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Preface
Luigino Bruni , Libera Università degli Studi Maria Ss. Assunta di Roma, Stefano Zamagni, Università di Bologna
Book:

Civil Economy

Published by:

Agenda Publishing

Published online:

09 August 2023

Print publication:

30 October 2016, pp vii-xii
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Summary

We make light of virtues in life; we praise them in death.
– Giacomo Leopardi, Nelle nozze della Sorella Paolina, Canti IV, 1824
The world suffers for lack of thought.
– Pope Paul VI, Encyclical on the Development of Peoples, 26 March 1967
We have worked in the area of the civil economy for many years. We published a large work on this theme in 2007, which was a time of growth and enthusiasm for the new financial economy that promised widespread and inclusive well-being. Actually, even then we were pointing out the serious limits of a vision of the market and a conception of the company that was based on the individual rather than on the person, on compulsively seeking wealth rather than public happiness, and forgetting and destroying such fundamental economic goods as relational goods, common goods, and gratuitous goods. The crisis that exploded in 2007–8 only reinforced our diagnosis of the malady of a particular capitalist economic system that is wholly centred on rent seeking. The crisis confirmed yet again that the classic tradition of the civil economy still has a future for Europe and for everyone.
As well as witnessing the grave crisis of debt-based financial capitalism (private debt in the United States and public debt in Europe) the past ten years have been an important time for the civil economy. An unintended consequence of the crisis was to create cultural conditions suitable for understanding the economic, social and ethical relevance of a different, sustainable vision of the economy and finance. The “civil economy” is a tradition of thought that, in order to save the market economy, recalls it to its ancient, original vocation as an ally of the common good, representing a space for liberty, sociality and the expression of our capabilities and “vocations” as persons, particularly the vocation of work.
We will not exit this serious crisis, which goes much deeper than just the economic dimension, by eliminating finance and markets (assuming that someone were even able to do so), but only with civil and civilizing finance and markets.