To the women religious who with their charisma
 transform the wounds of others into blessings for all people.

Immagine… a city without noisy and quarrelling co-dominium, where each family has its own small cottage visibly and acoustically isolated from other houses so that no neighbours can be disturbed; a city where the left over skyscrapers (for offices) are made in such a way as to avoid every encounter in the staircases or in the landings; where the urban traffic is perfectly regulated so as to avoid any quarrelling to the end of getting the precedence, where, in the offices, they use to communicate only via E-mail for the more delicate decisions; where all the  once common spaces have been parcelled out and privatised by the  “zettino” of the city….

An ideal city: the pre-condition of conflicts is missing and this reduces the conflicts almost to zero. Would you like to live in a city like this? I think so, because the scenario, which I have stylised is very close to the cities that we are imagining and projecting today in our marketing society.

This report wants to offer some explanation of the reason why a similar scenario is being determined. It may offer some hints to avoid (for those who, like me, want it) that this sad picture may become a reality.

At the origin of this text there is an image and an intuition: the fight of Jacob with the angel (the image), and the indissoluble bond which is present in every human relation between wound and blessing (intuition).

Every deep relation with the other is together wound and blessing. The other aspect of happiness that brings the inter-human relation to me is occupied by suffering. Human experiences flourish when we succeed  to live with this dramatic tension, while they become unliveable places in the long run when we want to get the blessing without the wound.

The science of economy, with its promise of a “life in common without sacrifice”, is in the modernity a wide way of fleeing far from “the wound of the other”; just because of this the humanism of the market economy is one of the most responsible causes (though not the unique cause) of the sad and solitary driftage of our times. It is a human condition without joy because of our having believed the formidable illusion that the market, or the bureaucratic    and hierarchical enterprise, would be able to offer us a good conviviality without pain and could lead us to encounter an unarmed and harmless other that would exchange with us, rather than fight against us. There is, however, the trick that this harmless encounter with the other without wounds is also an encounter without joy that does not lead to a fully human life of the person and the society. Today we are paying the cost of this illusion with the money of happiness ¹

At the same time, the way of a withdrawal from market, as well as that of the State, is not practicable –if it is true that, as human history shows us, where market does not reach it is normally not reciprocal love that takes its place; the emptiness of the contract, above all in big communities, is often filled in with various forms of “feudalisms”, where the stronger exploits the weaker. A world without market cannot be a decent society, yet a society with only markets is even less decent. The market, the area where we can meet without sacrifice in a peaceful and civil way, is a conquest of civilisation, an instrument of civilisation that, at times, can form an alliance with gratuity and become a means for freer and even more fraternal human conviviality. Community and market can be conjugated in a fruitful way, and many experiences of social and civil economy –Economy of Communion- are important factors (not theories) telling us that the alchemy of contract into gift can be realised. However, let us see on which conditions this can be realised.

The ambivalence of life in common

«By studying the important currents of the European philosophical thought concerning the definition of what is human, we reach an unexpected conclusion: the social dimension, the element of life in common is generally not considered as necessary for man. However, this thesis does not appear as such; it is rather a pre-supposition which is not formulated” ².

In these pages, we shall try to understand some of the reasons which have taken us, with modernity, to the statement of this individualistic and a-social vision of the human being. We shall see how the birth of modern science on economy is an important phase in the individualistic humanism of modernity. 

In the traditional society of the middle age, strongly modelled around a given understanding of Christianity, the possibility of life in common was deeply linked to the idea of sacrifice and suffering. 

We find the root of this vision in the Greek thought, above all in the ethics of Aristotle. This great thinker caught a paradox that reached the heart of the entire Western continent: the good life, the happy life is at the same time civil and vulnerable. In his Etica Nicomachea, he says that, since  «a happy man  needs friends” (chapter IX), for which “one cannot be happy by being alone”, it follows that it is impossible to reach happiness in solitude and in fleeing away from the civil life and from relation with the other. However, if happiness demands social relations, namely friendship and reciprocity, and if friendship and reciprocity are not fully controllable matters, it follows that our happiness depends on how much and if others give a response to and return our love, our friendship and reciprocity.  

If I need friends and reciprocity to be happy, a happy life is of an ambivalent nature: the other is for me joy and sorrow, the only possibility for a happy life, but also one on which my happiness depends. Thus, the “good life”, (the blessing) depends on others, who may wound me. However, if I take refuge in solitude and contemplation to avoid this vulnerability, namely on a shelter from others (the cynical neo-platonic alternative) ³, life cannot flourish in its fullness. Thus, we can see how the traditional thought of Aristotle, more than Aristotle himself, associated happy life with tragedy. This is what the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes about it, “These components of ‘good life’ are destined not to be self-sufficient at all. Instead, they will be vulnerable in a particularly deep and dangerous way”».⁴

In this sense, life in common, the communitas, carries imprinted in its flesh the mark of suffering. The Judaic world reminds us, with some symbols and myths contained, above all, in the Genesis, that the other is simultaneously a blessing (because I cannot be happy without him) and one who wounds me, just as in the narration of the fight of Jacob with the angel, which is the basic inspiration of this writing.

From individuality to  communitas

The pre-modern and old thought had intuited this ambivalent nature of “good life”; we cannot be happy without communitas; but it is just from the essential need of relation with the other and of his presence, that the good life of the community entwines itself, in various ways, with death –let us think, for instance, that the first city (Enoch) in the Bible was founded by the fratricide Cain, and that the foundation of Rome, also, is associated (in different myths) with the murder of Remo on behalf of Romolo. We find sacrifice and suffering in the human relations and if we do not accept this risk and this suffering, life cannot be fully human.

This is why the idea of common good in the pre-modern West was not associated to a sum of private interests; it was rather a subtraction: only by renouncing and risking something of “one’s own“ (of the private goods) we can build up “ours” (the common good), which is, therefore, common since it does not belong to anyone.

However, we must know that the pre-modern vision of the world, including the christianitas, remains substantially holistic: one can see the community, but not the individual. The Absolute absorbs everything, and individuality does not emerge.

 In particular the man of old does not see the relation “I-you, the horizontal inter-subjectivity among equals. The ambivalence of life in common, lived, experienced, intuited in the flesh, had not become a culture in the old world  nor in the pre-modern West.

In the old world, the inter-human relation was always mediated by the Absolute. The community was a unique body, an organism in which all he components were pre-ordained. To this purpose it is interesting to notice, in the narration of the fight of Jacob in Genesis, that the sacred author sees God himself, or an angel, in that “mysterious being” that fights: he does not see the other man (though the text speaks of “a man”). That culture could not see a man in that mysterious being, because the other with whom the person with whom to fights and gets wounded is God (or better, his angels, since man does not fight against God, who is totally the other). In the fights against God, however, the man of old could soon see the blessing behind the wound, the land of the fathers waiting for Jacob, thus he accepted it. A similar thing, instead, cannot be said of modern man who will not see in the other man the possibility of a blessing, but only that of the wound.

In this relation with God, the Absolute, suffering, limits, sin are oriented to the transcendent : everything acquires sense in this vertical perspective, a perspective that is translated into civil life because of a feudal and hierarchical system that mirrors a benevolent divine order (or intended like this) imprinted by the Good in human dynamics.

I do not need to be in deep relation with you in order to be happy. The fundamentally relational structure of pre-modernity is, therefore, triadic and unequal(but not Trinitarian, where, by definition, the Three persons are equal).

The entire middle-age, therefore, has been a slow emergence of the individuality category : a process that has developed harmoniously until the Tuscan civil humanism during the first part of the century four hundred, but which then exploded into a vast and irreversible process with the Renascence, the Reformation, the six hundred and the illuminist century. The renascence of the modern political economy is to be located in this process.

The discovery of the “you”: the angel becomes the other.

Among its fundamental characteristics of modernity there is the discovery of the other as a you, a subjectivity placed in front of me as different from me, but at a level of equality. The angel (the mysterious being that fights with Jacob) becomes the other

Once the Absolute gets out of His horizon, once the sun sets down, in the twilight  of the gods, the modern man lowers his gaze, looks around himself thus becoming aware of the presence of the other, of another who is not his own being and who, therefore, appears as a “non”.

Now we have reached the crucial moment of our talk: the discovery that modernity made of the other was the discovery of what is negative and of the “wound” that the otherness necessarily carries with itself. Modern man saw, above all, the wound, rather than the blessing of the other. The reality of the “I” and of the other who is not “I”, was not associated with the positive and the happiness that the other can give me, but with the negative, with the non-being, with the “non”. The enthusiasm for the discovery of my existence as subject (it was effectively enthusiasm) was accompanied also by the fear of the existence of the other. At the very instant in which modern man says “I”, he pronounces “you” with fear, thus he tries his best not to pronounce it, not to recognise him as equal and different from himself, even less as an indispensable font of happiness. The discovery of the other does not become a way of mutual recognition, but opens the season –still in full development- of searching new ways of fleeing away, to avoid meeting the eyes of the other

Hobbes e Smith depict two important moments of this epochal process in social studies. In synthesis, Hobbes with the Leviathan and Smith with the “invisible hand” of the market, have sought a substitute of the absolute as mediator of the I-you relation. Before the “non” that the discovery of the other carried with itself, the modern social thought has not wanted to face and to cross the negative and the wound, but has actually brought again the relational structure to the situation of pre-modernity: I-mediator-you, where the mediator God is substituted  by the Leviatan or the market that carry on, we must notice it, the same function as that of preventing the crossing of the “darkness”, namely the other with a face.  

«Tell me your name»

However, it is only when the other asks my name, namely enters a personal relation with me, that he blesses me, “Tell me your name”. Thus, he blessed him (Gen. 32,31). In the politics of Hobbes and the economy of Smith, there is no direct inter-subjectivity, but a mediated and anonymous rationality, for fear of the negative and of suffering (the “wound) that the personal “you” embodies. The contract –private in Smith and social in Hobbes- becomes the main instrument of this operation, where the “contract is first of all what is not gift, absence of  munus».⁵

The modern social sciences are born from the invention of a new third person: it is no longer the Third One (God), not even a third person that opens and universalises the I-you relation, a third person that is a “he” or a “it”, but a third one who is immune of our relation, and makes us immune reciprocally, by guaranteeing (or promising) a free land in which one can meet without getting wounded. 6 Modernity has preferred “he” to “you”. This is the invention of a new form of inter-human relation, the contract within the market, which is depicted as a promise of mediated relations without suffering.

The contract becomes a new form of reciprocity, radically alternative to the one founded on the free reciprocal gift: the gift unites us because it puts us on the condition of insisting on a common land which, by definition, does not belong to any of us, while the contract makes us reciprocally immune because what is mine is not yours, and vice-versa. The common land, above all when it is the land of relations among equals, is also a land of conflict and death, a conflict and a sorrow that modernity has not wanted to accept by renouncing –here is the point- to the fruit of the common lands. Modernity has wanted to break up, unsuccessfully,  the ineluctability of this alliance by paying a very high cost.   

The birth of economy in the ‘700, the work of Smith in particular, is a fundamental moment in the “immune project” of modernity. In the modern economy the common good is obtained without any form of sacrifice linked to a tragic and personal relation with the other: it is simply a sum of private interests (A+B), which, thanks to the market, can become  (A+Æa)+(B+Æb). The new economic communitas does not demand any wound and any risk: each one seeks one’s own personal interest and, without any personal encounter, the market (the “invisible hand”), produces the common good also indirectly:  a “cooperation without benevolence”, as Hume, a master of Smith, would say. 

If the market were a limited area, well distinct from life – like sport or the classic work- - without too many worries, and perhaps with a certain enthusiasm, we could accept the existence of this free zone where to meet without wounds and suffering. However, if the market becomes the  main form of organising life in common, if it enters the whole of civil life, then a civil relation entrusted only to the contract of market is insufficient and dangerous and the Leviathan State, which embodies the same mediate and impersonal logic, cannot heal the “failure” of a similar inter-human relation.

The embrace of the other  

The “paradox of happiness” substantially tells us of the high cost we are paying today for the absence of blessings which the economy of  immunitas has produced. The goods go on simulating more and more relations without wounds, but also without blessing. This is the source of the growing unhappiness of modern economy and societies of market

At this point we must go back to the splendid icon of Jacob’s fight, with which we have opened our talk.

This Biblical narration is pictured within the return of Jacob to the land of the fathers, after his exile in the land of his uncle Laban, to escape the anger of his cheated brother, Esau. To understand fully the blessing that the angel –the mysterious being- gave to Jacob, we need to start from the wounded fraternity between Jacob and his twin brother Esau. Genesis narrates of a previous blessing that Jacob snatched from old Isaac through cheating, taking it away from Esau illegally (See: Gen 27,5). The wound Jacob received from the angel was also a wound that re-established a broken fraternity, healing a more radical wound, namely that of fraternity.

The society of contemporary market also has wounded the fraternity: here also, through the cheating  of promising us a free good conviviality. This cheating must be expiated, if we want  to re-appropriate our human nature; only a “body to body” with the other in flesh and bones, along with the acceptance of the wound caused by the fight can re-establish today a new social bond, a new fraternity, which we don’t know yet how to glimpse at.

Who can see the wound of the other, heal it and receive the blessing for himself and for society? History shows us that it is only when the charisma are at work that we can see the blessing beyond the wound. Only a charism, namely the gift of different eyes capable of seeing things that others do not see (an evident example of charism is the artistic charism, though of different nature from the civil and social ones), knows how to see the embrace hidden in the fight.

Eyes that can see  

Poverty is a large area where the charisma are at work finding new solutions. Here, however, we need a premise of fundamental importance. We need to pay attention whenever we speak of poverty, because there are different forms of poverty. Not all kinds of poverty are inhuman: poverty is a plague, but also a beatitude if it is chosen for the love of others. The semantic spectrum of the term poverty goes from the tragedy of those who are subjected to poverty (because of others, of events), to the beatitude of those who choose poverty freely. This is actually the deep sense of action on behalf of tens of thousand missionaries who work in the most disadvantaged countries.

These are the various kinds of poverty of St. Francis from Assisi and of Gandhi, which cannot be uprooted from the earth, which cannot remain just as stories (to quote some expressions of the ONU), because if by chance this happened, humanity would terribly be impoverished. There is no happiness without any form of poverty  (of oneself, of goods, of power….) freely chosen: this poverty is one of those wounds to which a blessing is linked. In the Italian language there are more words to express undergone poverties: indigence and misery, which would be beautiful to be found oftener in the media.

The Iranian economist Majid Rahnema, for instance, mentions five forms of poverty: The poverty chosen by my mother and my Sufi grand-father, like the great poor of Persian mysticism; that of some poor people in the quarter where I spent the first twelve years of my life; that of men and women in developing countries, with an insufficient income to meet the needs created by society; that which is linked to unbearable deprivations suffered by a multitude of human beings who live humiliating forms of misery; finally, that depicted by the moral misery of wealthy classes and of some social areas in which I happened to find myself during the course of my professional career».⁷

I am personally convinced, also because of a direct experience, that no form of poverty can be solved without loving it: only he who can see something beautiful in this form of poverty (wound) succeeds in redeeming it (blessing). This is why we can never completely be set free from the tricks of poverty without the charisma: the institutions are not sufficient.  

Thus, the civil and economic role of the charisma becomes crucial: the charismatic persons, the persons who bear a charism or participate in it, redeem poverty because they see a treasure in the poor, in the sick and the prisoner: “Do not call them problems”, often Mother Theresa would repeat, “call them gifts”. In the missionary who goes towards the poor besides the agape (gift) form of love there is also the eros, the attraction, because he has eyes capable of seeing something beautiful that fascinates him (otherwise in the long run he would just flee away from problems and evil). Any charism, both of lay and religious inspiration, is a gift that offers “different eyes” to see a treasure in a thing that is only a problem for others.  

Historical hints of charismatic economy

The antique society saw the manual work as to be performed only by the slaves; Benedict and the fathers of the monastic movement saw in it something “more and different”, thus they put it at the centre of their new community life: ora et labora. The city of Assisi saw the poor as the refusal of society. Francis saw in them  «Madonna poverty», something so very beautiful as to take it as the ideal of his life and the life of many who followed and still follow him.

The institution of Montes Pietatis was born in the XV century with the Minor Franciscans. The said institution is the first form of the people’s Bank, born as a “cure of poverty” That pietatis remained the Imago pietatis, the Crucifix, that the Franciscans, thanks to the light of their charism, would see also in the victims of usury in the Italian cities of the first market economy

In the indigenes of Paraguay the domineering Portuguese and Spanish saw a species substantially not different from the animals of the jungle, of whom even the soul was denied. The charism of Ignatius of Loyola helped us to see in them something “more and different”, and to invent the prophetic experience of civilisation and inculturation called the XVII e XVIII, forms of social economies ante litteram.

Francesco di Sales, Giovanna di Chantal, and then Don Bosco, Scalabrini, Cottolengo, Don Calabria, Francesca Cabrini, Don Milani, Chiara Lubich, Don Giussani, received eyes to see in the poor, derelicts, street boys, immigrates, sick, even in the deformed persons something great and beautiful for whom it is worth while to spend one’s life, and that of the hundred thousands of people who, attracted and inspired by his charism, follow him.

Without the charisma of the founders of Orders and social Congregations between the seven hundred and nine hundred centuries, for instance, the history of the European welfare-state would have been quite different: hospitals and health-care centres, schools and instruction, the “care of uneasiness”, have been, no doubt, the fruit of public politics and “institutions”, but the action of the charisma has not surely been less important and generalised. I believe that the different history between the welfare state in Europe and that in the USA cannot be explained without considering the different role that the charisma have carried on in these two cultural contexts: a diversity that is rooted in the protestant ethics, on one side, and in the Catholic ethics on the other side. I do not want to refer to the known theory of Weber on the different protestant and catholic kinds of “spirit”; I want to put the accent on something different: the two different cultural contexts have brought different charisma to emergence: those in the USA, have taken essentially the aspect of philanthropy, while in Europe (surely the Mediterranean one) the aspect of “charismatic communities” (religious, but also civil: let us think of the co-operative movement and of the system of associations.

We could see also beyond the religious boundary, finding myriads of persons as bearers of charisma who found social co-operatives, ONG, schools, hospitals, banks, syndicates. They fight for the rights of others, of animals, children, environment because they see things “more and different” from all others. In particular, today the social and civil economy is filled with charisma.

A flourishing of charisma

In the present age, if it is true that some frontiers show a radical tendency to individualism as well as spiritual impoverishment, it is equally true that never as in these years we witness a flourishing of charisma for the thousand battles of civilisation and freedom.

Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, but also Mohammad Yunus, or to quote some from our home, Andrea Riccardi, Don Benzi or Ernesto Olivero: they are diverse persons, but all of them are capable of not fleeing away from the problems of the world; they are rather attracted by them, loving them and transforming the wound into blessing, suffering into love and the cross into resurrection.

Moreover, though I have stated that the form of love typical of a charismatic is the agape, we must always keep in mind that the agape-love is fruitful and humanly mature when it includes also the forms of philia and of eros. The bearer of a charism is not essentially an altruistic person, even less a philanthropist; he is rather a builder of community (philia) and a person fallen in love (eros). He who, animated by a charism, seeks the derelicts, the lepers, the “lonely”, goes to them with an attitude like that of the bride of the Song of songs who seeks and yearns for the bridegroom.

This is eminently true for the religious charisma, but it is not less true of the charisma which are not explicitly or primarily religious. Only passionate people who have fallen in love are able to attract and to drag others after them, and we know that passion belongs to the repertory of the eros.

I am convinced that when the Nobel for peace M. Yunus started, in the 70s, his Grameen Bank he did it because he was deeply attracted and “in love” with the persons of poor villages in his Country. No problem can be solved without eros, because the man who is helped must feel to be attractive, beautiful, lovable. If a problem is not passionately loved, it cannot be redeemed

The Nine hundred has been a century very rich in charisma, a particularly coloured flourishing century bearing plenty of fruit. Theresa of Calcutta and Chiara Lubich, also as women (there is a special bond between charism and the feminine gender, between “ charismatic profile” and “Marian profile”, in the words of von Balthasar), are for many of us the charismatic face of our times. Mother Theresa spent her life for the poorest of the poor; Chiara, because of a charism born from the Cry of abandonment of Jesus on the cross, sought and loved today’s new poverties, such as poverty of relations, of God, sense of life, happiness and all this urged her to seek the many disunities of today, loving them as an answer to the Cry. “O my lord, give me all the lonely”, we find written in one of the charismatic meditations of Chiara Lubich (1960).

Fine art is another environment of the human nature where the charisma become evident.

In fact, the charismatic resembles the artist very much and the artist is surely the bearer of a charism. It is not by chance that, yesterday and today, many artists flourish around great charismatic persons. An artist who works with wood once said to me, “Every now and then I find a piece of wood in the forest or in the heap of my barrack, and I see a sculpture within it”. Those who are not artist usually see in a piece of wood something to be burnt in the stove; the artist, instead, has different eyes and can see in it a deer, an eagle, a rose, a crucifix. 

The charismatic persons are just like this: they can see master-pieces of art in people and situations that are discarded by all others; they can see a rose with its thorn, the Risen Lord together with the crucifix. The artists are “transformers of ugliness into beauty, of “wounds” into “blessings”: a masterpiece of art generally is born from a pain loved and made sublime in itself, in others, in nature. Those who do not believe in the presence of charisma in humanity should explain the presence and the action of the artists.  

Charisma and innovations

There is no fully human development and no social innovation without charisma. In the social state there is a mechanism very much similar to the one supposed by Schumpeter (1911) for the entrepreneurial innovation. In his theory of economic development, the great Austrian  economist proposed one of the most suggestive and relevant theories of the ‘900, distinguishing between “innovator” enterprisers and “imitator” enterprisers.

The innovator is a person who breaks the stationary state (where there are neither profits nor losses), and, thanks to a new idea, he creates development, thus carrying economy forward. Then, like a swarm of bees, attracted by new opportunities of profit, more “imitator” enterprisers arrive to treasure up the given innovation; from that moment forward, this becomes an integral part of the entire market and society, thus taking back the system to a balance and to the stationary state; until new innovators arrive who push forward the poles of the economic development for a new process of innovation-imitation, namely a true virtual circle that creates richness and development

I am convinced that a similar mechanism is at work in the social state: a dynamic between “charism” and “institution”. The charismatic innovates, sees unsatisfied needs, discovers new poverties, opens new ways for solidarity and pushes ahead the “human poles” of civilisation. Then the institution arrives (the State, for instance), to imitate the innovator, treasures up the innovation and transforms it into “normal”, institutionalising it.

Let us think, for instance of the theme on social balance. In the 70s some social innovators –charismatic we could say- freely started to write down not only an economic and financial  report but also a social and environmental report. Today, after more than thirty years, to write a social balance in some sector is becoming an obligation of the law: the State imitates, arrives and institutionalises.

Another example on the theme of ethical consume: the first persons to innovate and to propose higher ethical standards in production were some charismatic persons (the founders of just commerce in solidarity, for instance). Today, even the most traditional enterprises and famous economic institutions (multi-nationals) are imitating them, raising their own standards, while the States an the international institutions go on making obligatory certain social and human innovation (work of the minors, for instance). 

We find an analogous process in the field of human and environmental rights: bearers of charisma bring innovations, push forwards the human frontier and the institutions that follow. Therefore, the innovators are soon reached by the institutions (luckily), and if they are not able of new innovations, soon they become not distinguishable for the imitators. This does not mean that there is no charism also within the institutions: the dynamic charism-institution exists also within the institutions themselves. Moreover, the charismatic realities get institutionalised with the passing of time and, therefore, they need reformers, “prophets”, to keep the charismatic dimension alive.

 The true innovator is never afraid of the imitator: when the innovation is in crisis, the imitator is seen as a rival in a game at zero sum, and the whole attention falls back on the re-distributive aspects of the exchange: the cake is taken as a datus, and we try only to get the thickest slice ^8.

Conclusion

In the pre-modern world the charisma have seen and cured above all the physical wounds, giving birth to structures of blessing, such as hospitals, schools, orphanages, etc.: they were wounds loved by many charisma of founders of religious orders, not only (let us think of the conservatives), who have made the human more human and the human existence more bearable for many people. Then, the institutions imitated them, thanking God.

In the modernity, as we have seen, the wound of the other is, above all, a wound of relations, the incapacity of meeting the other and blessing each other reciprocally; in the post-modernity, this wound shows always more its dramatic nature.

Today humanity needs charisma, different eyes, which may help us to see the blessings in the wounds, in the spiritual and relational plagues: that may help us to see the embrace hidden in the fight with the other.

I believe that the charisma and the religious life can give, and actually give today, the considerable contribution of these “different eyes” to the common good.

Angelo Amato
Secretary in the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith
Piazza Città Leonina, 1 - 00193 Roma

NOTE

1. Cf L. BRUNI, L’economia, la felicità, gli altri, Città Nuova, Roma 2004; T. SCITOVSKY, L’economia senza gioia, Città Nuova, Roma 2007.

2. T. TODOROV, La vita in comune, Pratiche Editrice, Milano 1998, 15. 90

3. Diogenes, for instance, lived in a cask (barrel), trying to eliminate needs and desires to the end of not depending on anything for his happiness.  

4. M. NUSSBAUM, La fragilità del bene, Il Mulino, Bologna 1996 [1986], 624.

5. R. ESPOSITO, Communitas, Einaudi, Torino 1998, xxv.

6. The philosophical work of L. ALICI is excellent on the meaning of the “third one”: Il terzo escluso, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo (Milano) 2004.

7. M. RANHEMA, Quando la povertà diventa miseria, Einaudi, Milamo 2005, X.

8. About  the “temptations “ of the Ces and similar experiences, see L. BRUNI, Reciprocità, Mondadori, Milano 2006, chapter 9.