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The land of We/8 - The market, the merchants and the Gospel: scientific reflection and social works
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11//11/2023
The era of the medieval merchants and of their companies where in the Book of Reason, the main account was listed under the name of "Messer Domineddio", was the time when the alliance between the merchants and the mendicant friars generated Florence, Padua or Bologna. It was an extraordinary era that failed to become the modern Italian and Meridian economic culture because the Lutheran Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation split Europe in two and prevented the medieval civil seeds from fully flourishing. It was, paradoxically, the Protestant Nordic world that gained a part of the legacy of the first medieval market economy (but without its charisms, without Francis and Benedict), although it was born in controversy with the wealth of the Roman Christianity of the Renaissance Popes. Catholic countries, including Italy in a special way, experienced the Protestant Reformation as a religious and civil trauma, and the results were typical of a major collective trauma. We cannot know what Italian and Meridian society and economy could have become if that alliance between Franciscans and merchants had continued after the sixteenth century, if the Catholic Church had not been afraid, at times terrified, in the face of any form of individual freedom, convinced that the "internal forum" without the control of the pastors was too exposed to the winds of heresy coming from the North. All that class of humanist merchants that developed between Dante and Masaccio, Michelangelo and Machiavelli, the businesses and banks of the Tuscans and the Lombards, shattered on the rock of the Council of Trent. With the end of the sixteenth century the Baroque age began which contributed some artistic and literary excellence but did not generate children and grandchildren equal to those first merchants who were friends of the friars and the cities. The Baroque history of Italy is the story of an interrupted path, of an unfinished civil, religious and economic history which had determining effects on the shape of the modern economy and society under the Alps. That set of theology, legal and moral norms, practices and prohibitions, fears and anxieties that we call Counter-Reformation (I do not use the expression of Catholic Reformation, even if there was a Reformation in the Catholic Counter-Reformation and a Counter-Reformation in the Protestant Reformation) has not only conditioned our religious life, it has also changed and shaped our businesses, politics, banks, communities, families and taxes.

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In this Italy of the Counter-Reformation, despite everything, some dimensions of the medieval and Renaissance economic ethos nevertheless managed, to survive the restoration. Some ancient spirit slipped into the hidden places between the folds of people's lives, into the living spaces not occupied by religious power. These were often submerged spaces, real karst rivers, where some merchants and bankers managed to wedge themselves without being discouraged and defeated by the manuals for confessors or by the anti-economic and anti-civil catechisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In these centuries, many Monti di Pietà died out but others became commercial banks. We have seen that the Grain Banks survived longer, for four centuries, and were poor but decisive resources for Southern Italy. There were few but there were some scholars of economics, who, navigating between prohibitions and ecclesiastical condemnations, wrote beautiful pages of economic theory. First Antonio Serra and Tommaso Campanella, then Ludovico Muratori and Scipione Maffei were that ideal bridge that united the shores of civil Humanism with the reforming Enlightenment of Genovesi and his Neapolitan civil school (of Dragonetti, Longano, Odazi, Filangieri, Galanti...), which was one of the brightest seasons in Italian history. The economic eighteenth century soon clashed with the restoration of the first decades of the nineteenth century, and then anti-modernism between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the years of the Non-expedit of Pius IX and the Pascendi dominici gregis of Pius X (1907), which was culturally similar to the climate created by the Counter-Reformation in past centuries.
Coming directly to economics, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Neapolitan Francesco Fuoco wrote texts that were still entirely Genoese, and therefore humanist, pages inherited from the humanist merchant-bankers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Tuscany. But with Fuoco, the Genoese tradition of Civil Economy ended, because with the mid-nineteenth century our best economists re-founded the Italian tradition on French and English bases, without any vital link with the Neapolitan and Italian eighteenth century. We still had good economists but now they were all very distant from the Genoese and inserted into the main flow of a new, international and increasingly Anglo-Saxon-led science. Italy became a periphery, although it was still respected until the Second World War (thanks above all to the widely held enormous esteem for Vilfredo Pareto).
However, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not many Italian economists, even very talented ones, attempted to reconnect with the classic Italian tradition, without following the single bandwagon of science in its new tracks. One of these, and perhaps the most interesting one, is Achille Loria (1857-1943), from Mantua, whom we left last week with his "theory of rent", similar to that of Francesco Fuoco. Loria was among the few economists of his time who did not forget about the Grain Banks: "The Grain Banks, which lent wheat in kind, giving the borrower, at the time of sowing, a waning bushel of wheat and receiving, at the time of harvest, a full bushel of wheat: the difference between the two bushels represented the interest. But over time this loan was mostly made in favour of the large owners and therefore it lost all its philanthropic character, which constituted its merit" (Course in Political Economy, 1927, p.695). Loria's interest in rent, which he placed at the centre of his system, was an expression of a vision of the economy and society centred on profits and therefore on entrepreneurs, on the productive class, therefore critical of the parasitic tendency of Italian culture, which grew exponentially during the Counter-Reformation. The seventeenth century was in fact a time of return to the land, of the nobility of blood, of counts and marquises, of a class of nobles who lived without working and all the rest of society who worked without living: "Then comes another distinction of social classes, shaped by the distinction of capital into productive and unproductive: that of the productive capitalists, exclusively devoted to industry and that of the unproductive who do not increase social wealth but speculate on values, forming their income by extracting from the income of others" (The economic synthesis, 1910, p. 211).
However, one question remains. Loria was a follower of the Italian civil tradition, but he was not Catholic (he was from a Jewish family): where then was Catholic economic thought in the twentieth century directed? Loria also wrote about cooperation and the cooperative movement. It was in the writings on cooperation, on rural savings banks, and then on savings banks that we find some of the most beautiful pages of Civil Economy by Italian writers, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, including some beautiful ones by Giuseppe Mazzini. Just as in the time of the Counter-Reformation, Italian Catholics dedicated themselves to the establishment of the Monti di Pietà, the Grain Banks and to an enormous quantity (and quality) of social works, schools, hospitals, also the night of free thinking between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries anti-modernists saw a great proliferation of social works, institutions, cooperatives, banks and non-academic writers who were skilled builders of the common good.
However, this does not mean that the anti-modernist wave of the Catholic Church did not also heavily involve the few Catholic economists of the first half of the twentieth century, from Giuseppe Toniolo up to Amintore Fanfani. This Catholic tradition, which had an important centre in the early days of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan founded by Agostino Gemelli, continued to view the Middle Ages as the golden age and the Scholasticism of Thomas as the highest point of Christian culture and philosophy, also in the economic field. For Fanfani, an author with his own brilliance and originality, the ethical pinnacle of economic ethics was reached between the thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries, when, with the first hints of Humanism – interpreted as a resurgence of paganism – the decline of Christian civilization began. This gave rise, as early as the end of the fourteenth century, to the spirit of capitalism, which for Fanfani was an evil spirit. Fanfani, criticizing (perhaps without understanding) Max Weber, affirmed that capitalism did not originate in the Protestant world but in Italy between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when economic practices abandoned the teachings of Scholasticism and began to follow different paths far from authentic evangelical humanism: "Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the number of those who adopted illicit methods in the acquisition of wealth, according to Thomistic rules, increased ... The neighbour lost the physiognomy of brother and acquired that of competitor, that is, of enemy" (The origins of the capitalist spirit in Italy, Vita e Pensiero, 1933, p.162). Thus, merchants such as Marco Francesco Datini redeemed themselves from a misguided life "trying to make amends at the point of death" (p.165). Because, by then, "wealth is a means solely for satisfying one's needs" (p.165). Instead, until the mid-fourteenth century, for Fanfani the economy was Christian because "economic activity, like all other human activities, had to revolve around God... Everyone met in one idea: that of Theo-centricity" (p.158). The fifteenth century was therefore the birth of the spirit of the capitalist who "knows no other limit of conduct than that of utility" (p.155).
Thus, all the work of the Franciscan school between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (which Fanfani and Toniolo ignored or did not take seriously), which had led to a new conception of civil profit and the merchant as a friend of the city, was considered degeneration and decadence by the true Christian spirit, the one which was dominated by Thomism, where people worked only for the common good, because, it was believed that working for private gain is only a form of selfishness and the pursuit of personal utility. So his vision that pits Humanism against Scholasticism, and above all considers the centrality of God in competition with the centrality of man, as if God wanted a world entirely directed to himself, a Father who would not enjoy the autonomy of his children by wanting them all for his exclusive service – what non-incestuous father would ever do that? Thus it was forgotten that the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the centuries when the alliance between Franciscans and merchants had worked authentic economic, civil, artistic and spiritual miracles and the enmity between the centrality of God and the centrality of men that had dominated the Counter-Reformation returned in the twentieth century.
Many documents of the Social Doctrine of the Church reflect these anti-modern, anti-market, anti-entrepreneur and anti-bank decades (it is not surprising that neither the word entrepreneur nor bank is present in our Constitution). This is why today it would be not only urgent but very necessary for the studies of Social Doctrine to truly start again from Humanism, from that period when the market was born from the Christian spirit, from merchants and beggars together, from the Gospel, not against it. This is what we have tried to do in these last few weeks. Thank you to those who have followed us on this challenging but perhaps somewhat useful journey.
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The land of We/8 - The market, the merchants and the Gospel: scientific reflection and social works
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11//11/2023
The era of the medieval merchants and of their companies where in the Book of Reason, the main account was listed under the name of "Messer Domineddio", was the time when the alliance between the merchants and the mendicant friars generated Florence, Padua or Bologna. It was an extraordinary era that failed to become the modern Italian and Meridian economic culture because the Lutheran Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation split Europe in two and prevented the medieval civil seeds from fully flourishing. It was, paradoxically, the Protestant Nordic world that gained a part of the legacy of the first medieval market economy (but without its charisms, without Francis and Benedict), although it was born in controversy with the wealth of the Roman Christianity of the Renaissance Popes. Catholic countries, including Italy in a special way, experienced the Protestant Reformation as a religious and civil trauma, and the results were typical of a major collective trauma. We cannot know what Italian and Meridian society and economy could have become if that alliance between Franciscans and merchants had continued after the sixteenth century, if the Catholic Church had not been afraid, at times terrified, in the face of any form of individual freedom, convinced that the "internal forum" without the control of the pastors was too exposed to the winds of heresy coming from the North. All that class of humanist merchants that developed between Dante and Masaccio, Michelangelo and Machiavelli, the businesses and banks of the Tuscans and the Lombards, shattered on the rock of the Council of Trent. With the end of the sixteenth century the Baroque age began which contributed some artistic and literary excellence but did not generate children and grandchildren equal to those first merchants who were friends of the friars and the cities. The Baroque history of Italy is the story of an interrupted path, of an unfinished civil, religious and economic history which had determining effects on the shape of the modern economy and society under the Alps. That set of theology, legal and moral norms, practices and prohibitions, fears and anxieties that we call Counter-Reformation (I do not use the expression of Catholic Reformation, even if there was a Reformation in the Catholic Counter-Reformation and a Counter-Reformation in the Protestant Reformation) has not only conditioned our religious life, it has also changed and shaped our businesses, politics, banks, communities, families and taxes.

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    [title] => The prophecy of a market based on trust alone
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The land of We/6 - The Neapolitan Civil Economy of the eighteenth century and Francesco Fuoco
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 28/10/2023
The idea that exchange is a ‘game’ where the gains of one party are equal and opposite to the losses of the other, is often the first difficulty that a teacher encounters in the first lessons of economics. Students approach economic science with the belief that the market is a place of ‘zero-sum’ (+1/-1) relationships. It is difficult to convey the idea that in economic exchange the golden law is mutual advantage and therefore the gains of one party also correspond to gains for the other and when this mutual advantage does not occur, the market is distorted and denied and ends up resembling war, robbery or athletics (the sports metaphor for the economy is almost always wrong). Behind the bad reputation that economic operators have enjoyed for centuries, was the same mistake that my students make today. If the market is really a relationship where one party enriches itself at the expense of the other, it becomes necessary to protect the weak party, restrict the area of exchanges and then view merchants and bankers with great ethical distrust. Religious prohibitions on interest-bearing loans only reinforced a negativity that already existed. Merchants and economic and financial operators were well aware that the market was a ‘positive sum game’; they knew this because it was based on contracts, which when carried out in freedom reveal the mutually beneficial nature of the parties - why should I give my free consent to a predatory relationship? In the same way, they knew that the mutual advantage was often asymmetrical (+4, +1) due to different information and power balances. However, when the contract generated a minus somewhere (+2,-1), they knew that they were exiting the economy and entering into theft, leaving behind physiology and entering into the pathology of the market.
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The real problem lay elsewhere, that is, above all among theologians and philosophers. Those who wrote about prices, markets or interests were for the most part intellectuals who (with the happy exception of the Franciscans and some Dominicans) preached about trade and business without having, in general, the faintest idea of what real markets, real loans, real contracts, real shops and entrepreneurs were (a problem that, in part, still exists). And so the idea was superior to reality and the moral treatises and manuals for confessors described a commercial world that was distorted and distant from the real lives of people. So much so that while treaties against trade and usury multiplied, the Middle Ages was filled with tens of thousands of Christian bankers and merchants, who made profits, took and lent with usury and made our cities beautiful.
Describing the great spread of usury in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, A.L. Muratori recalls that loans with interest were provided for in the statutes of the cities, where often there was even a public register of usurers. Muratori cited a document from 1339 which said, "No person in Siena could lend with usury in anyway, if he does not first register in the book entitled Usuraio of Bischerna" (Opera Omnia, 1790[1738-1743], XVI, p. 310). The ‘Bischerna’ was the ancient legal system. He continued: "Whoever lent with usury, gave the loan for only six months and whoever received the money, contributed with a gift to the usurer; that is, he paid the fruit of the six months immediately". After the six months, "if the debtor did not pay, the interest that the debtor was then obliged to pay was a quarter of a penny for each lira for each single month" (p. 311), that is, 4% per month which was equal to almost 50% per year (and this explains why the 5% per year on loans from the Monte di Pietà was really a non-profit institution rate). The language is striking: there was talk of a gift to the usurer, because presenting the interest as a gift made it easier to circumvent ecclesiastical prohibitions against usury. However, every merchant knew that the reality was very different from the words with which it was expressed and that the idea of gift had nothing to do with it. Eloquent expressions are the first casualties when reality drifts away from the concept of reality. Thus, until recently, hypocrisy and double standards flourished as the fertile ground for merchants and bankers from the Middle Ages.
After centuries, theologians of the Counter-Reformation perpetuated a civil hypocrisy by reinstating ancient and abstract prohibitions on profits and usury, which had been largely overcome by the Franciscans and merchants between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, a widening gap and mutual distrust developed between the economic and ecclesiastical worlds, including the very Christian bankers of the Popes. Religion became a matter for worship and feasts, for fraternities and processions, for births and deaths, for wives and women, but merchants and bankers kept well away from the confessionals and sermons. Among the many counter-reformist preachers and theologians, the Jesuit Paolo Segneri (1624-1694) stands out. He was a respected literary figure (he collaborated on the third edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca) and the author of many manuals for confessors and treatises on morals. The most famous of these is The Christian instructed according to his law, from 1686, in which he criticized merchants harshly saying, "by selling things in credit to the poor, they then give them this privilege, that since they have no money they pay more for it". So credit-credit is a scam created by the seller for the sole purpose of increasing his earnings at the expense of the poor. And he adds: "I know that merchants defend themselves with those very precious titles of ‘loss of profit’ and ‘emerging damage’..., but I really think that they often use them as a simple hook to forcibly gather the fruits that they are unable to reach by hand" (Ed. Veneziana, Carlo Todero, 1765, vol. 1, p. 207). These elegant phrases really reveal a low moral picture of the market, carried out in dark shops: "The buyer seeks illegal advantages, either in the unfair price he offers or in the weakness of the currency. The seller tries to hide the defects of the merchandise he displays and when questioned does not reveal them otherwise, artfully choosing dark shops so they are less visible" (p. 209). Then he continues with his doubts (which are really certainties): "I think, that often this great danger they have learned, of not being paid by selling in time will occur because they often want the Mallevadore [guarantor]; and as if the Mallevadore is not enough, they want a pledge" (p. 207). It is clear that here Segneri speaks of merchants but also of bankers, who in the ancient regime were often the same people. And he concludes: "It is very difficult to negotiate a lot and not harm others’ shops" (p. 208). Finally, the idea of exchange as a ‘zero-sum game’ emerges very clearly: "In every contract between purchase and sale, sin stands in the way, like a stake stuck between the walls... Almost as if the injustice between those two terms is so limited that even if you want to, you cannot go free. On one side it is held strong by the buyer and on the other it is held strong by the seller" (p. 208).
It should therefore not surprise us, given this dominant idea regarding trade and credit, that neither the word entrepreneur nor bank appears in our beautiful Italian Constitution.
The Neapolitan and Italian civil economy was born in the eighteenth century with a different idea of market and credit. We have already seen it with Genovesi, and now we see it with one of his heirs, the Casertan (Mignano) Francesco Fuoco (1774-1841). Fuoco, now forgotten in his own homeland, was an extremely original, at times brilliant, author. Priest, Neapolitan revolutionary of 1799, teacher, mathematician, physicist, Latin geographer and philologist in the first phase of his activity, he then became an economist following his French political confinement (1821-23), where he studied with the great economist J.B. Say. In this French phase he began his complicated collaboration with the Como businessman Giuseppe de Welz, for whom he wrote, perhaps out of economic necessity, his first works on economics and finance (which were published by de Welz: an attribution dispute that has not yet been fully resolved). They include the book The Magic of Credit Unveiled (1824), where we find an innovative and sometimes surprising theory of credit and banking. His point of reference is Antonio Genovesi, of whom he cites extensive passages in his Economic Essays (1825-27), where, among other things, speaking of maxima and minima in economics (Fuoco is one of the first mathematical economists), he writes: "The notion of minimum wage is the point at which the worker refuses to work due to insufficient wages" (Vol. II, p. 11), to remind us that the minimum wage is anything but a recent or bizarre issue.
In the introduction to The Magic of Credit, Fuoco begins by saying that he came across a thesis by a French author so bizarre as to seem at first delirious: "Whoever has the talent to contract debts possesses the art of becoming rich" (p. 1). The possible delirium arose from the memory, of which, as a fine writer, Fuoco was very well aware, of satirical texts such as Il debitor felice, by Ser Muzio Petroni da Trevi who at the end of the 1500s affirmed that "you cannot give yourself greater happiness in this life than having debts", and praised those who lived without working, making others work for themselves. Clearly the praise of credit (not so much of debt) that Fuoco shares had very different and opposite roots.
A few years later, in his Economic Essays he wrote pages of great beauty and relevance on credit: "The means that give maximum energy to the work of a people are created and multiplied by virtue of credit and credit is strengthened to the extent that work is perfected" (II, p. 395). He therefore speaks of an “alliance between work and credit", based on mutual advantage, essential for public happiness. An alliance he calls ‘intimate’, thanks to which "morality spreads".
As for the interest on the loan, for Fuoco "nothing is fairer than receiving compensation from the loan" (p. 397). Quoting Genovesi at length, "to whom we could add nothing better", he concludes by saying that "capital is a sterile wealth when it is not used for productive purposes, that is, for any branch of industry. Therefore, lending is a necessary condition to turn capital to productive uses” (II, p. 415).
The conclusion of his reasoning is very beautiful: "The creation and use of capital rests on credit and therefore on morality which was and will always be its foundation. If the principles of morality were generally recognized and respected, credit alone would be enough to give life to the general economy of peoples" (II, p. 416). An economy therefore of credit alone, an economy of pure credit, a market of faith alone. Today it seems like a utopia of yesterday: what if it were instead a prophecy of tomorrow?
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The land of We/6 - The Neapolitan Civil Economy of the eighteenth century and Francesco Fuoco
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 28/10/2023
The idea that exchange is a ‘game’ where the gains of one party are equal and opposite to the losses of the other, is often the first difficulty that a teacher encounters in the first lessons of economics. Students approach economic science with the belief that the market is a place of ‘zero-sum’ (+1/-1) relationships. It is difficult to convey the idea that in economic exchange the golden law is mutual advantage and therefore the gains of one party also correspond to gains for the other and when this mutual advantage does not occur, the market is distorted and denied and ends up resembling war, robbery or athletics (the sports metaphor for the economy is almost always wrong). Behind the bad reputation that economic operators have enjoyed for centuries, was the same mistake that my students make today. If the market is really a relationship where one party enriches itself at the expense of the other, it becomes necessary to protect the weak party, restrict the area of exchanges and then view merchants and bankers with great ethical distrust. Religious prohibitions on interest-bearing loans only reinforced a negativity that already existed. Merchants and economic and financial operators were well aware that the market was a ‘positive sum game’; they knew this because it was based on contracts, which when carried out in freedom reveal the mutually beneficial nature of the parties - why should I give my free consent to a predatory relationship? In the same way, they knew that the mutual advantage was often asymmetrical (+4, +1) due to different information and power balances. However, when the contract generated a minus somewhere (+2,-1), they knew that they were exiting the economy and entering into theft, leaving behind physiology and entering into the pathology of the market.
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The land of We/4 - The limits of the mutual advantage of the market, the new atmosphere in the age of Muratori
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 14/10/2023
The birth of modern Political Economy is closely linked to the affirmation of a new idea about the Common Good. Ancient and medieval thought gave rise to it from the willing and conscious renunciation of the private good of individuals. In the eighteenth century, however, people began to say that the common good is the (unintentional) result of the pursuit of one's own interests, without the need for any renunciation. No one in the market loses anything, everyone gains. This is the heart of the discourse hidden behind the metaphor of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", introduced a few years earlier by the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani (Della Moneta, 1750) and already present, in essence, also in the other great Neapolitan, Giambattista Vico. A revolution well expressed by Smith: "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good" (The Wealth of Nations, 1776).

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Neapolitan and Italian Civil Economy thought differently about this and continue to do so: while recognizing the mutual advantage mechanisms of the market as the golden law of economic and social life, it never thought that only the mutual advantage of the invisible hand was sufficient for the common good. They knew the mutual advantage but did not make it the only social or economic language for the civilisation of peoples. Antonio Ludovico Muratori (1672, Vignola - 1750, Modena), an immense figure, had very clear ideas about this. In those years, after the seventeenth century, which was also the golden century of the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition (which, among other things, Muratori also covered), a reform movement began in Europe. In the ecclesial sphere, first the election of Benedict XIII (in 1724), who we have already mentioned in previous articles because of his great action for the Grain Banks, and then, after the brief parenthesis of Clement XII, of Benedict XIV (in 1740), marked a real season of social and economic renewal as well. Benedict XIV, in addition to writing the encyclical Vix pervenit (1745) on the legitimization of interest-bearing lending, was an economic reformer, and carried out an agrarian reform to reintroduce the biblical institution of "gleaning" for poor farmers.
The Muratorian age was a season of greater tolerance for new and divergent ideas, a climate that favoured the emergence of great social intellectuals that the seventeenth century had not generated; the Catholic talents of that century tended towards the least "dangerous" areas of art, music and poetry. Muratori was an impressive and gigantic intellectual figure. He made fundamental contributions to historical studies, including 27 volumes of the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 6 volumes of the Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi, 12 volumes of the Annals of Italy. He was the teacher of the young Antonio Genovesi, he wrote important economic pages both in La carità cristiana (1723) and in Cristianesimo Felice (1743) where he described and praised the socio-economic experiment of the Jesuit "reductions" in Paraguay. The year before his death he published a summary of his thought in Della publica felicità, a book whose title, for at least a century, represented the motto of the research project of Italian economists and has now been revived. Among the many topics touched and renewed by Muratori, two are very important: the theological work to reform economic-civilian life and the coexistence of the idea of mutual advantage and that of gift.
After almost two centuries of the Counter-Reformation, Muratori understood that without a profound reform of "devotion" (devotion) and popular piety, which in those centuries was intertwined with magic and superstition, Catholic society would have remained definitively blocked. And therefore the priest Muratori criticized the devotions to save devotion: "Books of devotion and piety abound in the Catholic Church, authors who propose some new devotion and divonzioncelle (little devotions) every day", (Della regolata devozione dei cristiani, Preface, 1747). His criticisms provoked many harsh reactions, accusations of Protestantism and Jansenism, a fate common to true reformers.
The main reason for his religious criticism is very important: "We must clearly understand a very important truth: God commands us nothing that is not for our own good, that is, to love and seek our happiness even in our present life" (p. 5). Because, he explains, the whole of Revelation is oriented to our happiness: "God wants us to resist the breaths of disordered lust, anger, gluttony, revenge, and other similar vigorous passions: is this not for our benefit?" (p. 17) In a Church entirely centred on the souls of purgatory, on the valley of tears, on penances, on pain and on the theology of atonement, Muratori’s work shines out as a hymn to life and the person, as a Humanism, where God is man’s first ally for his happiness. It is an entirely biblical and evangelical vision. The God-human relationship should be read as mutual benefit and reciprocity: His good is ours, ours is His. Beautiful. From this humanism comes his criticism of the cult of the saints and Our Lady, and he even goes so far as to say something revolutionary: that the devotion of the saints "is not necessary and essential to the Christian" (p. 205).
The economic reason for his long battle for the reduction of too many holydays of obligation in the Catholic Church is also very important. On feast days, Christians could not work, so "the multiplicity of feasts clearly prejudices and burdens those who have to earn their bread with the arts and the toil of their hands" (p. 10). And he added: " The saints do not need our glory, and on the contrary the poor need bread, nor should it ever be thought that the saints, so full of charity, love the fact that to honour them unnecessarily the poor are defrauded of their necessary portion of food" (p. 211). Again the lack of mutual benefit. And he concluded masterfully: "Our devotion is for our profit" (p. 212). A few years later, his student Antonio Genovesi did not fail to approve this vision of Muratori on religion in his Lessons (chap. 10, IX, vol. 2). His most complex and long pastoral theological battle was that against the "bloody vow" (or the vow of the "Palermitans") that theologians, bishops and the Jesuits recommended for Christians. Those who took that vow had to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin at the cost of their lives. Muratori judged this vow as superstitious and illicit. His battle began in 1714 with the book De ingeniorum moderatione (I7I4). The reason for his opposition lies, here too, in the lack of mutual advantage: even if the Immaculate Conception were certain (which Muratori did not consider certain but only probable), Mary does not obtain an advantage if Christians give their lives to defend a dogma: «Mary does not need dubious praise, nor an imprudent sacrifice. On the other hand, you need your life" (p. 269). Muratori therefore criticized a Church that saw human sacrifice as a currency to give glory to God. Hence his criticism of the excesses of the "Marian devotions", of the proliferation of the "Confraternities of the slaves of the Mother of God" (Regulata Divozione, p. 280). The only good devotions are those, as he said at the end of his book, "which return to the glory of religion and to the profit of the people" (p. 283). Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori, who respected Muratori, was a very harsh critic of his stigmatization of the "bloody vow": appealing to the authority of Angelico, he wrote: "It is still certain that such a cult can be a cause of martyrdom" (A. Maria de Liguori, Delle Glorie di Maria, ch. V, 1750).
Turning now to the second aspect of his thought, in his beautiful book Christian Charity, we also find the Monti di Pietà: «The industrious charity of the faithful then invented other kinds of Monti di Pietà. Such as the Sacred Bank of Flour, of which Blessed Jerome of Verona was the main instructor in Modena and in other cities". The Monte della Farina was a variant of the Grain Banks - there would be a lot to study about these ancient institutions! And then he continued: "The task of the directors of such Monti is to buy grain, of good quality, with the greatest possible advantage at convenient times and to do this with no less diligence than if it were their own business, to resell it, converted into flour, without any interest, to those people who are in need ... Too many people like that easy job of making their fortune by sucking the blood of the poor." And then he also told us that "a Hemp Bank was established in Bologna, an abundant city of Pious Works" (p. 315). With regard to the Monti di Pietà, he continued: "Monti Sacri de i Pegni (Pawnshops), founded in recent centuries by the piety of Christians, for the glory of Catholicism in Italy and Flanders" (p. 310). Those banks were truly a glory of "Catholicism", even in centuries which were ambivalent for the Catholic Church. It is important how Muratori explained the operation of these Monti, where those who lend money do so "with the intention of receiving back nothing more than the capital lent..., and to demand more would be to seek only our own interest and not the benefit of others" (p. 311). The only legitimate interest in the Banks of the Poor, is what is required “for the reimbursement of the expenses for the maintenance of the Officers" (p. 312). A Muratori, therefore, who is so fond of "mutual advantage" that he even puts it at the centre of his criticism of religion, but who recognizes that in some areas of economic and social life mutual advantage is too little, because there is a need to register the gift. In religion, mutual advantage was on the side of the poor; in the Monti, only the gift was on their side, and therefore on the side of the Common Good.
Muratori (along with Scipione Maffei) recognized the legitimacy of interest in most commercial affairs, but knew that there are human actions where mutual advantage does not work well. To remind us that the "invisible hand" works in many things but not in all, otherwise that hand becomes only an ideological tool to "suck the blood of the poor". The "good" common good is not born only from interests: it is also born from the gift, which is the leaven of the mass formed by interests. As emerges from his On Public Happiness, where we read: "The most ordinary desire, and father of many others, is that of our Private Good... Then, of a more sublime sphere, and of a nobler origin, there is another Desire, that of the Good of Society, of the Public Good, or of Public Happiness» (p. vi). Many goods come from the desire for the Private Good, but not all goods, because there are others that come from the love of the Common Good. These are two different goods, both essential. In the civic museum of Modena, there is a portrait of Blessed Gerolamo of Verona. The saint is holding a single cloth with the inscription: Mons charitatis. In the midst of the Counter-Reformation, the Church understood that there was a sanctity linked to the construction of the Monti and the Banks, and that setting up a Bank for the poor could be the only sign of a saint, there was no need for anything more "religious".
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The land of We/4 - The limits of the mutual advantage of the market, the new atmosphere in the age of Muratori
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 14/10/2023
The birth of modern Political Economy is closely linked to the affirmation of a new idea about the Common Good. Ancient and medieval thought gave rise to it from the willing and conscious renunciation of the private good of individuals. In the eighteenth century, however, people began to say that the common good is the (unintentional) result of the pursuit of one's own interests, without the need for any renunciation. No one in the market loses anything, everyone gains. This is the heart of the discourse hidden behind the metaphor of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", introduced a few years earlier by the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani (Della Moneta, 1750) and already present, in essence, also in the other great Neapolitan, Giambattista Vico. A revolution well expressed by Smith: "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good" (The Wealth of Nations, 1776).

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The land of We/2 - The void left by the decline of the Grain Banks
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/09/2023
The policy of central governments, first the Bourbons and then the Piedmontese, with the intention of taking control of the agricultural credit institutions from the Church, caused a lot of damage to the South and to small villages
Along with some dark pages, the age of the Counter-Reformation has also seen some luminous ones. Because the ‘land of We’ is the land of community, and community is always an interweaving of light and shadow. One of the luminous pages is that written by the Capuchins, by the Bishops and by many Christians who gave life to the hundreds of Monti di Pietà (Pawn shops) and Monti Frumentari (Grain Banks), and decidedly took the side of the poorest people, especially in Southern Italy. They are pages as luminous as they are unknown and untold by the Social Doctrine of the Church itself, which was formally born in 1891 (Rerum Novarum) when the Monti (Banks) were already in decline and systematically neglected them. And so we do not know that the 114 Monti Frumentari of the Venetian Republic at the end of the 18th century "will be replaced by the rural coffers desired by Leone Wollemborg" (Paola Avallone, Alle origini del credito agrario, 2014, p. 85). However, this transformation of the Monti worked partly in the North, less so in the Centre and essentially failed in Southern Italy, where the void left by the Monti remained empty. Let's see why.
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In the history of the Grain Banks there is a specific Southern Question, which begins with the Bourbons and continues with the unitary State. In the Kingdom of Naples, the Grain Banks developed thanks to the significant impulse given by the Church, both institutional (Bishops) and charismatic (Capuchins). A key figure was the Dominican Bishop, Pierfrancesco Orsini (Gravina 1650, Rome 1730), the future Pope Benedict XIII. In Manfredonia (Siponto), where he was Bishop, he established his first Monte Frumentario in 1678 and when he became bishop of Benevento, he established a Monte Frumentario there in 1686 and caused at least one to be established in each village and city leading to the establishment of over a hundred. When he became Pope, he encouraged their establishment everywhere.
It is precisely around the role of the Church in the management of the Monti that the decisive games of their history in Southern Italy were played out. In fact, in 1741, there was a Concordat between the Bourbons and Pope Benedict XIV, which led to the secularization of the Grain Banks, to lessen the interference of the Church in the economic life of the cities. What were the results? A few decades later, Francesco Longano, economist and assistant philosopher to the chair of Antonio Genovesi, wrote very clear and important words in his report following a trip to Molise (and Foggia),: "From time immemorial, for the public relief of the people, a large multitude of Monti di Pietà [Monti frumentari] or Luoghi Pii was found in each Province of the Kingdom. They were so subject to the Bishops and their administration was so exact, that they had prospered immensely. Their income mostly consisted of grain, but also cattle, sheep, and cash rents. An excessive vigilance which in a very short time, together with the annual administrators, reduced, exploited and impoverished them all. Eight or ten privileged people, poor or rich, have formed a kind of monopoly. The rich out of greed, the poor plunder out of need" (Viaggio dell' abate Longano per la Capitanata, 1790, pp. 188-189). The operation of the Bourbons had therefore produced "the irreparable loss of a work of extreme public utility in almost every city, land and village of the Province" (p. 259). And therefore Longano concluded: "We immediately understand the need to re-establish them, by declaring them to be ecclesiastical goods again and subject to the Bishops' Direction" (p. 260). This was a counter-reform which never happened.
As the historian Paola Avallone recalls, "the Grain Banks enjoyed a certain flourishing as long as they were free to operate according to the statutes they had given themselves and as long as they were managed locally by people appointed by the parish priest and held to account for their management to the episcopal authority, as indicated by Pope Benedict XIII after 1724. They prospered as long as they managed to adapt to the needs of the local community “(cit., p. 24). The policy of the central governments, first the Bourbons and then the Piedmontese, with the intention of taking control of the Monti away from the Church, caused a lot of damage, in particular in the South, where the Church had carried out many civil and economic functions for centuries, especially in small villages and among the poorest. They wanted to centralize the management of the Monti, not recognizing their fragile but essential local and community structure, and they caused them to die.
Emblematic in this regard is the failure of the ‘General Grain Bank of the Kingdom of Naples, a central mega-institution (based in Foggia), which should have managed all the Monti scattered throughout the kingdom as peripheral branches, also to overcome the plague of the infamous ‘oral contracts’ in the countryside. Founded in 1781, it never took off. The bureaucracy increased, the distance between those who governed the Monti and the poor farmers increased, and attempts were made to separate the financial component from the charitable one, undermining that dual nature that instead constituted the soul and the secret of their success. It was therefore an anti-subsidiary reform, reinforced by the post-revolutionary French period, by the restoration and finally by the unitary State which tried to transform the Monti into ‘agricultural loan banks’ or ‘savings banks‘, institutions far from the tradition of the villages of the South, from the spirit of those places. I traced two royal decrees, from 31.1.1878 and 14.7.1889, which respectively transformed "the two Monti Frumentari and the pecuniary bank of Roccanova (PZ), and invested their assets in favour of the Loans e Savings Bank", and "the Monti Frumentari of Maltignano (AP) in an Agricultural Loan Bank". The verb used by the bureaucrat of the decree, ‘invert’, resonates today as a prophetic verb: it was precisely a reversal of the meaning of the Monti that was generated by laws that did not understand them. From the decrees we read that in the small Lucanian municipality of Roccanova there were three Monti, and in the village of Maltignano the term ‘Monti’ is used in the plural, testifying how much those blessed institutions were widespread and capillary. In addition, "the maneuver of transforming the Monti Frumentari into Loan Banks, through the conversion of grain into money, particularly favoured the classes not directly interested in the work of the fields... Usury ended up with having the upper hand" (Michele Valente, "Evoluzione socioeconomica dei Sassi di Matera nel XX secolo", 2021, p. 29).
The transformation of the Monti into these new ‘Northern’ coffers therefore involved a financialisation of the Monti Frumentari which, unlike the Monti Pecuniari that often accompanied them, used grain as currency. The great innovation of those different banks was the use of grain as currency; the novelty was precisely the reduction of an intermediary step, a crucial element in a world with very little money and therefore held by usurers. The new laws forced the Monti to abandon grain-currency and transform themselves into ordinary financial institutions. And there they died. Moreover, the laws of the State did not understand the hybrid nature of these institutions, credit and charity, contract and gift and fought it, without understanding that opposing this hybrid nature meant denying the history of the Monti, who lived as long as and as long as they were spurious, mixed and contaminated. They wanted to separate what was united by nature and vocation, and they made them die. Of course, we all know that behind a mass extinction of thousands of Monti there are many reasons inscribed in the evolution of Italian and European society over the centuries, but the anti-subsidiarity reforms, the anti-clerical ideological attitude, the cultural distance between the new rulers and the farmers, were decisive elements for this economic and social massacre: who knows what southern finance, economy and society could have been if the Monti had been understood and protected? Giustino Fortunato, a southern politician and intellectual, was very opposed to the reform of the Monti and in general to the agrarian and economic policy of the unitary State in the South. In a letter to Pasquale Villari dated 18.1.1878, he wrote: "A reform made in depth on preconceived ideas, on a priori... The confusion is great. First example: the transformation of the Monti Frumentari into Agricultural Loan Funds" (Carteggio (1865-1911), pp. 11-12). The reform was, for Fortunato, a true "gravestone" for the Monti and for the “cafoni” (ignorant peasants).
And here we must return to the vocation and nature of the ‘Catholic’ and meridian economy. The pastoral action of the Counter-Reformation had strengthened and developed the widespread presence of the Church in the countryside, which, especially in the South, was in a condition of serious degradation, including economic deterioration. The constant presence of friars, nuns and priests in every village, in the parishes, in the many rural convents, had led the Church to understand the real needs of real people, and so it became expert in concrete poverty and the economy. And the Monti Frumentari were born: "As long as those institutions were administered by ecclesiastics, the goods kept in them were considered sacrosanct and therefore untouchable. From the moment they were secularized, they were plundered without any restraint (Paola Avallone, cit., p. 27).
What still remains in Italy and in southern Europe of the social and civil tradition, of the institutions of financial solidarity, today risks suffering the same fate as the Monti Frumentari, where the rulers are no longer the Bourbons and the Piedmontese but the algorithms of Basel and of the national and international financial institutions, which separate credit from communities, which distance choices from regions, which no longer listen to the real needs of concrete people and when they try to listen to them they do not understand them because they speak too different languages, and without translators.
I end by giving the floor to Ignazio Silone, who has redeemed the honour of the word ‘cafoni’, a word too full of injustice, pain and hope, which still awaits the day when pain will no longer be a shame: "I well know that the term of ‘cafone’, in the current language of my country, is a term of offence and mockery: but I use it in this book in the certainty that when in my country pain will no longer be a shame, it will become a name of respect, and perhaps even of honour" (Fontamara, Introduction).

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    [text] => 
The land of We/2 - The void left by the decline of the Grain Banks
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/09/2023
The policy of central governments, first the Bourbons and then the Piedmontese, with the intention of taking control of the agricultural credit institutions from the Church, caused a lot of damage to the South and to small villages
Along with some dark pages, the age of the Counter-Reformation has also seen some luminous ones. Because the ‘land of We’ is the land of community, and community is always an interweaving of light and shadow. One of the luminous pages is that written by the Capuchins, by the Bishops and by many Christians who gave life to the hundreds of Monti di Pietà (Pawn shops) and Monti Frumentari (Grain Banks), and decidedly took the side of the poorest people, especially in Southern Italy. They are pages as luminous as they are unknown and untold by the Social Doctrine of the Church itself, which was formally born in 1891 (Rerum Novarum) when the Monti (Banks) were already in decline and systematically neglected them. And so we do not know that the 114 Monti Frumentari of the Venetian Republic at the end of the 18th century "will be replaced by the rural coffers desired by Leone Wollemborg" (Paola Avallone, Alle origini del credito agrario, 2014, p. 85). However, this transformation of the Monti worked partly in the North, less so in the Centre and essentially failed in Southern Italy, where the void left by the Monti remained empty. Let's see why.
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