Brown Bag Seminar: An attempt to reconcile political economy and civil economy: the road of fraternity

The paper is about the role of ‘fraternity’ in economics. ‘Fraternity’ is a word that is rarely used in economic theorizing although Bruni and Sugden’s effort to popularize it in 2008. In the past, economists-philosophers employed expressions such as ‘mutual assistance’ (Genovesi), ‘mutual sympathy’, ‘fellow-feeling’ (Smith) to indicate something similar. However, these cannot be considerated synonyms of ‘fraternity’ although they share some features with B&S’s ‘fraternity’. The aforementioned concepts do not capture some aspects that ‘fraternity’ does. Therefore, ‘fraternity’ can add something to the economic discussion because it can contribute to the explanation of some market relationships and economic phenomena that other terms are not able to fully catch. I argue the importance of introducing the concept in question into the economic discourse is also significant as it encapsulates elements both of the political economy tradition as well as the civil economy one and thus it represents a link between the two approaches.