism was a highly particular, and brief, period in Italian history, but one that still exerts its fascination today. It remains a decisive cultural point of reference, because it was the product of a felicitous alchemy between the values of classical and Christian antiquity and the new political, cultural and economic demands that burst onto the Western scene. Today we know that it is not possible to understand the genesis of civic economy, or of political economy in general, without coming to grips with Italian civic humanism and its urban civilization. So to start again, ideally, in reconstructing the humanistic tradition of civic economy means relating contemporary economics with nearly a thousand years of history. It means showing that thought about things economic is not some mushroom that sprouted overnight in modern times but a new bloom on a secular tree that can still flower again (Bruni and Zamagni, 2007).
The “golden age” of civil humanism was unquestionably the first half of the fifteenth century, and its locus was Tuscany. Its main representatives were Bernardino da Siena, Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Léon Battista Alberti, Matteo Palmieri, and Antonino of Florence. This was also an age when Florence experienced an extraordinary confluence of artistic genius, embracing such figures as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello, Botticelli, Della Robbia, and Fra Angelico.
Typically, two basic elements are associated with Humanism: the rediscovery of classical (Greek and Roman) culture and the necessity, for a fully human life, of civil life. The second of these elements, therefore, typifies civil humanism, which does not coincide with the entire period of Humanism, which deserves the adjective “civil” only for an initial moment, before the end of the fifteenth century when the individualistic, Platonic, contemplative, solitary and magical aspect got the upper hand (with such thinkers as Pico della Mirandola or Ficino) and, de facto, brought early civil humanism to an end in favour of the notion of the individual, a subject “separate” from other individuals and all the more so from the community. The two souls of humanism (the civil-Aristotelian and the individualistic-Platonic) would generate different traditions in modern social science: the individualist school that issued forth in hedonism and the sensualism of the eighteenth century (taken up again by neoclassical economics at the end of the nineteenth) and the school of civil economy represented principally in the eighteenth century by such scholars as Francis Hutcheson, Paolo Mattia Doria, Antonio Genovesi, Giacinto Dragonetti, Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri and Adam Smith. Today, like a river long underground, it is resurfacing.
Civil humanism brought an extraordinary revaluation of the worldly, relational aspect of humanity, from family to city to State. Any number of tracts on civil life were offered in response to earlier centuries’ paeans to the solitary life (Petrarch). The classics too were rediscovered, above all Cicero and Aristotle, but the civil humanists’ attitude towards learning was shot through with the need for a philosophy that was a school for life, a serious and profound meditation on life’s problems – just like Genovesi’s civil economy three centuries later. In the view of the civil humanists, responding to the dominant ideas of the epoch from which they were emerging, the only true virtue is civil virtue, the only true life is active life: “Virtue is at the disposal of all” (Poggio Bracciolini). So there is no virtue in the life of solitude but only in the city. Man, “a weak animal, insufficient in himself, attains perfection only in civil society” (Leonardo Bruni, in his introduction to the Italian translation of Aristotle’s Politics).
It should come as no surprise, then, that Bruni, Alberti, Bernardino da Siena and Bracciolini railed against the detractors of economic life and of wealth, propounding theses on the social uses of wealth and on the heterogenesis of ends that would not come into the common domain until the eighteenth century. It remained quite clear to these writers, in any case, that self-interest would not turn automatically or magically into the common good. There is no civil economy without laws, institutions, civil virtues. This is one of the main messages of Italian social thought; economists were also legal scholars, and vice versa (in modern times, let us think of such figures as Beccaria and Gian Domenico Romagnosi). It was city-based civilization – the model social order that arose in that age – that made it possible for the pursuit of individual self-interest not to father destructive, anti-social mechanisms and for markets, watched over and fed by other forms of civil and spiritual life, to act for and not against the community.
Civil humanism’s lease had, alas, all too short a date. The experience of liberty and republican government gave way to the Signorie and absolute monarchy, which translated immediately into an authoritarian age far removed from the libertas florentina of the early fifteenth century and its city-based culture. So it is no accident that with the end of that century thought on civil life faded; the humanists themselves were no longer engaged, politically active like Bruni or Palmieri, but what we would now call “free lance” intellectuals, no longer part of either a university or a city body but a lone individual, wandering from court to court. And considerations on public happiness became a research into individualistic, Epicurean happiness, as is shown in the treatises of Marsilio Ficino, Filippo Beroaldo, Piero Valeriano, Lorenzo de’ Medici or Pico della Mirandola. All of these thinkers, each in his own particular way, wrote that happiness is to be sought in flight from other people and from the city, and that life in common, life in society, can bring only suffering.
A rupture was thus consummated between civil humanism and modernity. The experience of civil life came to an end at the threshold of modern philosophy.”
The above does not exhaust this most interesting contribution. The essay (you can ask me for a copy), continues to examine why this tradition broke down, and especially the ‘hard blows’ from Hobbes and Mandeville concerning ‘evil human nature’. Then, in the middle of the eighteenth century, again mostly in Italy (Naples), with thinkers such as Genovese, the civil oriented thinkers sought to refound the tradition, incorporating the critique. Even though Adam Smith in fact espoused many of their ideals, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, subsequent economists did not take up this strand of his thinking.
Zamagni:
“The civil economy of Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Antonino of Florence, Vico, Genovesi, Romagnosi and Smith is not dead, however. Over the centuries it has continued to flow like a current in the subsoil of official economic doctrine. At times it has resurfaced in the thinking of some economists, including major ones (Alfred Marshall towers above them all). These are all chapters in a history of civil economy yet to be written.
Starting in the first half of the nineteenth century the civil vision of the market and of the economy in general began to disappear from scientific research and from political and cultural discourse. The reasons were many and varied. Let us mention just the two most important. The first was the slow but steady spread throughout high European cultural life, of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy. … The second reason was the industrial revolution and the definitive establishment of industrial society.”
It is therefore time for a new resurgence of the civil tradition:
“For some time now the discipline of economics has begun again to feel the need for the relational perspective in order to transcend the clash between the holistic and individualistic paradigms. Why is this? Actually, the focus must be on the individualistic paradigm, since for years the holistic one has been practically abandoned. Indeed the current of thought running from Ricardo and Marx to Polanyi and Sraffa, in which that paradigm is embedded, has ceased to offer a real alternative to the intellectual hegemony of neoclassical thought in its countless versions. Note that the relational perspective I am considering here is not that of exchange but that of reciprocity. Exchange is instrumental in nature: it is obvious that every time I initiate an exchange I am entering into a relation with someone, but this relation is merely instrumental, a means to my end. A relation of reciprocity, by contrast, considers the force of “between” as Buber (1972) suggests; in economics, this is captured by the concept of relational good (Zamagni, 2005).”
This resurgence is finding a way back in discourse through the controversies of human motivation, and the increasing revolt against understand as solely motivated by interest.
Zamagni:
“What route can we take, then, to overcome the paralyzing reductionism of “received economic theory”? Scholarly responses are differentiated, not convergent, but there is consensus on one point: it is urgent to abandon the assumption of homogeneous motivation for all agents. Note that this does not mean simply banishing homo oeconomicus, because there are in fact a-social persons in the world who neither “help” nor “harm” others. What we need to do is to recognize that the economic world is also inhabited by other types of subjects. Some are anti-social (the envious, for example, who in order to inflict harm or suffering on someone else is willing to sustain a cost that he knows will produce no material benefit for himself; or the malicious, who takes pleasure in other people’s ill fortune); others still are pro-social (such as the increasingly numerous consumers who support and sustain the fair trade and ethical finance movements; or the businessmen, also increasing in number, who are instituting democratic stakeholding in their firms as the practical expression of corporate social responsibility). Pro-social acts, it should be noted, are such not because they are actually in the public interest but because they are performed with the public interest in mind.
What is entailed in assuming motivational heterogeneousness? First of all, it implies that “upstream” of the problems that rational choice theory has addressed so for there is a problem of choice of personal dispositions. And, as we know, dispositions respond to institutional changes, so the problem becomes designing institutions that operate as a mechanism for selecting groups with various motivational systems, not merely as an incentive mechanism to favour one group or another of subjects, as is done unthinkingly today.
The second implication is that one can no longer keep the category of relationality outside of economic studies. The fact that human beings live partly in a symbolic dimension leads unavoidably to the idea of relationality and the notion of the relational good. The person in relation to others is what is missing in conventional economic theory, which appears not to see that what is relevant to people is not to be found only in people themselves – as in the “new social economics” of such scholars as Durlauf, Murphy and Kline (2001) – but between them.”
Zamagni then, after an analysis of the problematique of globalization, presents the new concept of a civil welfare economy, but that is for another day.
Source: Draft essay by Stefano Zamagni for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2008: Reciprocity, Civil Economy, Common Good.
