Economics is a human activity. An understanding of such activity, therefore, cannot be achieved without an effort to understand the human person. As Bruni and Zamagni have affirmed, in their Dizionario di Economia Civile, social scientists and economists must take into account intersubjectivity within their own analysis. They also make a distinction between “social relation” and “Personal relation”, giving privilege to the second. The first form of relation are totally anonymous and can be abstracted by specific subjects, they can be “typified” and described in an anonymous and impersonal forms. The second, instead, depend and rely on the individual subjectivity of the persons involved.
Economic relations are just another form of relation between persons. Therefore, an analysis should at least be aware, if not able to analyze, of the “unspoken” in said relations: emotions, beliefs, values, etc.; In fact, according to the authors, to reduce the complexity of motivations, drives and interiority to merely the observable effects of the economic relation is a methodological fallacy. The anthropology on which this understanding of economics is built aims to consider the human being as a multi-faceted being, that is not reduced to a one-dimensional aspect of his existence (i.e. rational choice, desire, selfishness, etc.) like in mainstream economic interpretation. In this interpretation, the human person is influenced by a multitude of factors that can find realization only in the moment these motivations enter into a form of relations with the other. In this sense, an economic based on this kind of anthropology, according to the author, would be able to analyze and evaluate also other forms of relations that do not fit perfectly within economic action (like gratuitous action or the act of gift).
As the theoretical foundation of this proposal, I wish to refer to the work of Antonio Genovesi who, in the 18th century, at the peak of Neapolitan Enlightenment, aimed to develop a conception of economic life focused on urban life, and the centrality of human relations for the civil life. For Genovesi, happiness is “summum bonum”, that comes from natural obligations between humans, but also from the subsequent original pacts that establish the life of a community. This interpretation of human’s role in society rests on a “relational anthropology” that focuses on the human capacity of “forming relations”. While the catholic tradition in Civil Economy does not focus on analyzing specific virtues, as it focuses on the features of sociality and relationality itself, it recognizes that a human being, while striving for his own happiness, can achieve this happiness only within the relations of a community. In this sense, the human being is a creature that is both eminently social and that express its own individuality fully only within a relation with the other. Happiness, then, can flourish only within genuine relations, not instrumental one, that allow the human being to be “happy in a happy community”.
Key Bibliography
Bruni L., Zamagni S., Dizionario di Economia Civile, Città Nuova Editore, Roma, 2009
Bruni L., CIvil Happiness, Economics and Human Flourishing in Historical Perspective, Routledge, London, 2006
Genovesi, A. (2005 [1765–1767]) Lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile, Critical Edition, edited by M.L. Perna, Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli studi filosofici