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    [title] => There is a 25th hour for the Earth, let us take responsibility for it
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This year, the Economy of Francesco (EoF) has chosen ‘The 25th hour’ as title for its global event.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 06/10/2023
The event that is taking place today, on 6th October, is EoF's fourth global event since Pope Francis wrote his letter of convocation for young economists, businessmen and women, change makers on 1st May 2019, which soon turned out to be a blessed touch of the hand of Providence that awakened consciences and authentic civic vocations of young people who felt called by the name and responded with their typical generative generosity.

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The idea of an extra hour, that hour that begins when the 24 hours of the day are over, has inspired stories and films, starting with the 1949 novel by Romanian writer Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu. Our generation and the previous one have invented globalisation, the Internet, achieved the longevity revolution, created robots and artificial intelligence, SUVs and electric cars; but while doing all this they have consumed and exhausted the 24 hours that were at our disposal since the Earth's SOS was launched over half a century ago (think of the Club of Rome's report on the limits of growth, in 1972).
The idea of an extra hour, that hour that begins when the 24 hours of the day are over, has inspired stories and films, starting with the 1949 novel by Romanian writer Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu. Our generation and the previous one have invented globalisation, the Internet, achieved the longevity revolution, created robots and artificial intelligence, SUVs and electric cars; but while doing all this they have consumed and exhausted the 24 hours that were at our disposal since the Earth's SOS was launched over half a century ago (think of the Club of Rome's report on the limits of growth, in 1972).
The one who had understood it, however, certainly as regards the poor, the discarded, the children, the Church, was Don Lorenzo Milani, whose birth centenary is celebrated this year. In one of his most prophetic pages he wrote a ‘letter from beyond the grave’ to the future ‘Chinese missionaries’ who would arrive in Europe in the year two thousand (fifty years after his letter), to re-evangelise Europe where in the meantime the Christian faith would have disappeared, leaving only ruins of bell towers and abandoned churches behind.
Concluding his letter he wrote, “We did not hate the poor, we have only slept. But when we woke up it was too late: the poor had left without us” (Pastoral Experiences, 1958). And if the Church loses the poor it loses itself, its very spirit, it goes astray, because the Church only lives where it can repeat it together with Jesus, “Blessed are the poor”, with no shame. We all have slept, too; and while we were asleep the hours passed, first slowly then gradually faster. Time passed over our indifference, which over the years has become less and less innocent and more and more guilty. But, thank God, we have one more hour. We are still alive. Perhaps God has heard his prophets who, like Abraham, are imploring him to give our ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ another chance.
It is the prayer of St Francis, of Pope Francis – the two Francises of the EoF –, of Clare, of the many young people and teenagers who for years have been crying out to save the earth and the discarded, of the many prophets of our time, often anonymous and unknown, who continue to fight, pray and hope for a future – for one more hour, an hour donated, of that extra time that God is giving to the earth and the poor. A plea that was answered this time. The EoF is part of this extra hour given as a free gift, and is together with the many who are keeping hope alive. Because in the Bible, when the earth is given new hope, the sign is Emmanuel, a child, a young person. Pope Francis said this in his message to the EoF in October 2021: “You are perhaps the last generation that can save us: I am not exaggerating”. Today in Assisi we are celebrating the responsibility and joy over the gift of this extra hour. It is the hour of gratuitousness, the hour that might not have been there and yet is there.

Photo credits: © Luca Sarà

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    [text] => 
This year, the Economy of Francesco (EoF) has chosen ‘The 25th hour’ as title for its global event.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 06/10/2023
The event that is taking place today, on 6th October, is EoF's fourth global event since Pope Francis wrote his letter of convocation for young economists, businessmen and women, change makers on 1st May 2019, which soon turned out to be a blessed touch of the hand of Providence that awakened consciences and authentic civic vocations of young people who felt called by the name and responded with their typical generative generosity.

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    [title] => Against the myth of leadership (and for a eulogy of following)
    [alias] => against-the-myth-of-leadership-and-for-a-eulogy-of-following
    [introtext] => 
Opinions - The new theories are portrayed as post-hierarchical, but they are not, because they divide the world into leaders and followers. The true agent of change is the one who does not feel like a leader
By Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/11/2022
Leadership is one of the sacred words in the religion of the new capitalism of the 21st century. The thinking, and above all, the practice of the phenomena now called 'leadership' are actually very ancient. It is not difficult to find in the great thinkers of the past, from the Greeks to Max Weber, ideas and even actual theories on the creation and management of leaders and on their decline. Economic science hasn’t dealt with it much, because it has always been more interested in markets and individual rational actions than in organisations and complex collective phenomena, although some great economists (Vilfredo Pareto, for example) have written some very neat pages on the ideologies that produce leaders and then eliminate them. Sociology and management have been more engaged in this topic, because, in essence, leadership theories are variants and (less sophisticated) developments of theories of authority and the exercise of power in human groups, including enterprises: the classic topics in the social sciences.

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With the new millennium, however, something very important has changed around leadership. Courses on how to become a leader, how to recognise the 'traits' of a leader, how a leader can influence a team to generate change, and much more, have grown at a high and continuous rate, until invading the departments of all economic and social sciences, engineering, philosophy and even theology. An even more recent, but no less worrying phenomenon is the expansion of leadership training courses in civil society organisations and communities, even in convents and spiritual movements, in church bodies, where superiors and parish priests are beginning to self-define themselves using the new words of leadership. The advertisements for leadership courses at business schools state that the course is aimed at “experienced managers and executives and anyone who aspires to leadership positions or is required to be a leader”. And if you leaf through the many dedicated manuals, the definitions all look similar: leadership is the ability to influence that a particular person (the leader) has over employees (followers). The followers are driven by the charisma of the leader - charisma is a used and abused word - to work in a group where they are directed and guided by the leader. So, in a nutshell: leadership is understood as the ability of a leader to influence one or more people. Thus, words such as managers, executives, heads of office, coordinators have become old and outdated, linked to a capitalism that is too trivial. Leaders, unlike the old managers, have charisma, charm, attractiveness, and the ability to persuade and seduce.
A first question: where did the need to turn managers into leaders originate? Where did this irresistible urge to give heads of office or coordinators a charismatic flair spring from? Certainly, capitalism has changed, it has come out (or is coming out) of the factories and assembly lines, and today obtaining the consent and obedience (another old word) of workers has become more difficult. Moreover, the culture of post-modernity creates post-patriarchal young people, who are less used to and less prepared for the virtues of obedience from superiors, but more sensitive to the values of freedom, equality, consent, and contract. The old companies of the twentieth century were born also and above all because hierarchy cost less than individual contracts: negotiating every action with every worker requires an enormous amount of time and resources; hence the idea that it makes the organisation faster and more efficient if the hiring of a person is done within a broad labour contract, where the individual tasks are entrusted largely to the hierarchy. But for hierarchy to work, you need employees who value it, see it as good and share in it. This is how, with the arrival of the generation of workers of the new millennium, the figure of the leader is born: this one does not need hierarchy (so it is said) in order to make the organisation work, because the consensus and adhesion of the collaborators arise from the leader’s charisma, their ability to convince, their persuasion and authority. Leadership appears to be more post-modern, egalitarian, non-hierarchical and even fraternal than the old organisational theories of the 20th century, and also certainly more ethical and respectful of everyone's dignity. But is this really the case?
The author of this article is convinced of the opposite, namely that theories of leadership are much more hierarchical than those of the Fordist-Taylorist factory - and more chauvinistic, too. The real difference is of a narrative type: they are talked about as post-hierarchical theories and practices without being so. Why? The many different leadership theories have one decisive fact in common: they divide the world into leaders and followers. Some people, for the most diverse reasons (personality, vocation, talents, role, etc.) are leaders; others, and they are many more, followers, i.e. members or workers who freely accept to be influenced, seduced, convinced by their leader, and who are also happy with this influence that they freely undergo. Of course, a follower today may become a leader tomorrow, or even though he is a follower of a leader in office A, he may be a leader in office B where he will have other followers whom he will in turn have to seduce and capture with his charisma. And so on, ad infinitum. But let us ask ourselves at this point: would we like to live in such a world? To work in offices, departments, companies where our manager is our leader? We would probably simply dread it. Because it is a much more illiberal society than the old 20th century one. This is not the first time that the deep limitations of leadership have been highlighted. Indeed, new adjectives have sprung up in recent years: relational, community, participative leadership, and even leadership of communion. But, one should realise, the problem does not concern the adjective: it is directly connected to the noun: leadership. But that's not all. Economic theory teaches us that some of the most important social phenomena are explained by mechanisms of adverse selection: without meaning to, institutions end up in certain contexts selecting the worst people. Put differently: who registers for a leadership course? Economic theory tells us that it is very likely that “those who aspire to become leaders” are the people least suited to “lead and guide” teams, because loving the “profession” of leadership and being a good leader are not at all the same thing. Think of political leadership: in all countries, the best politicians have emerged and still do so during major crises, when there are no ‘schools for politicians’. In times, however, when being a politician becomes a profession, which gets associated with power and money, political schools tend to generate poor politicians.
Theories of leadership are very much influenced by the model of the charismatic leader. In Western tradition, the charismatic leader is par excellence the prophet, i.e. someone whom people follow freely because of his inherent authority. Unfortunately, leadership theorists do not know that prophets (the biblical ones for sure) have never considered themselves leaders. The major prophets of the Bible (from Moses to Jeremiah) did not feel themselves to be leaders, nor did they want to be leaders. The mere thought of having to lead someone terrified them. They were chosen from among the discarded, the people considered as the last ones; some of them are also stutterers and disabled but capable of listening and above all of following a voice. It all serves to tell us that those who in life have succeeded in a leading role in some process of change have been able to do so because first they had learned to follow a voice, first they had learned how to follow. Prophets are men and women of failure, whereas leadership is presented as the way to achieve the other magic word of our capitalism: success, being the winners. People of success, followed and flattered, were the false prophets who often came out of the “prophetic schools” that churned out multitudes of prophets by trade and for-profit charlatans.
The first law that the great biblical wisdom left us reads: “beware of those who present themselves as a candidate to become a prophet, because they are almost always false prophets”, or, we might say today, simply narcissists. Furthermore, history and real life tell us that one becomes a 'leader' simply by doing one's job and nothing else really, and then one day maybe someone imitates us and thanks us, and we don't even notice. But the day someone feels like a leader and starts behaving like one, people and groups start getting unwell, and many individual and collective neuroses are produced. And when communities wanted to produce their own leaders at home, they selected too many people who were incapable of that task, even when they had the best of intentions. Simply because leaders are not trained, and if you try to train them you create something strange and not infrequently dangerous. So imagining leadership courses for young people is extremely dangerous. But they keep multiplying, because leadership schools attract the many who desire to be leaders and delude themselves that they can buy the fulfilment of this desire on the market. “Leadership” courses for those who are already in a coordinating and leading role would be a different matter, but they would have to be very different from those in circulation today. These courses should help to reduce the damage that ‘leaders’ produce in their groups, to train in the deponent virtues, meekness and humility, to learn to follow their colleagues.
Leaders have a necessary and vital need for followers: but who decides to be Robin in a world where only Batman's moral qualities are exalted? So where is that freedom so fervently proclaimed by these theories? The ideal workplace is that of a community of people where everyone simply plays his or her part in a cooperative game, a team where everyone follows everyone else in reciprocity, in the dignity of equal tasks. This is an adult world, where work is directed and there is dialogue with the people. If at a certain point someone has to perform coordinating, governing and accountability functions, they will simply be doing their job as I do mine: they will not have to lead anyone, they will not have to influence anyone, they will only have to play their necessary part in the one collective game. However, if this person acts as a leader, we call that manipulation. Finally, it is really surprising that the Christian world is attracted to theories of leadership today, considering that it was born of Someone who founded everything on following, and who one day said: “None of you should be called the leader. The Messiah is your only leader.” (Mt 23:10 - in: CEV)
We certainly need agents and actors of change, always, especially in a time of great change such as ours. We especially need people who take responsibility for their choices. We have a vital need of this especially when our businesses and communities are stagnant and static. These change makers are unlikely to come from schools of leadership: they can only emerge from meticulous communities and businesses that will take to the streets, that will take to the dusty streets of the cities and even more so of the peripheries. That’s where the new leaders await us, who will be agents of change precisely because they will not feel like the new leaders. And they will be leaders all together, all different and all equal, in the reciprocity of following.
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    [text] => 
Opinions - The new theories are portrayed as post-hierarchical, but they are not, because they divide the world into leaders and followers. The true agent of change is the one who does not feel like a leader
By Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/11/2022
Leadership is one of the sacred words in the religion of the new capitalism of the 21st century. The thinking, and above all, the practice of the phenomena now called 'leadership' are actually very ancient. It is not difficult to find in the great thinkers of the past, from the Greeks to Max Weber, ideas and even actual theories on the creation and management of leaders and on their decline. Economic science hasn’t dealt with it much, because it has always been more interested in markets and individual rational actions than in organisations and complex collective phenomena, although some great economists (Vilfredo Pareto, for example) have written some very neat pages on the ideologies that produce leaders and then eliminate them. Sociology and management have been more engaged in this topic, because, in essence, leadership theories are variants and (less sophisticated) developments of theories of authority and the exercise of power in human groups, including enterprises: the classic topics in the social sciences.

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    [title] => The cry from the Earth and the poor asks for dreams and new prophecies
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Editorials - The humanism of the "three F's" of young people and the challenge for the coming year of combining integral ecology and economics
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 31/12/2019
50 years after '68 and the various world ideologies, young people are once again the first element of change and true social and political innovation
2019 will be remembered for two epochal innovations, intimately connected to each other: the new role as protagonists for young people and adolescents, and a global awareness of the drama and irreversibility of the environmental crisis. Fifty years after 1968, young people are once more the main element of change and true social and political innovation. It took several decades for them to find their place in the "new world". After the end of the ideologies they went through a civil and cultural eclipse, remaining speechless and crushed as if in a long "Holy Saturday", between a world that had ended and one that was taking too late to arrive. Their grit was dampened and darkened by the mourning of their parents and grandparents, and so they poured themselves into smaller things - video games or smartphones – due to the death of the older generation. Because if it is true that we have all come out disoriented and disappointed since the twentieth century, young people have suffered and suffer more and more deeply because of the end of collective narratives, utopias, big dreams. As adults you can last a long time without dreaming together, as young people you resist much less, because utopia is the first fuel of youth.

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The end of utopia, however - that non-place – ended up (re)generating a new place, the place par excellence, the place for everyone: Earth. Hence, after that long-lasting period of bewilderment they have now found Earth, which has become the new eu-topia – a good place, the good place - to go back to writing a new great collective story. At the bedside of sick mother Earth, they have found a new bond, a new fraternity and a new religion, and, for many, a new sense of the sacred. The first sacred was born, in the dawn of civilizations, from the experience of mystery and tremendum, linked to the discovery of the existence of something impassable and inviolable. For many of these young people, these girls and boys, Earth's illness has in fact become the new tremendum, the new mystery and the new insurmountable limit; then a new hierophany (manifestation of the sacred), the epiphany of an original and founding experience, a new myth of origin that links them to Earth and to each other. There is a lot of the religious and sacred in these environmental movements, even though they (and everyone) lack the categories to understand it. They felt the "ideological ground" fail under their feet, and instead of sinking with it, they found themselves a new ground to stand on, which they feel and live as the Promised Land for which it is worth continuing to walk in the desert and not give up. They discovered the Promised Land in everyone's land. Each new beginning is multi purposeful and ambiguous; this beautiful, still shapeless morning can generate a new season of authentic spirituality, the heir and continuation of the great religious narratives and of the Jewish-Christian biblical humanism. However, we could also find ourselves in a land populated by post-modern totems and taboos, managed by "for-profit" shamans and haruspices. We cannot say this for sure as of yet; what is certain is that the end of the ideologies has not completed the process of "disenchantment of the world". The world is still enchanted if we know how to look at it through the eyes of the young. The religious sense of the years to come will also depend on how traditional religions will be able to read and interpret this new spiritual spring, if fear or trust will prevail.
No wonder then the alliance that has been created between these young people and an eighty-three year old Pope Francis, felt by the majority as a friend and an ethical reference point. In fact, while in 1968 the Church was part of that old world that the young generation wanted to make collapse, today the Church of Francis is an essential part of the new era that is emerging. Laudato si’ anticipated these youth movements providing many with the cultural and spiritual framework of reference for all the new that is happening. On that Earth left desolate by the end of ideologies, many of us thought of filling that huge void by promising "three big E, I and B" to young people - English, IT, Business; they however replied that these objectives were in fact too small, and instead came up with the "three F’s" - FridaysForFuture. The young people of 2019 are also sending us other messages, although the signals they emit are still weak - but these weak signals are always the most important ones. What is happening in Chile, Lebanon, France, Italy, among other things, tells us that inequality is another form of CO2 and if it exceeds a certain "degree" is becomes intolerable. Although the economic dimension of this diverse youth movement often tends to be less emphasized than the ecological one, the great challenge of the 21st century will be to keep the two together. And this is where the meaning of the event The Economy of Francis (L'Economia di Francesco, to take place at the end of March 2020) can truly be captured, a process that started to offer young people an ideal homeland (Assisi) from where to begin their search for an integral relationship with the 'oikos. A new ecology is possible only concurrently with a new kind of economy - if the oikos is one, an integral ecology is neither conceivable nor feasible without an equally integral economy.
The sustainability of capitalism is multidimensional. The dimension of inequality and therefore of the various forms of poverty that continue to cry out for justice must therefore be immediately added to the more strictly ecological one. We cannot therefore focus only on the most urgent and visible aspect of unsustainability (that of the natural environment) and forget the others, on which it basically depends. For example, for social civil organizations born in past years and decades surrounding challenges of poverty and social inclusion, it is now becoming easier to survive and grow by accessing public funding to combat climate change, and so they risk suffering a mission shift (a change of objectives) guided by public and private incentives. The cry of the Earth cannot and must not cover the cry of the poor, but rather amplify it. The unsustainability of our world therefore comes in many shapes and sizes. Alongside the CO2 of inequality, there is also an increasing unsustainability of a certain kind of business culture and managerial practices of large economic and financial institutions. While on the one hand, a company often sincerely announces a policy that is more attentive to the natural environment and sometimes also to inclusion, its employees are simultaneously crushed by a managerial style that asks more and more of their time, energy and life. In part thanks to new technologies, every boundary between working hours and non-working time has by now been severely eroded with businesses seeking and often obtaining the monopoly of the very soul of their employees. The new generation cannot stand this for long. A new generation, which on the one hand asks the system for a new sustainability and a slowdown in the exploitation of the Earth to enable it to "breathe", and on the other is subjected to extreme unsustainable and accelerated rhythms that do not let them breathe when it enters the workplace.
It is not enough to renounce to or soften the constant strive for profit maximization to become sustainable. Even if a company decides to maximize other variables in addition to profit, until it frees up space and time for its workers, it will never be a truly life-sized environment for people, or a friend of its people and the Earth. The first "profit maximization" problem is the actual maximization element, which remains a problem even when other things are the ones to be maximized. Therefore, if companies do not loosen and improve their internal work relationships, if they do not free and restore time and life to employees, if they do not withdraw from the territories of the soul that they have occupied in recent years, it will prove virtually impossible for them to truly be able to respect and save the planet externally. Relational sustainability deeply linked to people's spiritual sustainability (the spirit is able to live only when it manages to save "not yet maximized" places of freedom and gratuity). This will be a major theme in the labor market and workplace in general in the coming years. A phrase by the prophet Joel that has often been quoted this last year by Pope Francis: «Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams» (Joel 2,28). A splendid phrase, which only a prophet could write. Today we could also read it this way: young people will make prophecies if the older people continue having and pursuing dreams. We have not just left our sons and daughters a plundered, overheated and polluted, planet; we have also left them a world depleted of big and collective dreams. The first gift we can give our young is to start dreaming again. This is the kind of wealth that they really need.
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Editorials - The humanism of the "three F's" of young people and the challenge for the coming year of combining integral ecology and economics
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 31/12/2019
50 years after '68 and the various world ideologies, young people are once again the first element of change and true social and political innovation
2019 will be remembered for two epochal innovations, intimately connected to each other: the new role as protagonists for young people and adolescents, and a global awareness of the drama and irreversibility of the environmental crisis. Fifty years after 1968, young people are once more the main element of change and true social and political innovation. It took several decades for them to find their place in the "new world". After the end of the ideologies they went through a civil and cultural eclipse, remaining speechless and crushed as if in a long "Holy Saturday", between a world that had ended and one that was taking too late to arrive. Their grit was dampened and darkened by the mourning of their parents and grandparents, and so they poured themselves into smaller things - video games or smartphones – due to the death of the older generation. Because if it is true that we have all come out disoriented and disappointed since the twentieth century, young people have suffered and suffer more and more deeply because of the end of collective narratives, utopias, big dreams. As adults you can last a long time without dreaming together, as young people you resist much less, because utopia is the first fuel of youth.

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Editorial – At the root of the attack against the solidarity networks
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/04/2019
One the greatest moral novelties of Christian and European humanism is having freed the poor of the guilt of their poverty. Ancient times had left us with an idea as legacy, the very deep-seated and widespread idea, that poverty was nothing but a divine curse, well-deserved due to some fault committed by either the person in question or his or her ancestors. The poor hence found themselves condemned twice: by life and by religion (the book of Job constitutes in fact one of the ethical heights of ancient times precisely because it is a reaction against the idea of poverty as a source of guilt), and the rich felt secure, justified and doubly blessed.

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In Europe, however, it wasn’t the cities or States with their political institutions to liberate the poor from their curse. In fact, ever since the days of the Roman Empire and all through medieval and modern times, citizen statutes and laws were much more attentive in identifying the so called voluntary and hence guilty poor and beggars, in order to then chase them out of the city walls. We should not forget that the political history of European cities is also (and at times, above all) a history of the exclusion of the poor, the Jews, the migrants, the heretics and the vagrants, because they did not possess that “trustworthiness” required to become part of the club of the markets of the new cities. Thank God, however, European institutions were not only constituted by the political institutions in the bourgeois and merchant cities: the institutions born from religious faith were present as well. Christianity had brought along a great innovation regarding poverty. A religion founded by a man who was not rich and with a large number of impoverished apostles and disciples, who dared calling the poor “blessed”, in a religious and cultural context which discarded and cursed the poor.
And who in his life did everything to show the sick and poor that they were not guilty of their sickness and/or their poverty (think of the man blind from birth, the paralyzed man, the lepers…). The early Church continued this ethical revolution, and Saint Ambrose could hence write: «It is not true that the poor are cursed» (Naboth’s Vineyard). But he had to say it with force for he was well aware that he was going against the current mentality. Centuries later, this great religious and social innovation lead to Francis and the mendicant orders who lived an displayed an idea of poverty as a means of liberation and happiness which then continued to irrigate the second millennium. And hence the basis of the many social charisms of modern times, who see the poor not as cursed people, but as images of the poor and suffering Christ.
There is a process of erasing the stigma of curse at the root of the many hospitals, schools and orphanages that have formed the basis for European welfare. And while the politicians of yesterday and today argued and argue about the various categories of poor (voluntary and involuntary, deserving and underserving…), these social charisms told us and still tell us that a poor man is just a poor man, and that it is his objective condition of need that makes him a fellow human being and as such deserving of help. The Samaritan does not help the man who has fallen victim to brigands because he possesses any special merit, but because he was a victim and he was a human being, a man (“A man was going down…“). Blame and guilt have never been good keys to understanding or curing poverty, because each time the analysis of where the blame lies begins we always end up finding a source of blame condemning the weak.
The charisms, not the political institutions of the cities or later of modern States, were the ones to overcome the terrible distinction between the good poor and the accursed poor, and to have the “hospitals” where the guilty poor were locked up and submitted to veritable forced labour and social reintegration, very well-known in many European cities of the past, closed. Without that different view on poverty and the poor held by hundreds and thousands of priests, lay people, nuns and monks, Europe would have been very different and certainly much worse for the poor – and hence for everyone, because the condition of the poor and their social consideration still constitute the primary indicators of the morality of a civilization.
These last few years, this diverse European culture of poverty has plunged into a deep crisis. There are many reasons behind this, but a decisive factor has definitely been and is still caused by the culture of business, which is becoming the dominant culture in every aspect of Civic life. An economy based culture, of predominantly Anglo-Saxon nature, that in the name of meritocracy is reintroducing the archaic thesis everywhere of poverty as a curse and fault. Why? The logics of economy are at the root of ancient religions, which are born from the merchant concept of exchange between men and their divinities.
The first homo oeconomicus was the homo religiosus, who interpreted faith as a trade, as a giving and in turn receiving from the divine, as debit and credit to be managed through offerings and sacrifices. The Bible and later Christianity have fought with all their might to liberate mankind from this economy based idea of God. With the cultural weakening of Christian-Hebrew religion, the ancient idea of the economy god has resurfaced today on our secularized horizon, and with it the idea of blaming, of merits, of demerits, of new kinds of sacrifices and new idols. We have awoken in the “twilight of the gods” enchained by a religion of idols which brings back the archaic idea of the poor as being guilty. But its greatest stroke of genius lies in being able to present it as a moral innovation, as a higher form of justice, simply by giving it an evocative name: meritocracy.
We understand the recent attack against the solidarity networks and the world of the tertiary sector in Italy (it would be useful to read and reread the interview with Zamagni published here on Sunday the 28th of Aprile) without taking the ideological project of meritocracy and the business culture which fuels it too seriously. Meritocracy is becoming an ethical legitimization of the moral condemnation of the poor, which first interprets the lack of (certain types of) talent as a fault to be blamed for, and then condemns the poor as undeserving and finally discards them together with those who take care of them.
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Editorial – At the root of the attack against the solidarity networks
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/04/2019
One the greatest moral novelties of Christian and European humanism is having freed the poor of the guilt of their poverty. Ancient times had left us with an idea as legacy, the very deep-seated and widespread idea, that poverty was nothing but a divine curse, well-deserved due to some fault committed by either the person in question or his or her ancestors. The poor hence found themselves condemned twice: by life and by religion (the book of Job constitutes in fact one of the ethical heights of ancient times precisely because it is a reaction against the idea of poverty as a source of guilt), and the rich felt secure, justified and doubly blessed.

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    [title] => Let's save the Black Friday natives
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Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018
If anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls today and then try to figure out what's really going on. In the places where Black Friday is celebrated what is happening is something very similar to a religious phenomenon, with many traits in common with the functions of traditional religions.
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Even this capitalism has a growing need for rites, liturgies, churches, festivals, processions, songs, sacred words, priests and communities; just like any other religion it wants us to cross the threshold of the temple to enter another time in which to enjoy non-ordinary dimensions of life.
But, if we look at it more carefully, we realize that from each of these 'sacred' elements one or more essential components have been amputated. It is precisely this amputation that distances consumer capitalism from 'real' religions (particularly from the Jewish-Christian biblical horizon), and brings it closer to the idolatrous cults typical of the first archaic religious forms, without having the purity of the eyes of ancient people. And so, in the twilight of the gods of traditional religions, contemporary man finds himself in a world freed from the biblical God and repopulated by an infinite number of idols that are less interesting than those of Egypt or Babylon.
To understand this, let's think of the discounts that make up the centre around which the ritual of Black Friday revolves. Even if doubts are raised about their 'truth’ every year, discounts are generally real. It is so because real discount is an essential element of the cult. Discounts must be real, because there is no religion without some form of gift, grace and sacrifice. With one fundamental difference, however, that reveals much of the sacred nature of this day. In traditional religions it is the faithful who offer gifts to their God, in the capitalist 'religion' it is instead the enterprise - god who offers 'gifts' to his faithful. The direction changes because the sense of worship is the opposite. In fact, in the religion of consumption, the idol is not the commodity but the consumer, whom businesses try to retain (or, to use another religious word, make faithful to themselves) with their discount-sacrifice. It’s a gift without gratuitousness, and therefore not religion but idolatry.
But that's not all. The gift of this day is a homoeopathic gift, that is, the like that cures the like. This concept is also very archaic. With the homoeopathic kind of gift you take a very small part of the disease you want to cure and you put it in your body in order to immunize yourself from it. Capitalism knows very well that the true and free gift would be subversive and destabilizing for corporate and financial balances, also because it has no price, it is not for sale, it cannot be encouraged; and so it sterilizes it by introducing 'giftlings’ into its body. In its essence, Black Friday is therefore the great operation attempted by the market to immunize itself from gifts by means of discounts, to try to keep authentic gratuitousness far from its temples.
 It is not by coincidence that Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the memorial of the great abundance of the first harvest when the ‘pilgrims’ (the first settlers - the tr.) arrived in the New World. It is therefore a feast of gratitude and gratuitousness, which the next day tries to neutralize nowadays. We must do everything so that it does not really happen. Because on the day in which gratuitousness is definitively expelled from the markets and the enterprises the whole economy will implode. The magnificent economic system lives and regenerates every day because millions of people give their businesses more than they should give as per contracts and incentives. And they do it simply by working, entering every morning into offices and shops as whole people, and therefore also with their ability to donate and to donate themselves, because this is where much of our dignity and freedom is played out. The main defence against the constant, tenacious and growing war unleashed against gratuitousness therefore lies above all in trying to preserve our moral and spiritual capacity to distinguish gifts from discounts. We must save this distinction especially for today's children, the 'natives' of Black Friday, because on the day they begin to confuse the gift with the discount they will find themselves in an infinitely poorer world. The price of gratuitousness is infinite; no discount can reduce its value.
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Commentaries - The religion of consumption and its sacrificial rites
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/11/2018
If anyone still has any doubt that our capitalism has become something very similar to a religion, they just have to take a good look around on the web and the big shopping malls today and then try to figure out what's really going on. In the places where Black Friday is celebrated what is happening is something very similar to a religious phenomenon, with many traits in common with the functions of traditional religions.
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    [title] => A Nobel for the economics that gathers ashes
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Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016
The culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil and political edifice of the past generations. Until a few decades ago, the reign of the contract was important but delimited, because much of people's life was ruled by the register of pacts (family, friendship, politics, religion, work...).
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Pacts and contracts have lived together for many centuries and they were complementary tools for social life. Until the point when the globalization of markets and finance as well as the emergence of an ethos - where each bond is experienced as a snare for the individual - decreed the gradual transformation of all the pacts into contracts. The pact is (was) a community and symbolic fact. It does not originate from the register of personal interest only but has its constituent elements coming from gratuitousness, forgiveness and collective bonds and interests. Weddings, unions, cities, constitutions, work - these were pacts and not contracts; and as long as they "live", they still are. The postmodern individual likes contracts very much because they appear as "human relations without injury", that is, relationships with very low "activation" and "exit" costs that are certainly lower than the costs of the pacts.
And so contract is replacing pact very rapidly in the family, at schools, in health care, in the "labour market", presenting itself as the only truly liberal and civil tool for regulating human relationships, possibly all of them. So upon learning about the rewarding of economists Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström yesterday, we can understand why the committee for awarding the Nobel Economics Prize explained their choice by saying that their work in contract theory now covers a constantly expanding area, "from bankruptcy legislation to political constitutions."
The economic theory of contracts has in fact now become a universal grammar to design human relations not only in businesses, but also at universities, in politics, and in more and more forms of organizations. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences seems to know this very well. But what they may not know, or do not say, is that contract theory is profoundly changing our way of being together in the world, and not for the better. In fact, it conveys a very clear vision of man and an increasingly intrusive and influential ideology which is based on certain dogmatic axioms that are far from being ethically neutral. The main and most powerful one is the theory of incentives, according to which if you pay a human being in an adequate and sophisticated way you can get almost anything from them.
And so all the other non-monetary and not self-interested kinds of motivation of human beings should not be taken seriously because they are neither credible nor reliable. The worker or the citizen - according to this economic theory - does not work well because they attribute a value to work well done in itself, but only if they are appropriately remunerated. And after decades during which economists have continued to think, write, and teach all this, it is more and more difficult to find someone who thinks that the first motivation that drives a person to work well is their work ethic or sense of duty.
A side effect of this newly awarded contract theory is presenting all human relationships as free relationships between equals (as contracts, in fact, are). Therefore, we are living the eclipse of the great theme of power, which is declined as simply a matter of the right incentives. Everything is simple, too simple. A simplistic approach founded on the big weak point of a strong anthropological reductionism, of which contract theory is the highest expression.
The motivational, symbolic, relational and spiritual complexity of people is left in the background. Oversimplified men and women are depicted, real contracts are designed to the measure of these "economic gnomes", and finally we end up also believing that we are really such as the economy sees us - an economy that chases the old utopia of reducing human relationships to a technical matter, and therefore to something ethically neutral, universal and abstract.
And also something useless, if not manipulative. So the real question becomes: are we sure that today, while we continue to pay for the disastrous consequences, it was appropriate to reward the leading representatives of this economic and financial theory, presented as a simple "toolbox"? Perhaps, if we want people to get back on friendly terms with economic theory and economic theory to be proven a friend of the people, we need more humanist and less technical minded economists. Scholars who, if asked the question: "What motivated you to become an economist?" may give similar answers to the one that the great (and forgotten) Achille Loria gave almost a century ago: "Human suffering."
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    [text] => 
Nobel Prize for "contract theory", simple and disastrous
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2016
The culture of contracts is the big winner of our time of too many poor on the losers' side. It grew from the ashes of the culture of pacts, which had been the backbone of the family, civil and political edifice of the past generations. Until a few decades ago, the reign of the contract was important but delimited, because much of people's life was ruled by the register of pacts (family, friendship, politics, religion, work...).
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Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016
A great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and markets to the point where you can manage without humans beings. Managing and controlling men and women is much more difficult than managing docile machines and obedient algorithms. Real people go through crises, they protest, they enter into conflict with each other, they always do things other than those that they should do according to their job descriptions, often they do better things.
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Simply because we are free, spiritual beings, and therefore always excessive in relation to our tasks, contracts or incentives. A truly perfect market would then be the system of techniques, controls, incentives and instruments that are finally able to ensure maximum efficiency and maximum production of wealth, reducing everything to the point of eliminating human presence from the new cities of the new economy.
Today, thanks to the extraordinary achievements of automation and digitization, there is a serious danger of that ancient utopia coming true. In fact, if we look closely at the climate that reigns in big companies, we can notice that the objective that lies behind the rhetoric of a certain type of managerial culture (which says exactly the opposite) is standardization, predictability and formatting the behaviour of workers, to depotentiate the charge of freedom that cannot fit in technical rationality. They would want work performed without workers, work without people, extracting only the part that's perfectly oriented to the objectives of ownership from human action. Reduced to its barest essence, this is the nature of the increasingly sophisticated ideology of incentives, which is the new religion of post-modern capitalism.
But when work is reduced to technique and performance, when organizations become so rational as to "build" workers who imitate the logic of machines, nothing remains of the primary anthropological activity that is human labour, or of its mystery. And if men and women lose their ability to work they lose a lot, too, almost all of their dignity, of their having been made "a little lower than the angels" (Psalm 8; the word-by-word translation of the Italian quote is: "little less than Elohim"). The realization of the utopia of labour-without-humans would then only be a realisation of the perfect dehumanization of life in common. And to continue to live, we would be forced to emigrate en masse to other lands and other planets where it is still possible to really work.
This Labour Day may therefore be the right moment to remind us and to remember what work and the workers really are. We should remember, for example, that if we really want to get to know a person we have to watch them as they work. That is where they are revealed with all their humanity, that is where their ambivalence, limitations but also, and above all, their ability to give freely and exceedingly can be found. We can party together, go out for dinner, play soccer with friends, but nothing compares to work as an anthropological and spiritual window that reveals those around us to us. It is not uncommon that we thought that we knew a friend, a parent, a child, until one day we happen to see them working and suddenly we discover that we had never really known them, because an essential dimension of their person had been veiled from us, one that was only opened up while we watched them work: as they were repairing a car, cleaning a bathroom, teaching a lesson, preparing lunch. All of us are present in the hand that tightens the screw, in the pen that writes, in the rag drying: it is here that we encounter our humanity and that of others. And, almost always, a new appreciation and a new gratitude for work are born and we see and discover them as a gift. Few organisations actually give more joy of the work well done, and so very few (if any) give more misery of bad work, even when we cannot do otherwise. We all have grown up watching the grown-ups work.
I "got to know" my grandfather Domenico when, as a child, I saw him in his workshop building a small stool for me with his own hands. Only there did I realize what his big, callous and expert hands really were, and it was from then on that I really got to know him. The only thing I have left of him now is that cutty-stool, kept in my studio next to my books, and his spirit is perfectly and entirely present in those pieces of wood, because one day I saw him incarnating in that object, built as a gift to me.
A severe form of poverty of our children is not being able to watch the work of adults anymore, because too many jobs are becoming abstract, invisible, confined in far away non-places, inaccessible especially to children and young people. What work will they create tomorrow if today they live immersed in a thousand shows, but are deprived of the sight of work being done, which is the greatest show to see on this earth? A great gift for our children is to give them a chance to see real and concrete work, to begin to see the world from there.
There are few more real human and spiritual experiences than walking through cities and watching people as they work. Therefore, there is no better way to celebrate work than starting to watch it again, seeing it, recognizing it, and then returning with feelings of thankfulness. Our esteem and appreciation – on a personal and collective level – for work and for workers is the first and real reform the world of work needs. And maybe, on this day of non-work, let's read a few pages of the classics of the Italian civil tradition about work again: "There is no work, or capital," Carlo Cattaneo wrote, "that doesn't begin with an act of intelligence. Before any work, before any capital there is intelligence that begins the work, and first impresses the character of wealth on it."
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    [text] => 
Commentaries - Work, its non-places and value
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/05/2016
A great utopia of our capitalism is the construction of a society where there is no more need for human labour. There has always been a spirit of the economy that dreamed of "perfect" enterprises and markets to the point where you can manage without humans beings. Managing and controlling men and women is much more difficult than managing docile machines and obedient algorithms. Real people go through crises, they protest, they enter into conflict with each other, they always do things other than those that they should do according to their job descriptions, often they do better things.
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