The Vocabulary of Good Social Life

The Alternative for the Economy of Dominance Is No Utopia

Communion - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/20 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on February 9, 2014 We are all suffering from serious shortages of communion. We are actually risking getting used to its absence, and so stopping to long for it. Communion is formed within...

The Merchants' Loggias Alone Will Create a Desert out of the City

Institutions - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/19 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on February 2, 2014 Our well-being depends greatly on the quality of institutions. Marriage and universities, banks and State, Church and trade unions are obviously quite different things, bu...

The Good City of the Different and the Babel of the Closed Castes

Community - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/18 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on January 26, 2014 Community, one of the richest fundamental and ambivalent words in our civil vocabulary is undergoing radical change. The community has always been a reality that is...

Let's Leave the Economy of Flatland Behind to Restart Generating a Future

Time - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/17 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on January 19, 2014 We are living through an eclipse of time. The logic of capitalist economy and its culture that is undisputedly dominating much of social and political life do not know the di...

Justice (Beyond the Unfair)

Justice - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/2 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on August 18, 2013 There is a strong contrast between the deep sense of justice that we  all - even the wicked - have deep inside, and the world that appears to us as a display of widespr...

Trust in Obedience: the Key for the Future

Meekness - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/16 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on January 12, 2014 The words that do not age can die and be resurrected in every era. One of these words is meekness, which was already great in the Psalms and the Gospel as well as in...

A New Beginning Needed for the World - Starting from Women and the "You"

Economics - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/15 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on January 5, 2014 “...(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 t...

No Freedom Without the Market. The Market Alone Does Not Bring Happiness

Consumption - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/14 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on December 29, 2013  The centrality of consumption is a fact of our society that is neither new nor typical. What is rather new and important, however, is our inability to grasp the perv...

A Different Gaze Dwelling in and Changing Life

Charismas - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/13 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on December 22, 2013  The moral and civil shortcomings of our times are also the result of the expulsion of the charismas from public life, the charismas that all too quietly accepted their...

Gratuitousness Creates New Things (but where are the prophets?)

Innovation - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/12 by Luigino Bruni  published in Avvenire on December 15, 2013  Innovation is becoming the new watchword of the 21st century. But, as it often happens, the most interesting and really relevant things begin with the predicates, ver...

Market and Reciprocity. An alliance to be re-founded

Market - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/11 by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on December 8, 2013 In the undersoil of our civil and economic culture there are two opposing tendencies growing. The first is the gradual rapprochement between culture and the languages of the capitalist market a...

The Future is Not a Club

Commons - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/10 by Luigino Bruni  Published in Avvenire on December 1, 2013 Commons have gradually become scarce and critical, and they are still too absent from the culture and practice of economics and politics.In economics common goods made their first appearance ...

Connections Make Us Rich

Cooperation - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/9 by Luigino Bruni  Published in Avvenire on November 24, 2013 Communities flourish when they are capable of cooperation. Had we not started to co-operate (work together), community life would never have started, and we would have stayed stuck a...

Something Unique

Experience Goods - The Vocabulary of Good Social Life/8 by Luigino Bruni  Published in Avvenire on November 17, 2013 We are witnessing the emergence of a new demand for participation in the consumption, saving and use of goods. There is a crucial difference, for example, considering the Internet 10...