Abstract
It is common among scholars who study Italian civil tradition the idea that French personalism contains the anthropological basis in which best fits the civil economy. However, even though this idea is often repeated, it is not easy to find papers who demonstrate it clearly. Even more, it is not easy to find papers that contain—in a rigorous and systematic way—the anthropological basis for all subsequent developments of the civil economy. In this paper we take into account the works of one of the most important French personalists: Jacques Maritain. Thus, we provide a detailed description of Maritain’s social anthropology, and make a close comparison between his proposals and those of the civil tradition, to conclude that the work of this philosopher can be offered as a strong anthropological basis for this tradition.
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Notes
Summa theologica, part I, q. 29, a. 1.
Summa theologica, part I, q. 75, a. 5, 1ª answer to the objections.
Summa theologica, part I, q. 75, a. 4.
Summa theologica, part I, q. 75, a. 5, second answer to the objections.
That is, in Summa theologica part I, q. 94, a. 3; part I, q. 92, a. 4º, second answer; part I, q. 88, a. 1, fourth paragraph.
Summa theologica, part I, q. 85, a. 8, third answer to the objections.
He repeats it in many of his works, but it is clearly expressed in La personne et le bien commun (1947).
We will come over the term civilization at the 4.4 paragraph, where we will explain the maritenian idea of human development.
We will come back on it on the 4.3 paragraph.
It was a 825-copy edition in two volumes of his work Lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile, published by Paolo y Nicola De Simone brothers in Naples in 1768–1770.
This approach fits with the Fable of the Bees by Mandeville.
Many biographies of famous people testimony this idea, such as Agrippa, who often paid public works with his own funds. It is evident how far away are our societies from such conceptions of the common good.
In our view, it would be reasonable to identify the maritenian corp politique with the civil society in the Italian tradition (the same idea is in Fernández Aguayo 2011, p. 42).
Similar to the idea of corp politique in Maritain.
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López-Casquete, M. Jacques Maritain: an anthropological basis for the civil economy tradition. Int Rev Econ 63, 129–157 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-015-0241-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-015-0241-0