Stefano Zamagni

Handbook on the Economics of Reciprocity and Social Enterprise

Original contributions from key international experts acknowledge and illustrate that markets and firms can be civilizing forces when and if they are understood as expressions of cooperation and civil virtues. They provide an illuminating discourse on a wide range of topics including reciprocity, gifts and the civil economy, which are especially relevant in times of crisis for financial capitalism. The Handbook questions the current phase of the market economy that arises from a state of anthropological pessimism. Such anthropological cynicism is one of the foundations of the contemporary economic system that is challenged by the contributors.

The Ethical Anchoring of Corporate Social Responsibility and the Critique of CSR

The author is professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna. In this chapter, he deals with two specific questions: How robust is the critique against corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Which ethical anchoring is capable of offering more solid support for CSR? Notwithstanding the plethora of studies and debates that have taken place over the course of the last quarter century, there still exists no commonly accepted definition of CSR. The author analyzes four different kinds of critique of CSR and then subsequently four different possible ethical foundations. He argues for a conception of virtue ethics.

The Ecology of Altruistic Motivations in Triadic Social Environments

For a long time, economists have maintained that individual preferences are part of the ‘fundamental’ level of description of an economic system. In particular, the widespread acceptance of methodological individualism has led economic analysis to treat preferences as the major ‘economically relevant’ characterization of individuality: the economic agent acts in such a way to maximize (on the basis of their information, computational abilities and so on) the degree of satisfaction of their preferences, and they are all the more rational the more they are able to mirror such preferences into action. In this perspective, thus, preferences are a primum movens that needs no further theoretical explanation, at least in the context of economic analysis.

Towards an Economics of Human Relations: on the Role of Psychology in Economics

In this paper, I concentrate on the relationship between economics and psychology, focusing on ways to enlarge the scope of economic research to make it more relevant for the analysis of policy means and of policy ends and, more generally, with the intention of fostering a climate for change and stimulating debate.

Social Paradoxes of Growth and Civil Economy

‘The problem with reliance on the market as a moral code is that it fails to give moral credit to those whose sacrifices enable others to consider themselves freely choosing agents. By concentrating on the good news that we can improve our position, rather than the not-so-good, but socially necessary, news that we might consider the welfare of others as our direct concern, the market leaves us with no way to appreciate disinterest’.1 While in agreement with the descriptive content of this statement, I would not endorse its conclusion. Indeed, my argument is that a too narrow interpretation of the notion of market economy has brought us to believe that ‘the market leaves us with no way to appreciate disinterest’. I believe it is time to re-examine that very foundation of economic theory according to which rational economic man is conceived as a calculating self-interested maximizer. I argue for a more realistic and solid view that takes into account the possibility of visualizing a market society as composed of both a private economy and a civil economy.

An Outline of the History of Economic Thought: Translated by David Field.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the development of economics from its beginnings, at the end of the Middle Ages, up to contemporary developments, including a number of significant contributions of the 1980s. The economic thought of the last 50 years has been given particular attention to reflect the remarkable growth in research accomplished during this period. The authors present traditional as well as modern theories as part of a historical process. Thus they have not only surveyed economic thought from a theoretical perspective, but have also reconstructed the intellectual climate from which new economic theories have emerged. The book therefore takes a history-of-ideas approach, whose principal aims consist, on the one hand, of understanding the context in which the ideas are formed, and, on the other, of explaining how the fundamental ideas lead to the creation of particular theoretical systems.

Markets, Money and Capital: Between theory and history: on the identity of Hicks's economics

John Hicks was one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. His contributions have shaped the core theories of rational choice and human welfare, value and money, capital and growth. At the same time, Hicks’s contributions often address contentious issues, and sometimes suggest unconventional and controversial points of view. In John Hicks, we see economic theorizing at its most fundamental, almost formative, stage. In his writings, economic theorizing strives to achieve, and succeeds in maintaining, a balance between the requirements of analysis and the explicit recognition of the relevance of history and institutions. In short, Hicks’s contribution to economics belongs both to the so-called ‘mainstream’ and to its critique. This characteristic feature of Hicks’s work derives from a seemingly simple, but in fact highly sophisticated, approach to the construction of economic theory. Hicks takes theories to be the product of a particular ‘concentration of attention’ (Hicks, 1976a: 209). Theories are focusing devices that may be effective in bringing to view certain causal patterns, while leaving other (possible) causal patterns aside. This makes theories essential to economic analysis (as some concentration of attention is a necessary condition for the identification of a causal relationship). The same approach makes multiple theories possible, however. Indeed, the possibility of distinct theoretical frameworks is a most natural consequence of changes in the concentration of attention (see Scazzieri, 1993b). Moreover, such changes are often necessary to preserve the relevance of theories vis-a-vis historical or institutional changes. In Hicks’s view,

Chapter 9 The Economics of Human Relationships

Abstract Behind my reciprocation of a friends gift may lie both instrumental reasons (I expect further future gifts) and ‘communicative’ reasons (I want to establish or confirm a friendship per se ). In a theory of rational individual action, such ‘communicative’ reasons can be incorporated as an argument of an agents objective function. This chapter starts by reviewing a recent literature that takes this direction and introduces ‘relational’ concerns through the concept of ‘socially provided goods’. From a ‘relational’ perspective, however, individual intentions are not all that matters: a relation is characterized by the two (or more) persons linked and by the kind of link they have. This perspective, which in our view should complement the more traditional, individualistic one, is particularly suited to embed individual motivations in their social context and to study their co-evolution. In particular, we focus on the conditions under which reciprocity and altruism may survive and even spread over as social norms. Drawing from the literature on the dynamics of social norms, we argue that the combination of individual incentives and the forces of social selection may lead to a contraposition between a societys material success and its well-being, i.e., between its ‘vitality’ and its ‘satisfaction’. Finally, we consider that the recent literature on the economic analysis of human relationships invites to a new reading of the ‘classics’ of economics and of moral and political philosophy. Both the new and the old literature point at the need to broaden the scope of economic modeling, to lay down the building blocks of a new, up-to-date approach to political economy that is equipped to tackle the challenges posed by advanced industrial societies in their social, cultural and economic selection dimensions.

Economics as if Ethics Mattered

After discussing the main reasons why the thesis of the axiological neutrality of economics is indefensible, the paper provides a thorough critique of the standard economic approach to human behavior. It then takes position in favour of the adoption of the relational paradigm in economic discourse. The paper supports the introduction of the principle of reciprocity within economic theory in order to expand its grasp on reality. Reference to the civil economy paradigm and to its salience is offered.

Traces of civil economy in early modern Franciscan economic thought: an education essay for civilisation and integral human development

After a brief historical reconstruction of the emergence of the market economy as a model of social order in Europe, dating back to the eleventh century – the century of the commercial revolution – the paper focuses on the decisive contribution of the Franciscan school of thought to furnish the theoretical infrastructure of the new mode of organizing the economic sphere. The argument proceeds discussing the reasons why already at the end of the sixteenth century the civil market economy progressively gave way to the capitalist conception of the market that became dominant at the time of the Industrial Revolution. The exposition closes, suggesting the main reasons why in the last two decades the civil economy perspective is gaining new ground, in particular, why the category of the common good is attracting more and more attention among both economists and policy-makers.