Personalist Economics: Reconstructing Economics on Different Philosophical Premises

Abstract

Personalist economics is at once something old and something new. It is something old in the sense that it is the most recent and, we hope, the most advanced thinking about economic affairs from the perspective of Catholic social thought in its more than 100-year history of development. Personalist economics is something new in the sense that little or nothing has been published on this subject, either as a book or in the periodical literature.¹

The individual today is often suffocated between two poles represented by the state and the marketplace. At times it seems as though he exists only as a producer and consumer of goods or as an object of state administration. People lose sight of the fact that life in society has neither the market nor the state as its final purpose, since life itself has a unique value which the state and the market must serve. Man remains above all a being who seeks the truth and strives to live in that truth, deepening his understanding of it through a dialogue which involves past and future generations.

We are not dealing here with man in the “abstract,” but with real, “concrete,” “historical” man.

Centesimus Annus, chapters 5 and 6.