Written
by Luigino Bruni
Today,
we need the cultural courage to stand up against the suffering caused by an
individual view which is produced by an obsolete anthropology and an economic
ideology of a single dimension
“...(T)he
crisis have given many and such denials of what appear strictly to be
scientific estimates, advanced by economists. It is no wonder that any layman
could believe to be authorized to proclaim the bankruptcy of the political
economy... To the voices, some calumny, not a mitigating factor is lacking. In
fact, many economists have sinned of immodesty”. These are the words of
political scientist Robert Michels, author of the first book entitled “Economics
and Happiness” (1917). He said this in 1933, but it seems to be written today.
Immodesty,
or superiority, is not the sole prerogative of economic science, since it is a
well-known universal anthropological tone. At certain times, however, the
community of economists has been affected by a particularly stubborn and
widespread form of immodesty. Faced with obvious deficiencies and errors of
their discipline, instead of giving in to the force of facts and getting into a
crisis, and instead of humbly revising ancient facts and dogmas, they
stubbornly returned all criticism to the sender. The present is one of those times, and there is an increasingly strong
need for a major overhaul of many dogmas and axioms of economic theory and
practice.
In
its original form, economy was entirely defined by the boundaries of the house
(oikos), distinct and separate from politics (polis). Economy ended when man
(male, adult, free, non-manual workers) left the oikos and moved in to the
polis. The oikos with its rules of management was the realm of the unequal
hierarchy and the reign of women, while politics was that of men and relations
between equals. Throughout antiquity and the pre-modern era, oikonomia has
retained this domestic, practical, internal, and usually female meaning.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, the noun 'economy' started to be
accompanied by new adjectives: politics (Smith and Verri), civil (Genovesi and
many others), public (Beccaria), social (many authors), national (Ortes). These
adjectives were meant to emphasize that economy was no longer the
administration of the house, and neither the “oikonomia of salvation” or the “Economic
Trinity”, the other meaning of oikonomia widely used from the Church Fathers to
modern times. The adjective political (and similar ones) has done much to
qualify modern economics in relation to the ancient one. By fusing the economic
with the political (political economy), two fields that had been separated for
thousands of years, some typical categories of politics entered into the
economy. But the strongest among all was the influence in the opposite
direction, if we think of the force with which the language, rationality and
economic logic are migrating from economics to politics, usually with rather
dangerous effects. These include a strong tendency to read the whole of public
life from the perspective of budgetary constraints, efficiency and economic
cost-benefit, producing an unprecedented democratic dumping which is one of the
most general and worrying cultural traits of our time.
But
there is a second crucial element on which much more collective and political
reflection is needed. The contamination between economics and politics has not
brought with it a public or political centrality of women which was originally
associated with the oikonomia. Instead, we have continued to think of ‘home’ as
the reign of the feminine and domestic economy; while the economy, turning
political and public in its theoretical principles and anthropological axioms
has been deprived of the woman and her specific view of the world and the
living beings - with serious and undervalued consequences.
This
(di)vision is theorized very clearly by
Philip Wicksteed, a leading British economist of the past century, as
well as protestant pastor and translator of Dante. At the heart of his most
famous and influential treatise (Commonsense of Political Economy, 1910) there
is the analysis of the behaviour of the “housewife”. The housewife, as long as
she moves inside the home, is moved by the logic of gift and by the love of the
“you” that she has in front of herself. But as soon as she leaves domestic
economy to go to the market, she disposes of her roles at home and takes on
those of political economy, the logic of which must be what Wicksteed coined “non-tuism”
(from the Latin ‘you’). The housewife, in fact, is permitted (by the
economists) to strive for the good of all through the market, except the good
of those whom they face in an economic type of encounter: “The economic
relationship does not exclude everyone from my mind except myself
[selfishness]; and it potentially includes everyone except you [non-tuism ]”.
This way the economy overcomes selfishness (“everyone except me”) but loses the
personal relationships within the economic ones (“everyone except you”).
The
typical tones of the real meeting with the ‘you’ - gratuitousness, empathy,
caring ... - are the ones that the ‘housewife’ should exercise only in the
private sphere, not in public which is all defined by an instrumental register
and by the absence of “you” and the presence of and only and lonely ‘him’,
‘her’ and ‘them’. And all this because someone has determined a priori that
those relational and emotional characteristics that most typically (but not
exclusively, of course) are of the woman, were not serious and rational enough
things for the serious and rational economic sphere. Too bad, though, that when
the face of the “you” is missing from the view, which is the only real and
actual face in every human environment, all that remains is a faceless and
therefore inhuman economy. But above all, we produce an economy that does not
see, and therefore does not understand the typical goods that would need
categories other than those of non-tuistic logic, among these the category of
common goods, relational goods, the logic of plural actions, non-instrumental
rationality and much, much, more. Non-tuism is still a pillar of the economic
science. And all the times that in the real economy a supplier looks another
one in the face, and, moved with compassion, gives him a deferment of payment,
or when a worker goes beyond the contract and takes care of a client in
difficulty, the “pure” economist considers these exceptions as friction, as
incomplete contracts, costs that should be reduced to zero if possible. In fact,
the more businesses and banks become large, bureaucratic and rationally
managed, the more these ‘tuistic’ frictions are reduced - but they never
disappear completely, and they will not disappear as long as the organizations
are inhabited by human beings.
But
things are different. We know that ‘tuistic’ actions are not frictions or
simple costs, but they are the ones that compose the invisible but very real
oil that helps our organizations not to produce clogs and that turns the
complex human gears even in times of crisis when contracts and efficiency are
just not enough anymore. Providentially, the real economy goes ahead despite
the economic and management theories, but today we must have the cultural
courage to stand up against this suffering, which is for the most part
preventable, produced by an obsolete anthropology and an economic ideology of a
single dimension. Let us not forget that unlike in the past centuries when the
public sphere was the monopoly of men (who theorized and occupied it), women
today find themselves living in economic and political institutions in which
there are, in fact, cultural and theoretical peripheries. The data show that in
our businesses and banks it is mainly the women who suffer, because in their
workplaces they seem to be conceived, designed and promoted by theories that
are missing their "other half' in the world and in economy. To change the
economy to shape it to the 'measure of a woman' would mean - I only hint at it
- also to review the theory and practice of the management of the home, the
economy of the family, raising children, caring for old people. And much more.
The
difficulties of the present time also depend on not being able to exploit the
immense relational and moral power of women who are still too often guests and
outsiders in the productive world of men, and so they cannot give expression of
their full potential and talents. The world of economy is also waiting to be
enlivened by the female genius.
Translated
by Eszter Kató
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