In closing this brief work, we want to call the reader’s attention to a few foundational questions. Our intention is simply to suggest a way that the discourse initiated herein might continue. We have encountered people and ideas that, while differing among themselves, have made up the harmonious blend of notes and colours of this short book. As the Canadian economist and historian Jacob Viner liked to say, “Economics is what economists do” and the civil economy is what civil economists did and do, always keeping well in mind that the civil economy is not a school, or a research programme, much less an ideology. Rather, it is a paradigm, or a particular way of seeing reality.

We like to live out and think about the civil economy as a process, an inclusive and heterogeneous cultural movement, whose protagonists are not the adepts of a “church”; rather, they are people belonging to different historical periods, traditions and schools of thought, who are academics, entrepreneurs and young people, but who all hold a common understanding of the economy as civil engagement, pluralistic and attentive to life – not dogmatic, interdisciplinary and historical. Thus the writers and thinkers we have included in this book are neither the only, nor the most obvious, or classic (considered by an entire tradition as the foundational figures). Not all contemporary authors in the civil economy would agree in considering our selection as the founders of the civil economy, apart from Genovesi, and perhaps Dragonetti.

This pluralism of sources is a protection against an ideological and sectarian drift that every movement or cultural process faces. The cultural biodiversity of the civil economy is at once its strength and its weakness. On the one hand it enriches the civil economy; on the other it makes the process of defining strong identities for the actors involved slow and complex, it exposes it to abuse, and it requires working within a chaotic reality in constant movement – fortunately, a movement that is still in full development.

As we have outlined, one of the central themes of the civil economy tradition of thought is interpersonal relationships. Economists and social scientists do a disservice to themselves and to others if they continue to ignore intersubjectivity in explaining economic phenomena.