Abstract
Every so often, one comes across a book which tells you things you already know with such lucidity and insight that it becomes a fresh window onto the subject. Italian economists Bruni and Zamagni here bring together central theses in their extensive earlier work on ‘civil economy’ in a cogent and concise form. One reason for the familiarity is that they have been influential for some decades on the development of Catholic Social Teaching, in particular Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate. The main themes of this short book are, then, to be expected: the inadequacy of mainstream contemporary economics to value the things that make life worth living, the ways that focusing on GDP mislead us, the damage wrought by treating shareholder profit as the sole aim of business, the pernicious distortions of an economy which favours rent over productiveness, and so on. Critiques of these failures are plentiful, as are attempts at offering solutions and better models. Where Bruni and Zamagni’s work brings a persuasive freshness is in their careful location of their vision for a better economy within a long-established and predominantly Italian tradition dating back to Antonio Genovesi in the eighteenth century, and others. And one good reason for reviewing this book in Studies in Christian Ethics is that, whilst they do not make this the crux of their argument, the authors are clear that tensions in Christian theology since the Reformation lie only just below the surface of the story about why one sort of economics and not another dominates our world today. The corollary of that insight is that it may well be through rediscovering religious traditions that a better economics emerges.
The book is divided into two sections. The first is a fascinating historical study of how economics might have taken a different, more socialised, turn under the influence of Genovesi, Dragonetti and others. Here, the predominantly Italian focus is leavened by a short chapter on Ruskin, but the strong theme is that, whilst not mechanically derived from Catholic social thought, the economics of the Italian school draws deeply from that well. At the heart of what the authors call civil economy is the concept of the common good—and the historical account seeks to reclaim the centrality of the person in community as opposed to the ideology which sees only the free individual and understands his or her freedom to be freedom from association with others. Restoring the economics of the common good clearly requires a shift away from what the authors identify as the Reformed and Lutheran anthropology of modernity which has eclipsed the belief in humanity’s capacity for virtue, leaving us only with self-interest and the invisible hand of the market. With further chapters exploring the problems of an eco-nomy in which rent has taken the place of production as a prime source of wealth, and speculation is more profitable than genuine entrepreneurship, the first half of the book constitutes a comprehensive critique of the economic orthodoxies of the last forty years. Through its deep engagement with the Italian tradition and those who shared its priorities, the authors show that critique to be historically well-founded on the basis of a different and distinctive philosophy of economic priorities and activities.
The second half of the book turns to ‘Ideas’ and considers how the principles developed through the historical overview might be called upon to redeem the failures of the prevailing orthodoxies. Here, Bruni and Zamagni are, perhaps, less convincing since they appear to rely upon the power of better ideas to overcome a situation which they acknowledge has led to massive inequalities, not only of wealth but of power. In this section one does find a few instances of that bane of so-called alternative economics, the imperative voice (‘we must…’) divorced from the ‘how’. What is lacking, as with so many works on alternative approaches to economics, is a credible account of how an elite which is wrecking the global economy in order to maintain its own warped priority of personal acquisition—to the extent that the structures and remit of governmental institutions have been humbled before it—can be overcome by the power of reason. Nevertheless, since the only conscionable alternative to violence may be the power of good and attractive ideas, the authors’ turn to ideas for the future is far from negligible.
What the authors’ notion of civil economy consists in begins to emerge in this second section but the scope remains for it to be refined further—this is not (yet) a manifesto. The aim is the re-socialisation of economics in ways which bring the private, the public and the civil together in mutual enterprise. The authors note the paradox that mainstream economics ignores, ‘the need to account for the natural sociability … of the human person, given that economics since the dawn of the discipline has always been occupied with investigating the nature and dynamics of relationships between actors who live in society’ (p. 142). Civil economics seeks to restore that social aspect and it is heartening that the authors refuse to promote their preferred model by demonising everything to do with the economics we have now. So they are admiring of true entrepreneurship when it is distinguished from speculation (and, in one of very few personal asides, they reflect that the vast majority of young people with whom they discuss business projects are seeking to make a difference to the world, with profit as one measure only of the sustainability of their plans: the student whose ambition is merely to get rich is not so common in their experience). They do not reject welfare capitalism or the welfare state but see both as needing the corrective influence of civil welfare in what the authors refer to as ‘circular subsidiarity’ in which the public, civil and corporate spheres interact to find the most effective level of action. Nor do the authors offer an absurdly optimistic anthropo-logy in which the Reformation focus on sin is ignored and all are assumed to be motivated by virtue. Their argument is that ignoring the human potential for virtue is as unrealistic as believing it to be universal, and that re-introducing the civil and socialised dimensions to economic modeling would enable the discipline to work with a better, because more accurate, understanding of human motivation. As they note, in Genovesi’s understanding of civil economy, ‘there is no opposition between the various forms of reciprocity, or between virtue and self-interest’ (p. 32).
Although the book says nothing of the Anglican tradition of social thinking epitomised by William Temple, and only briefly mentions Beveridge’s welfare state, there are interesting echos of the British, and Anglican, experience here. For Beveridge followed his monumental report on social security with another entitled Voluntary Action which argued that state welfare needed the parallel institutions and practices of voluntary neighbourliness if it was to survive. And was Temple unconsciously or consciously echoing Genovesi when he remarked (in Christianity and Social Order, Penguin, 1942) that the ‘art of government in fact is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands’ (p. 65)?
There is much more that could be said about Bruni and Zamagni’s arguments—in 147 pages, they have brought together one of the most effective critiques of our current economic orthodoxies, and this effectiveness stems in large part from their refusal to resort to rhetorical exaggerations or zero-sum games between competing ideas. Their critique is the more devastating for being expressed with such generosity. And this may be because, unlike many who write comparable critiques of economic orthodoxy, capitalism or globalisation, they are drawing explicitly upon a tradition of thought that has deep roots, failed to become dominant, but has never gone away. At the time of the financial crisis in 2008, it was frequently observed that, whilst the economics of the previous forty years had been in gestation for some thirty years before that, tested in theory since the 1940s and briefly in practice in Chile under Pinochet, nowhere in the world’s business schools and economics departments was there any alternative economic thinking that had been scrutinised, tested and refined to such a degree. Orthodoxy had, it seemed, driven out all manifestations of contrary thought. Bruni and Zamagni have shown here that alternatives to current economic orthodoxy do not have to be conjured up out of thin air and that there has always been, in the Italian tradition they describe, a foundation on which a better and more human economic environment could be constructed.
It remains to add that the authors’ translator, N. Michael Brennan, has done a superb job on the original Italian text. The English edition reads fluently and naturally with hardly any of the awkward constructions or clumsy neologisms found in many technical translations. Civil Economy is lucid and eminently readable—detailed enough to be convincing and short enough to be widely read, one hopes.