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Notes
We must keep in mind that Niccolò Machiavelli lived at a time of great moral and political crisis. The longing for society of the early civil humanists had produced not republics of free citizens, but more frequently authoritarian principalities, which were waging interminable wars that transformed the Italy of the Municipalities or the Civic Communities into lands with continuous excursions by foreign armies, throwing the populace into great fear and unease. Philosophers took refuge in Neo-platonism, magical esotericism, or in the utopian literature. Machiavelli founded modern politics as an independent field on new anthropological grounds. Civic virtues had shown themselves incapable of creating and maintaining peace and a wider mindset; a new foundation was needed, with a different justification of the possibility of peaceful cohabitation. It is here that, at least in Machiavelli’s Principe, political virtue makes its appearance: and here 'political' turns into the opposite of 'civil'.
A certain philosophy of otherness, from Emmanuel Lévinas’s Altérité et Transcendance to Roberto Esposito, feels that it must overcome this Thou/alter-ego in an external "he/she" that makes relationality open and transcendent: “All the rhetoric of the excess of the other notwithstanding, in a one-on-one comparison, the other is conceivable only and ever in relation to the 'I'. The other cannot be but non-self, its reverse and its shadow” (Esposito 1998, 129).
In Bruni (2006) there is a reconstructed this historical evolution that led to the rise of modern individualist economics; see this work for further study.
There would be much to say regarding the Protestant culture in which both Hobbes and Smith worked; the rejection of mediators in fact created other mediators that, in the long run, are emerging as tyrants no less fierce than those of pre-modern times.
Roberto Esposito in fact points out that the most radical contradiction is not the one between community and society (as in classic social thought) but between communitas and immunitas.
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Acknowledgments
I should like to thank Pier Luigi Porta for the support in the organization of the Conference “Market and Happiness”, and for the ten-odd years (thus far) of the Economics and Happiness research project at Milano-Bicocca, which has been one of the happiest experience of my whole life. I wish to thank also the colleagues and staff of Economics Department of Milano-Bicocca. I have also a no-less significant obligation to the Editors and Associates of this Journal and, more generally, to the members of the HEIRs Association, Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations, who have been a continuing source of inspiration and the effective driving force behind a whole range of pioneering research projects through the years.
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The argument of the present introduction is further developed in Bruni (2012) and Bruni, forthcoming.
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Bruni, L. Introduction. Int Rev Econ 59, 321–333 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-012-0172-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-012-0172-y