For example, in the paper Everyday Milieux and Culture of Displacement: A Comparative Investigation into Space, Place and (Non,) Attachment within the German-Polish Twin City Guben/Gubin, Jorg Durrschmidt and UlfMatthiesen argue that "metropolitan regions [like Berlin or Montreal] and borderland regions [like Guben/Gubin] are of similar significance" for "detecting new patterns of culture within the shifting landscapes of an emerging global cultural economy." In this regard, the linguistic barrier and the problem of an economically dominant (though possibly gastronomically weaker!) German culture resonates with the linguistic tensions that, as Nielsen et al. show, surface in the amalgamation debates in Montreal. Boundaries have legal and/or social significance, and mark the diversity of cities along a variety of sociocultural lines. While Nielsen et al. look at the amalgamation debates in light of a functional democratic polity that both participates in the debate and uses its legalrational authority to impos e its view, Durrschmidt and Matthiesen show that developments on the larger political scale (within the Berlin-Brandenburg region and the European Union) do not necessarily take hold at the grassroots level.
Durrschmidt and Matthiesen show, through a close narrative analysis of two case studies (Paul and Olga), how a relation to place is developed, and give an example of a phenomenological approach to the study of the culture of the city. Through the application of their method, they show that an attachment to place can be pragmatic (because of house ownership or economic opportunities); that in this globalized age it can involve "a tendency to overlook the neighbour as the nearest other"; that an attachment to place exists but is tenuous because, in the one case, it is tied to ownership of a house that is seen as a "protective cocoon" ("the world was outside, and we were inside, the door is locked"), while in the other case the attachment is tied to the material benefits the town offers ("As far as we are concerned, we have definitely improved our status, and only because of that we could build our house"). Durrschmidt and Matthiesen provide a practical example of one element of the project; namely that it is crucial to research regional cultural specificities in order to understand contemporary transnational developments. In this case, "what can be observed is a de-linking of place identity in the narrower sense from urban culture and local identity in the wider sense." As well, they show how a development that at the political level sought to regenerate the city's decaying economy by re-positioning it as a 'Eurotown' is, on the ground, treated with suspicion and reserve (surprise!), thereby showing that despite the "epochal changes in the post socialist period," the 'soft' elements of local milieux (the attachment to one's house, the ambivalent sense of belonging, the connection one has to one's neighbour, the ruptured connection to the past) "have proved to be astonishingly persistent."
In reading this paper, one is struck by the rather narrow self-interest that motivates Paul and Olga as they describe their attachment to their town. Here we see that the made place that is the city is, in this case, subject to the victory of what Arendt calls "the animal laborens," where "individual life" is "part of the life process," and the only life purpose needed is "to assure the continuity of one's own life and the life" of one's family (1958: 321). Though it appears that one (Paul) is more closed, and the other (Olga) is more open to the world, in both cases there is an interest in protecting consumer power. Yet, is the case of Paul and Olga in Guben/Gubin that different from many city-dwellers in North America, in that they have a sense of place based on the possession of a house that is a protective cocoon or a site of economic opportunity? Is not the focus on assuring the continuity of one's own life and the life of one's family the precise reason why suburban living is so popular? The Canadian wr iter Charles Foran (1995: 72) describes growing up in suburban Toronto as follows: "After all, suburbs like Willowdale didn't promote belonging; they promoted living -- prosperous, anonymous living. So long as a sense of history or belonging didn't interfere, didn't complicate matters, it was ok." How different are the more naked expressions of self-interest by Paul and Olga from the life that folks in Willowdale, Toronto live? Do not both express the philosophy that life itself is the highest good? And although the process of urbanization expresses and privileges this life philosophy, does it not also pose dangers to the place of the city? It is such dangers (e.g. consumerism, gentrification, sprawl, the need to integrate the suburban growth with core vitality, etc.) with which the papers in this special issue are concerned.
Yet, place-attachment and place-making are complex, contested, and ambiguous practices. In this case, place attachment to a small, divided town threatened with decline and decay, and subject to the rapid changes of de-industrialization and post-socialist transformation, is persistent but also somewhat contingent. The attachment to a place is 'for-the-time-being'; is entered into primarily through one's investment and self-interest (house-owning, connections to one's family, opportunities for social mobility). In the case of the two Guben! Gubin participants, the stability and durability of the made place exist because each has a connection to the place through the fabrication of the home (in the one case, a home built by the family of his grandmother, and the other, a home built from the fruits of economic success). The loss of a sense of permanence and stability that is one of the most distinguishing features of consumer society is not complete here; history, relationality and identity still mark their relat ion to place. Yet the story of a place identity de-linked from urban culture is perhaps the limit of the Guben/Gubin story. This story leaves us with the question of whether the sense of stability which comes from owning a home is as strong as it could be. Is there not a stronger notion of a made place - one that is not so vulnerable to the cyclic swing of external economic forces?
Mary Corcoran's paper, Place Attachment and Community Sentiment in Marginalised Neighbourhoods: A European Case Study, takes up the issue of place attachment in another context. Revisiting research done on economically precarious neighbourhoods in Dublin and five other European cities, she explores how "a sense of place is socially constructed, and how a place-bound identity is elaborated in the context of the neighbourhood and expressed in its symbolic locale." In this case, we have a sense of place linked, rather than de-linked, to locality. After a review of the ever-burgeoning literature on the concept of place, Corcoran explores what city residents say (primarily in the form of complaint) about the attachment to a place that is suffering either decline (because of increased drug and crime activity) or change (gentrification), or, in the case of Kilmainham in Dublin, both. She finds that the notion of place in these neighbourhoods is "unstable, ambiguous and contested." Ironically, but not surprisingly wh en one reflects on it, place attachments, rather than being dependent on the idea of an idyllic agreeable community, co-exist with intra-neighbourhood divisions. "These neighbourhoods and those who reside within them have been battered by the effects of de-industrialization, environmental degradation and stigmatization. Yet, they draw on 'memory traces' to motivate and mobilize themselves to resist the effects of these exclusions," thus challenging the facile truth that decline in the external environment automatically leads to decline in self-image. Perhaps here, in the poorer neighbourhoods of cities like Dublin, Toulouse and soon, the theorist can find a stronger relation to place. A sense of place with a more decisive relation to memory and a sense of tradition appears to offer the possibility of providing resources to resist external marginalisation and alienation.
"When asked to talk about the neighbourhood, respondents frequently resorted to elaborating specific memories.... They recounted stories of how the neighbourhood came into being, how they came to be located there, and how their sense of attachment to place was developed and nurtured over the years through their immersion in close familial and neighbour networks.... These are all practices of doing and sustaining shared history and collective memories," Corcoran says. In contrast to Paul and Olga, who have networks of extended family or business networks, here we have a story of residents, in Dublin for example, who, through the practices of doing and sustaining shared history, reify an image of a cleaner, friendlier, drug-free place as a way of resisting fatal resignation, or even as a way of resisting just acting narrowly to ensure their own economic survival. This tells us something about the possibilities of place-making in the made place that is the city. The place that is made includes the making of stor ies about the place, stories which connect and make real a past that is lost, but also retained in the motivation it provides to act (chase away drug dealers or clean the shared stairway).
Corcoran concludes with the question of whether the "long-term residents' sense of place attachment can be integrated with the change gentrification brings"; that is, of the change of incoming residents who are more attached to their cars and mobile phones than they are to the neighbourhood. How do residents of a place deal with newcomers who treat the place in which they reside as a space to activate and locate their own desires rather than as a place suffused with memory? It is the memory that is sustained by founding stories that enables one of the residents to comment on the appearance of this relatively new, if ubiquitous, urban actor, the gentrifier, in the following way: "Some of the houses are now being bought by people who are anonymous, who don't want to know or get involved and that is offensive to people." Anonymous, uninvolved living, seen as normal or neutral in Willowdale, is seen as an offence in this poor Dublin neighbourhood. The European response to change does not so easily forget the hist ory of the place.
As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, a theme running through all the papers (because it is a part of the contemporary culture of cities) concerns the challenge global developments bring to city spaces and the problematic sense of place which emerges from that. The new political economy, represented by voices like Harvey (1989), Sassen (1991) and Castells (1996), is one of the more contemporary theoretic discourses sustaining this position. The argument is that, as Belanger says, "urban spaces are re-constructed, and reinvented, through their positioning in an international network of urban economies: The papers by Corcoran and Durrschmidt and Matthiesen make reference to this literature, but also to local resistance to and local cultural understandings of the processes privilegd by the political economy literature. Belanger, in Urban Space and Collective Memory: Analysing the Various Dimensions of the Production of Memory, shows the illuminating power of this theoretic position to help understa nd the move of the hockey venue in Montreal from the Forum to the Molson Centre. As she remarks at the beginning of her paper, "markers of memory are everywhere in the city." While it is precisely these markers that provide for the objectivity of the made world Arendt was talking about, it is also the kind of permanence that is under threat in our increasingly consumeristic age. Belanger, in adopting the political economy perspective, seeks to show not only the production of objects like the Molson Centre, but also the "production of urban collective memory" around this more concrete production. In the hierarchy of life activities (survival, production, and speech), Belanger privileges the homo faber point of view through a production approach which takes consumption rather than use as its objective: if in Quebec "hockey is a kind of religion," then the Montreal Forum "has been the game's Temple, its sanctuary." Yet, in light of contemporary developments in urban entertainment spectacles, this 'temple' no lon ger measured up. Not unlike the reasons for renovating Ireland's sports temple, Croagh Park in Dublin, around the same time, the old Forum did not have enough room for "added luxury boxes, was too uncomfortable for new up-market spectators and too expensive for enhanced media hook-ups and new media formats."
Yet, if this is a story of Montreal's encounter with the homogenizing power of globalization, it has interesting local references. Aware of the importance of symbolic meaning of the old Forum to Montrealers, Molson, a Quebec-based international beer conglomerate, organized a promotional campaign that mobilized the history of the hockey team les Canadiens "to persuade Montrealers that popular memories and traditions could in fact be effectively transported from the old venue to the new one." Belanger frames the discourse of this move around both the Molson strategy of temporary repackaging of memories, and the cracks in this strategy, cracks which created the possibility of alternative memory production. Pointing to "the complaints from people who live, own businesses or spend a lot of time in the area being abandoned," Belanger states that the "symbolic attachment to the old building was more diverse and revealing of spatial memories than Molson had suggested." Thus, we have the story of a powerful instrument al actor and various attempts to voice alternative, if more collective, self-interest. In this battle of interests, Montreal as a durable object, and remembrance (mnemosyne, the mother of the muses) as an inspiration rather than a tool, disappear. That this danger is a feature of the contemporary city is true; from the point of view of the Molsons and that of political economy, Montrealers are viewed primarily as customers, a view which privileges the Molson Centre as a non-place, in Auge's sense. That this danger may also be a feature of a theoretic frame that privileges the global market in its view of the city is another question to be addressed.
Addressing the limits of various theoretic voices, or, to put it another way, remembering the place of the theorist seeking to understand place-making in the city, means making reflexivity part of the research. The latter concern, by virtue of our interest in uncovering the specificity of the city, is a methodological feature of this project, and it is our thesis that the political economy discourse -- though it illuminates certain aspects of globalization, and, as such, is a central interlocutor for this project -- is nonetheless limited in its ability to recognize and understand such specificity (see Smith 2000 for one -- if somewhat external -- critique of this theoretic frame). Ironically, this theoretic discourse, as a discourse, could end up privileging the very phenomenon of homogenization it decries in practice. For example, the move described by Belanger was accomplished in a fashion befitting Montreal's particular past. The marching of images of famous dead players from the Forum to the new Molson C entre in a parade that attracted over 200,000 spectators can be interpreted as a local spin on a global phenomenon. Or, depending on one's understanding of culture, power, and the power of culture, it could be seen as a global spin on a culturally significant local 'religion.' That is, Montreal, a city with as many Catholic church steeples as Rome, would have been witness to many processions and parades celebrating dead heros, saints and martyrs. Parading the dead, as memory production, may well be a part of Montreal's history. Belanger's paper shows the sophistication of the political economy discourse, even in the case of an all-Quebec project such as this; and she also recognizes that the political economy discourse has "some limits in terms of building a framework for agency and multiple memories in the city that also participate in the ambiguous process of remembrance of the city."
Producing objects and producing memory is also the concern of Elke Grenzer's article, Topographies of Memory in Berlin: The Neue Wache and the Memorial for Murdered Jews of Europe. Like Corcoran, Grenzer is concerned with the way the "past can be a source of productivity in the present." However, in this case it is not the stories about the old neighbourhood but stories about the frenetic building of memorials in Berlin that are at issue. "Since the fall of the wall," she tells us, "about 600 new placards, monuments and memorials now commemorate a past that Berlin had left unacknowledged in the years after its decisive role in the Second World War. As a modern changing city," she goes on to say, "Berlin is absorbed in its present as the stepping stone for the future while at the same time engaged in an extensive reconstruction of its past." The history of the Neue Wache or 'New Guardhouse' monument/memorial, its fate to represent what each ruling party (William III, Weimar Republic, Nazi, GDR, and now the new ly reunified Germany) chooses to remember, is a near perfect illustration that "the past is voiceless, because the present always speaks up and for a past." From the attempt of William III to celebrate, after the defeat of Napoleon, the power of the Prussian King, through the intention of the Weimar Republic to celebrate the fallen soldiers of World War I, to Kohl's transformation of the monument into the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny, Grenzer provides the story of Berlin's attempt to deal with its own ruptured and problematic past. That the story concludes with a memorial that intends to be a "space where everyone is a victim, including those who participated in the victimization of others" points to Arendt's (1961/8:44) claim about our world today, that "immortal things, works and deeds, events and even words, though men might still be able to externalize them," now "share the fate of all being -- they begin to perish the moment they have come into ex istence." In some ways, as a remembrance of suffering and death, this memorial, ironically, immortalizes the contemporary recognition of the fate of all made things, reminding us, again, of the way Berlin continues to manage to represent and speak to the contemporary age.
Where Europe struggles with memory traces as its cities are remade, the made place that is the city also finds itself struggling with the need to make and re-make its own boundaries. This is particularly evident in North American cities such as Montreal and Toronto, which clearly speak to our present age in this regard. Just as walls defined the boundary of the medieval city, distinguishing between those who belonged inside and those outside, the city at the beginning of the 21st century struggles with its limits. In their textbook on Cities and Urban Maciones and Parillo (2001: 105-135) state that sprawl and edge city growth are two of the major concerns facing North American cities of the 21st century. Both of these forms of land development make identifiable boundaries and limits problematic. This, of course, has consequences for self-governance, for dialogue and for civic life in the city. As Arendt says, "acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity.... Human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech" (1958:173). This is precisely the issue taken up in Public Culture and the Dialogics of Democracy: Reading the Montreal and Toronto Amalgamation Debate, by Nielsen et al.
As this paper points out, amalgamation seems to be a particularly Canadian solution to problems of urban governance. In Canada, municipalities are under the jurisdiction of the provincial legislatures. In the case of both Toronto and Montreal, the provinces initiated and legislated amalgamation. In both cases there was a government proposal to amalgamate and local opposition to that proposal, and, in both cases also, a city/suburb division. Yet, in Toronto the suburbs tended to support the amalgamation and the city opposed it, while in Montreal the opposite was true -- amalgamation tended to be opposed in and by the suburbs. To understand each case requires taking into account the cultural differences between Montreal and Toronto. The specificity of Toronto and Montreal manifests itself in the way each engages with these kinds of vexing issues. "Each city has its own truth, its own memory and its own sense of itself and difference from the other. Indeed," Nielsen et al. say, "imagining the differences between Toronto and Montreal in a dialogic way means recognizing the difference and reinforcing identities both within the cities and between them."
As Nielsen et al. go on to show, the debate in Montreal needs to be understood against the background of the question of Quebec independence, which itself gives rise to "contradictory and fully signifying multi-sided discourses that have been in open debate for generations." "Taken on a world scale," they go on to say, "the peaceful multi-sided background ambiguity of the Quebec question and its societal culture -- which needs to be read in the debates over amalgamation -- is itself a huge part of what makes Montreal a unique place." It is this culture, this irresolvable cause, which makes Montreal, as Jan Morris has said, a city like no other in the world.
The concern of the authors of this paper is for the need for a healthy Bakhtinian dialogism in public culture: "Official voices of support for government policy fill in one side of the dialogism in public culture... while opposition voices fill in the other. We see this two-sided discourse as a resource of public culture which draws citizens out from the particularity and specificity of their association in civil society into open democratic debate and expression." In some cases, citizens are drawn into open and democratic debate to protect what they already have ("my home, my town, my community") and in other cases to expand the conversation ("the more we talk, the more we get to... understand one another, the more we will do things together"). The authors conclude that this dialogue did not necessarily lead to a mutual understanding in the concrete sense that both sides came to an agreed understanding. In fact, there was much suspicion and distrust throughout the debate, a distrust that was left as a residu e of the debate. Perhaps this distrust is an outcome when dialogue is constrained to take the form of debate, where there is less freedom for the 'to and fro' that, according to Socrates, is the central element of genuine dialogue. Whereas the latter is an inquiring dialogue which privileges the freedom to pursue the question 'with' the other, the former is forced into a 'for and against' relationship with the other. Such 'being with,' according to Arendt, is the crucial reason the ancient Greeks needed to invent democracy as a political form, as it enabled the public disclosure of the 'who,' the unique identity of the agent. Of course, as I reiterate the central theme of my introduction, methodological approaches and substantive concerns inextricably intertwine here. In this case, is the issue of dialogue just a members' concern (e.g. of Montrealers), or is it also a theorist's (project researchers) concern, or both? Nielsen et al. refer to the idea of 'the obligation of justice' at the end of their article. This obligation expresses, in part, a civic concern with the distribution of resources. However, speaking reflexively, what is the 'obligation of justice' with regard to the practice of dialogue? In what way does the voice of this paper practice this 'obligation of justice'? With regard to the practice of dialogue in all of the articles that follow, is the 'obligation of justice' to correct and to criticize, or to dialogue and exemplify, or both? Such questions should fertilize a reflexive reading of this issue.
Humans make a place for themselves in the made place that is the city when the city is not so overwhelmed by a past (e.g. Rome) that the present can only bask in its past glory. Such a problem is decidedly not the concern of the authors of these papers, or the concern of these four cities. However, when a city is always being remade in a celebration of the productivity of humankind, it does not lend itself to being a place fit for humans. The danger of the latter is that the city, "dazzled by the abundance of its growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never ending process, would no longer be able to recognize its own futility -- the futility of a life which does not fix or realize itself in a permanent subject which endures after its labour is past" (Arendt 1958: 135). This danger is a problem for the cities discussed here and for every city that seeks to have a place in the global economy. Yet all of the papers show that, in the face of this danger, there is still a place for making a pl ace in the city. Whether it be the contingent place accessed through home ownership; the stronger sense of place recovered in stories in cities like Dublin; the theoretic and practical debate that a city generates over moving a place of memory in Montreal; a city coming to terms with its own place in a ruptured and shameful past; or a city passionately and emotionally engaged with the redrawing of its boundaries; all show that the culture of these cities (except perhaps Guben/Gubin -- which is why it is an interesting extreme case) makes a place for place-making. The made place, that is, the city as a place fit for humans, must inspire a sense of the significance of its identity in the world, that it is worth renewing, while allowing for the possibility of new action that could not have been foreseen -- so that the city is renewed by being made new again.
As stated at the beginning of this introduction, the Culture of Cities project brings together a diverse group of researchers from a diverse range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. These researchers are graduate students and faculty, young and senior scholars, English-speaking Canadian, and French-speaking Quebecois, Irish and English, German and French. While in this special issue we emphasize the social science side of the research, it is a social science which resembles the human sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften. The project privileges an interpretive approach to the culture of cities on the grounds that it is only through a disciplined interpretation that the specific nature of the culture that grounds all phenomena (even, according to the theoretic perspective of this project, economic, geographic, spatial and historical phenomena) can be made visible by being brought to language. That said, however, readers will recognize on a quick perusal of the papers in this issue (includin g the paper that is this introduction) a range of styles, topics and even approaches. Disciplined interpretation or radical interpretive inquiry (Bonner 1997) itself embraces a diversity of ways of accessing the culture of a phenomenon. Ethnography, content analysis, phenomenological research on lived experience, application of contemporary theories of place and space to a discourse on a city icon, or engaging theories and practices of architectonics, are among the ways that culture is brought to the fore.
The very diversity of voices is part of what defines the research topics in the project, the city itself, and the interpretive approach of our project. Our method is to tease out "the reality of the public realm [or city]," a reality which "relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised" (Arendt 1958: 57). So readers will recognize in the papers a German intensity, with detailed analysis in light of EU developments; an Irish focus on narratives and stories; a Quebecois interest in contemporary theorizing and hockey; a French-Canadian interest in the issues of differentiation and sovereignty raised by amalgamation; a German-Canadian interest in the ruptured and shameful past of Berlin, and so on. To reiterate, the place of these cities is inseparable from the theoretic voices that seek to understand their place and this project makes reflection on that voice (i.e. self-r eflection) both a resource and topic of our approach.
This publication announces the beginning of a more sustained focus on the international side of the Culture of Cities project. To date, the research, analysis, graduate student involvement and conferences have concentrated on developing student projects (Moore and Risk 2001), on the study of the city as a site of scenes (Public 22/23, 2001), on one exemplary application of the theoretical basis of the project (Blum 2003), and on the study and comparison of Montreal and Toronto (Sloan 2003). However, even as we concentrated on the Montreal and Toronto comparison, networks of researchers were established in Europe to provide the basis for continuing the comparative research on and in Berlin and Dublin. The work of three of our European colleagues, Mary Corcoran in Dublin, and Jorg Durrschmidt and Ulf Matthiesen in Berlin, provide examples of the kind of human science research that will become the subject of a more sustained collaboration as we seek to continue to develop our understanding of the culture of citi es and of our own voice and work.
Personalist Economics: Moral Convictions, Economic Realities, and Social Action evolved over my entire lifetime originating with my parents' teaching and modeling of certain fundamental moral convictions well before the start of my formal schooling. In that sense Personalist Economics is akin to a journal in which I have recorded what I have seen on my journey as a student through the discipline of economics and as a professional through the practical, everyday affairs of the economic order. It was only most recently, however, that I consciously connected my interest in human material need to my parents' own origins in the poorest part of Ireland--County Mayo.
There are two major types of problems with such a journal. First, my field of vision does not encompass the entire discipline. As with virtually every other graduate student of economics, my preparation was specialised wherein I opted for a primary concentration in labor economics: history of the labor movement, theory of wages, employment security, and labor force developments. Second, my understanding of what I have seen is flawed by my own human frailty. My vision, in other words, is far short of 20-20, and Personalist Economics suffers from my own near-sightedness. Clearly, the book would have been much improved had it been written by someone with a better-trained eye and with greater peripheral vision. For that reason, Personalist Economics is dedicated to William R. Waters and Joseph M. Becker, S J. because as their student I have become a great admirer of their superior vision in these matters.
The three contributors selected to comment on Personalist Economics for this review symposium--Peter Danner, Maureen Maloney, and Daniel Finn--bring their own personal convictions, formal schooling and preparation, professional experience, and vision to the task. Since each one is unique and capable, what they offer is highly personalised and valuable. For that reason, I would be poorly advised to attempt a direct reply to their remarks. It is better, I think, to let their remarks stand on their own and to try to frame my own in terms of what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of Personalist Economics in the hope and expectation that out of this symposium will emerge a better understanding of what personalist economics [1] is, a wider interest in articulating how it conforms to and departs from contemporary mainstream economics, and why it offers promise for a clearer vision of economic affairs and a stronger and longer-lasting foundation for economic policy. In effect what I am doing here is amending my journal based on more recently undertaken journeys through economics and economic affairs. These amendments, for sure, are not the final revisions I will make to Personalist Economics. My remarks below conform to the three-part organisation of Personalist Economics: premises, description of economic affairs, and economic policy.
PREMISES
The first and most important strength of Personalist Economics is that it rests upon and offers a different ideological foundation for doing economics and understanding economic affairs. It suggests re-thinking our premises, re-examining our description of economic, and re-assessing our policy recommendations by substituting personalism for both the individualism of mainstream economics and the collectivism of its principal alternative. It argues that how we understand and describe economic affairs and where we end up in terms of economic policy depend on where we begin in terms of our premises. Taken seriously by our colleagues in economics, whether orthodox or heterodox, Personalist Economics calls for much greater openness and critical scrutiny of the premises we use routinely but discuss only occasionally. In Becker's well-chosen words "...it is precisely at this point...that the rabbit gets into the hat" (Becker 1961:10).
In all honesty, I did not have Personalist Economics in mind when I set out on my journey. The book coalesced many years later when it became apparent to me that much of what I had published since the early 1980s had proceeded from premises which stood apart from the ones which are employed by virtually all neo-classical economists and the different premises which are foundational to the work of nearly all of my heterodox colleagues. It was not until the mid-1990s that I realised that my premises were derived from my own understanding of personalism as articulated mainly by John Paul II through his various writings and encyclical letters. In a manner of speaking, I found a comfort zone in personalism many years before I began to understand what personalism is and means. Even today I can claim only a crude understanding of this philosophy and how it relates to economics. Thus, if the greatest strength of Personalist Economics resides in its premises, which derive from personalism, it follows that its greatest weakness resides in my still inadequate understanding of personalism and how it relates to economics and economic affairs. Even so, it is comforting to know that "we will know more later."
Most importantly, personalism has meant centering economics and our understanding of economic affairs on the person as opposed to the individual of neoclassical economics and the group or the collective of radical economics. This, in turn, means seeing economic agents as two-dimensional beings--individual and social--and no less the one than the other. This duality has most fundamental consequences. To illustrate, economic affairs are organised by competition and co-operation precisely because human beings are at once individual beings and social beings. Put differently, in the economic order human individuality is expressed through competition whereas human sociality is given expression through cooperation. Mainstream economics presents competition alone as the activating principle of economic affairs and radical economics offers co-operation alone as the energising principle specifically because both see human beings one dimensionally (see Chapter 6). Further, individuality and sociality shape the way we d efine and measure poverty. Without being explicit, advocates of the so-called absolute standard of poverty perceive humans as individual beings while proponents of the relative standard see humans as social beings. I recommend combining the two into a single standard which then would reflect both dimensions of the human beings whose poverty we are attempting to measure (see Chapter 9).
Personalist Economics pays much too little heed to a second type of duality of great importance for doing economics and interpreting economic affairs. Human beings are both matter and spirit, material beings and spiritual beings. The one corruptible, the other indestructible. Peter Danner's most propitious expression materialized spirit (Danner 1999: 4), along with his cogent explication of it, adds substantially to the premises of personalist economics. In this regard, I now see consumption, work, and leisure differently and with greater insight than in the past. It is simply the single most important improvement in my visual acuity as I journey once again through economics and economic affairs.
Having addressed the question "Who are we?" in terms of individuality and sociality and the question, "What are we?" in terms of matter and spirit brings us to the third question in this trilogy which has drawn the attention of thoughtful men and women for more than 2000 years: "Whose are we?" Conventional economics asserts that we belong to ourselves. Radical economics, on the other hand, insists that we belong to the collective. In the extreme, conventional economics takes a libertarian view of humans which liberates the individual from the clutches of the state and radical economics takes a totalitarian view which not only subordinates the individual to the state but also reduces the individual to an object. Personalist Economics affirms, instead, that we belong to our Heavenly Father who created us in his image and likeness (see Chapter 1).
However, unlike the way in which it differentiates itself from the mainstream and from radical economics on the premises who and what, personalist economics sets itself so far apart on the premise whose that further dialogue is closed off with those in economics who are nonbelievers or hold the view that one's beliefs should not enter their economics. In a world which is overwhelmingly secular, holding views of the sacred in economics is seen by many as a weakness and by others as a disqualifier. Thus, proponents of personalist economics are likely to be marginalised and even excluded from the company of real economists. Even so, I am most encouraged by Joseph Becker's fortitude in these matters:
In talks I have given over the years to people working in the unemployment insurance program, especially government officials and representatives of management, I have urged them to see the unemployed as Christ Himself, who will some day say to them "Because you did it to the unemployed, you did it to me."
(Becker 1991: 56)
Personalist economics orders economic reality in terms of the following human activities: producing, distributing, exchanging, consuming, saving, investing, credit creating, innovating, developing, and (re-)vitalising. Representing economic affairs in terms of human activities puts a human face on economic reality and warns us that our economics has to take into account when those activities are ethically proper and when they become unethical. Accordingly, Personalist Economics presents a framework for ethical decision making based on the three central principles of economic justice--equivalence, distributive justice, and contributive justice--and demonstrates how each one applies to both the workplace and the marketplace (see Chapter 2). The virtue of Christian charity is presented as a partner with the virtue of justice in protecting human well being in economic affairs. Christian charity has implications for describing and understanding economic reality, which is taken up in the following section. Bringing the virtue of justice into play means that personalist economics is intrinsically normative and at odds with the logical positivism of mainstream economics. Pulling in the virtue of Christian charity reinforces the marginalisation and exclusion that follows from the premise whose in personalist economics.
Finally, Personalist Economics proposes the premise that economic performance is to be judged ultimately not in terms of the efficiency of the economic system in utilising resources but in terms of its effectiveness in meeting human material need (see Chapter 1). This premise is neither new nor original with Personalist Economics and, though it stands apart from the position advanced by Lionel Robbins, which dominates mainstream economics today, I do not use it to cast aside the widely-affirmed efficiency criterion. Rather, I subordinate the efficiency criterion to meeting need on grounds that how efficiently necessarily is subordinate to and ought not be taken for the ultimate purpose of the system. This premise of mine traces to the work of the grand-pere of personalist economics -Heinrich Pesch-and pre-dates Robbins (see Mulcahy 1952: 13-35). [2]
DESCRIPTION OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS
All of the human activities enumerated above-producing, distributing, exchanging, consuming, saving, investing, credit creating, innovating, developing, and (re-)vitalising-are activated (more or less) by the twin engines of competition and co-operation. Personalist Economics presents all of these human activities except developing and (re-)vitalising in considerable detail as means to the end of meeting human material need (see Chapter 6). The two aspects of human material need, physical need and the need for work as such, are set forth at greater length in Chapters 3 and 4, and innovation is addressed separately in Chapter 8. A third organising principle-intervention-is added to competition and co-operation, and each one is rooted in a specific social value, with each of these social values in turn grounded in one of the three principles of economic justice.
There are just two activating principles because there are only two human dispositions that can be called upon to energise human action in the economic order. The one is the human disposition to act individually for the individual rewards. The other is the human disposition to act collectively because individuals alone are not able to act as effectively as they can when they act together or because individuals alone are not able to act at all. The third organising principle of intervention functions in the limiting rather than activating mode because competition and cooperation carried to an extreme in the form of, say, dumping (excessive competition) or price-fixing (excessive co-operation) are harmful to human wellbeing. The three principles of economic justice provide the logical bases for the limits imposed by intervention.
Thus, Personalist Economics constructs a bridge between the premises it employs and how it proceeds in describing economic reality at its most elementary level. This presentation would have been strengthened by linking it metaphorically to the operations of a twin-engine aircraft wherein co-operation and competition are the two engines providing lift and intervention provides control and direction to economic activities just as the plane's rudder and stabilisers allow the pilot to maneuver the aircraft in safety. Further, the entrepreneur is the pilot in the sense of making decisions which determine course and destination. Finally, the investment banker fuels the aircraft with the credit necessary to start and operate the twin engines of competition and co-operation.
In characterising the various human activities which are central to economic affairs, I have found limit to be a most helpful pedagogical device. It applies, for example, to producing in the sense that every production process confronts the limit of capacity beyond which additional inputs result in actual losses of output. It also applies to consuming in the sense that every consumer confronts the limit originating in his/her own materiality beyond which additional consumption is irrational because it results in a loss of total utility. [3] Another application relates to the limit imposed on credit creating in a partial-reserve system by the amount of excess reserves. A fourth has to do with the limit imposed on intervention, most notably federal-government intervention, by the principle of subsidiarity.
Even so Personalist Economics does not make full use of the limit. For instance, even though waste, resource depletion, and environmental contamination are touched upon (see Chapter 7, especially Figure 7.1), there is no mention whatever of the limit conveyed so fittingly by carrying capacity. Nor does Personalist Economics include the rootedness of the limit of capacity in the human body itself in the form of physical fatigue and exhaustion and in the human spirit in the form of boredom and the fundamental human disorder of workaholism. In like fashion, Personalist Economics does not recognise the limit on human consumption originating in the human disorder of compulsive buying or shopaholism. These weak points relate directly to a failure on my part to see and understand the role of matter and spirit in economic affairs which, as mentioned previously, is captured so well by Danner in materialised spirit.
The last four chapters of Part II of Personalist Economics deal with four life -events or human conditions relating significantly to human physical need: unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and death. These chapters give real substance to our premise that the performance of the economy is best defined and measured in terms of the goal of meeting human need and serve as a solid foundation for the development of policy recommendations. The central weakness of these chapters is that they use empirical evidence, which today is outdated, a weakness that in fairness attends all research of this kind with the passage of time. Along the same lines, even though Chapter 11 examines the question of the provision of death, in the more than 15 years since that chapter first appeared in the professional literature there has been a much greater acceptance of death as the answer to certain social ills which John Paul II has characterised as a culture of death. Thus, today there is an even greater urgency to re-examine care of the dying and the cost of that care not only in terms of the health-care delivery system itself but in wider cultural terms as well. Where this might lead, I find difficult to predict. But my instincts tell me that we should be following this line of investigation more vigorously.
A major weakness is that in Personalist Economics there is no mention of (re-)vitalising or developing. The second of these two omissions I can excuse as being entirely outside my field of vision. There is no such excuse for omitting the first, by which I mean the physical (re-)vitalising which humans require because the body is depleted by various human activities especially work, and the (re-)vitalising which the human spirit requires due to ignorance, neglect, or preoccupation with other human needs or wants. In this regard, I find mainstream economics' leisure entirely inadequate.
As to the physical dimension of (re-)vitalisation, there is an obvious and direct linkage to the production function. Capacity is determined importantly by the sheer amount of physical energy that the human body is capable of delivering at work. Continuing to work when one is fatigued or especially when one is exhausted leads to defective work and the additional cost associated with re-work. It also leads to workplace accidents and the added cost of healing the human body and of compensating the victims and their survivors for any economic loss or for any pain and suffering that follow.
The need for revitalising the human body is affirmed by employers providing break periods at work, limiting the hours of work per day and the number of days of work per week, by providing vacation leave, and other such practices. This careful regulating of human inputs matches the managing of capital inputs specifically in the form of preventive maintenance scheduling and capital budgeting for the replacement of worn-out equipment. This insight, which I regret is missing in Personalist Economics, opens our eyes to the fact that capacity in the production process is determined by the wearing down and wearing out of human inputs and capital inputs which has important implications especially in continuous production processes.
In the preceding section on premises, I mentioned that in Personalist Economics the virtues of justice and Christian charity are allied in protecting human well-being. Applied together, justice and Christian charity eliminate the ill-will, rip-off, and disorder which characterise the workplace and the marketplace in their absence, and foster instead goodwill, genuine bargains, and solidarity. Seen as a resource rather than a virtue, Christian charity is unique:
It is the only resource that is free because it does not exist and does not create real value unless it is freely given. Additionally, charity is unique among economic resources because it is never exhausted through use and cannot be conserved through nonuse.
[O'Boyle 1998: 28, 30)
There is absolutely no recognition among mainstream economists of the special character of Christian charity as an input. The reason should be self-evident.
As to the spiritual dimension of (re-)vitalisation, I refer to attending to the needs of the human spirit to know, to love, and to feel and experience beauty, though often these needs are more difficult to perceive than strictly physical needs. This insight too is Danner's as is the insight that these needs inevitably depend on the human consumption of goods and services (Danner and O'Boyle 1999: 5) as, for example, enjoying a live symphony broadcast requires prior purchase of certain listening equipment, knowing more about the universe likely calls for books which must be acquired in advance, camping with one's family in a scenic location entails transportation outlays and other costs, and so on.
Stockhausen underscores the importance of the needs of the human spirit by representing humans as works of art in process:
Human beings are not automatically whole and complete. Their lives are more like works of art, in process toward becoming something whole and beautiful. If a work of art is left unfinished or removed from the artist's touch, if it is marred or vandalized, it becomes a grotesque caricature of what it could be. In the same way, human beings can break their relationship with their creator, or be disfigured by dysfunctional relationships, by substance abuse, or by seeing future possibilities closed off in dead-end jobs and inhumane working conditions.
(Stockhausen 1998: 1673)
Consuming and (re-)vitalising bring to the fore the difference between having and being. As John Paul II has warned repeatedly under the heading of the dangers of consumerism, without limits on consuming and having, (re-)vitalising and being are slighted. Personalist Economics would have been strengthened had I been much more attentive to these matters.
ECONOMIC POLICY
There are two central policy recommendations relating in the main to productivity as a central factor in economic security (see Chapter 12) and to co-operation as an activating principle for organising economic affairs (see Chapter 13). Both topics comply with the simple logic that policy follows description and is shaped by it, and both necessarily contain much of what is descriptive of economic affairs. Personalist Economics would have been strengthened with greater breadth of coverage in the policy domain. But my own professional experiences and my reluctance to say more than what I really know with some assurance counseled limiting my remarks to these two areas.
As to productivity, there are three lessons for policymakers. First, it is essential to disaggregate the productivity data because there are huge differences since the early 1970s. This point has been reinforced in a 1999 Business Week article on productivity and what the magazine's editors call the new economy (Mandel 1999: 92). Second, there is more to success of the individual firm than the efficient utilisation of resources. Innovation matters very importantly. Third, since the 1960s major earthquake-like tremors in the form of new affirmations and confirmations of individual rights, constitutional crises and political assassinations, along with the ongoing information revolution and huge numbers of mergers, acquisitions, liquidations, and bankruptcy filings, have shaken the foundations of every institution in the US including those which form the basis of the US economy. The changes triggered by these shockwaves in turn have impacted productivity in the private sector and thereby the fortunes of untold numbers of workers, families, and companies, making some, breaking others. If there is a weakness here, it relates to the fact that my presentation of the relevant information is not rendered in the econometric form so popular among conventional economics and so widely taken as indicative of authentic scholarly work.
As to co-operation, Personalist Economics presents two distinct types: supra-firm alliances and inter-firm partnerships. The first refers to associations of private firms and others constituencies such as unions, formally instituted and voluntarily entered, to deal with problems common to all the involved parties but difficult or impossible to resolve through individual action alone. An inter-firm partnership involves two or more independent firms co-operating to address shared problems by means of working arrangements which are far less formal than the supra-firm alliance. Such differences apart, both types of co-operation serve the same overall goal of resolving problems which cannot be dealt with effectively by the parties involved or cannot be resolved at all by those parties. For both types, Personalist Economics presents three specific cases based on personal first-hand experiences.
Therein lies both the strength and the weakness of the handling of this subject in Personalist Economics. The six cases presented show co-operation used to manage practical, everyday, marketplace and the workplace problems in ways that produce positive-sum outcomes. In other words, there is more to activating economic affairs than just competition and cooperation is not always and everywhere collusion. The weakness is that no doubt there are many more cases of this type of cooperation which should be documented to drive home the points underlined in Personalist Economics. in this regard, I am pleased to take note of the recent special report on the subject of alliances published in Business Week (Sparks et al. 1999: 106ff).
CENTRAL TENETS OF PERSONALIST ECONOMICS
The final chapter of Personalist Economics addresses the challenges ahead and therefore is forward looking. This is neither a strength nor a weakness per Se. It supplies a rough map of the territory to be covered anew and some suggestions as to where to begin and how to proceed. At the time, it seemed the best way to finish my remarks on personalist economics. And I likely would have finished the same way were I undertaking the project today.
Even so, something important is missing. Specifically, what has been overlooked is a backward-looking survey of the ground covered in my journey through economics and economic affairs. This seems to be the best way to conclude my remarks on personalist economics and my book on the subject. Were Personalist Economics being written today, the following would have formed the central core of the next to last chapter of the book.
Personalist economics is a different way of thinking about economic affairs. Four of its basic tenets are premises that Waters articulated more than ten years ago: institutions, person, uncertainty, and status. I should have been more attentive to his insights while Personalist Economics was in preparation especially since he contrasts them with the four corresponding premises of conventional economics: law of nature, individual, certainty, and contracts (Waters 1988: 113-120). I begin with those four premises. There is no particular significance to the order of presentation of the others:
(1) Decision making centers around institutions. In conventional thinking, the economy is self-regulating wherein any intervention on the part of the government is regarded as a departure from the efficiency of the market system. Personalist economics replaces the law of nature with institutions and social groups at the center of decision-making wherein government intervention is seen in a positive light.
(2) The human person is the basic unit of the economic order. Mainstream economics rests solidly on the premise of the individual as the basic unit of the economic order who is governed by the law of nature and acts in a rational, self-interested manner to maximise personal satisfaction. The common good is achieved by each individual pursuing his/her own self-interest by means of self-regulating impersonal forces of the market or simply the invisible hand. Personalist economics sees as the basic unit of the economic order the person who in terms of being is both individual and social and in terms of nature is both matter and spirit. At times, humans act according to the premises of mainstream economics, and at other times they act in ways which are neither totally self-interested and utility-maximising nor irrational for being less than completely rational. The common good is achieved by means of the visible hand of human beings acting collectively and, following the principle of subsidiarity, through private organisations before turning to government for help.
(3) Economics is a normative discipline. To mainstream economists, human reason unlocks the mysteries of the economic order which are expressed with certainty in determinate models, giving their economics the aura of an authentic positive science like physics. In personalist economics, the principle of certainty is not accepted. Some indeterminateness is inevitable because human beings are not entirely knowable and their behavior is not completely predictable. Further, human beings alone are moral agents, because humans alone have the intelligence and free will to make ethical choices. Economics therefore is a normative discipline, one which is value-laden as opposed to value-free. The challenge to the working economist in this regard is to know the difference between the facts discovered through systematic inquiry and the values which one attaches to those facts.
(4) Human beings are sacred with rights originating in their very nature. According to conventional economics, human behavior is assumed to be contractual in nature as for example in the sales contract and the wage contract wherein Pareto optimality is achieved by contractual negotiations. Voluntary exchange reinforced contractually is at the very core of a contemporary neo-classical economics, which is returning to laissez-faire as the ideal economic order. Personalist economics insists instead that humans are sacred and therefore have a status in economic affairs wherein their inalienable rights are more fundamental than contracts. They are ends in themselves and never to be seen merely as inputs to be valued instrumentally. However, every human right which has some bearing on economic affairs has its counterpart duty (see Chapter 14).
(5) Meeting the needs of the human body and spirit is the ultimate purpose of an economic system. Mainstream economists construct economics around things and thus the efficient utilisation of economic resources is the primary criterion by which the performance of an economic system is to be judged. In personalist economics human beings matter more than things and for that reason meeting the needs of the human body and spirit is the ultimate criterion by which an economy is to be assessed. Personalist economics perceives consumption, work, and leisure more broadly than does mainstream economics. Goods and services are consumed to meet not just the needs of the human body but inevitably certain needs of the human spirit. Work is for the dual the purpose of: (1) earning the income necessary to acquire the needed and desired consumer goods and services; and (2) becoming fully human by meeting the need to belong and the need to utilise and develop creative skills and talents. Leisure is not just what one does but what one is becoming, and as with work, leisure is seen in a communal and an individual context. In personalist economics, having matters less than being: the things one owns are less important than the person one is becoming. In this regard, personalist economics affirms the preferential option for the poor: those who are neediest are to be served first.
(6) Justice and Christian charity protect human well-being. The virtues of justice and Christian charity are twin bulwarks protecting human wellbeing. The three principles of economic justice--equivalence, distributive justice, and contributive justice--specify the duties which apply to buyers and sellers in relating to one another, to superiors in relating to their subordinates, and to an individual in relating to any group to which he/she belongs. These duties, if faithfully executed, protect human well-being by curbing the destructive human tendencies activated by competition and cooperation. Christian charity goes beyond the passive Kantian imperative to not view humans as mere instrumentalities, requiring each follower of Christ to actively affirm every human being as a person. Christian charity, along with justice, eliminates the ill-will, disorder, and ripping off which is common to a marketplace and workplace in their absence, replacing them with goodwill, solidarity, and authentic bargains. Christian charity alone among economic resources perishes and has no value when it is held. Rather, it comes alive and takes on value only when it is given away, and uniquely is never depleted by use. Neither of these virtues is included in the conventional economics way of thinking.
(7) Three principles organise economic affairs: competition, co-operation, and intervention. The first two activate economic affair by different human dispositions. Competition is based on the human disposition to undertake certain activities individually for the individual reward to be gotten from completing those activities successfully. Co-operation derives from the human disposition to undertake certain tasks collectively because they cannot be done effectively by individual effort alone or cannot be done at all by such effort. The decision to use competition is to organise economic affairs around the Many (individuals). The decision to use co-operation organises economic affairs on the basis of the One (group). Intervention operates in the limiting mode and often involves government action to curb certain destructive human activities energised by competition or co-operation. To protect human well being, such intervention is to be grounded in the virtues of justice and Christian charity. Cooperation is la rgely ignored by mainstream economics as an organising principle except when it is taken for collusion.
(8) Three social values underlie the three organising principles. Each one of the three organising principles for organizing economic affairs rests on a different social value. In the absence of these values in society as a whole, the principles cannot be used effectively or used at all. Competition depends on the social value of individual freedom. If individuals are not truly free to act they cannot compete. Co-operation rests on the social value of teamwork, community and solidarity. Without that value being widely shared across society, collective action cannot he undertaken. Intervention rests on the social value of equality in the sense that it is necessary for collective action to stop the powerful from subordinating and exploiting the weak. A laissez-faire economic order backed by neo-classical economics is based on the social value of freedom from government restraint better known as liberty. In Personalist Economics, freedom means freedom to act.
(9) Dynamic disequilibrium rather than static equilibrium is the order of the day. Mainstream economics represents both microeconomic and macroeconomic affairs in terms of a static equilibrium of supply and demand wherein the self-regulating forces of markets bring the system into balance by the systematic clearing away of any and all surpluses and shortages. This view of economic affairs has been characterised as mechanical. Personalist economics, on the other hand, represents economic affairs as organic wherein the economy is driven dynamically toward disequilibrium by innovational change--creative destruction--which depends critically on the support of credit-creating financial institutions. The difference is between the centripetal-like impersonal forces of the market bringing the system to rest and the centrifugal-like human energy of the entrepreneur initiating change and triggering unrest in the system.
(10) Some limits inhere in economic affairs and others must be imposed because humans are materialised spirits. Human materiality assures certain physical limits regarding consumption and work. The human body can consume only so much in one sitting so to speak, and can work continuously only for some fixed number of hours without rest. In like fashion, capital equipment cannot be run continuously without maintenance before it breaks down. Further, without other limits on what and how much we consume, on how long and how hard we work, and how much we allow for or indulge in re-vitalising activities (leisure), limits which reside quietly in the human spirit, our development as human persons is arrested or misdirected. The three principles of justice provide useful and effective limits on consumption, work, and leisure, and their faithful practice contributes powerfully to the realisation of the full potential of every human being.
As with the order of presentation, there is nothing fixed about the number of central tenets in personalist economics. The ones enumerated herein I think will pass the test of time and endure. As to any others, as stated previously, we will know more later.
Edward J. O'Boyle is Senior Research Associate at Mayo Research Institute where he conducts and publishes research in social economics with an intense focus on the role of the person in economic affairs. In this regard, he is most concerned about human material need and its two distinct aspects: human physical need and the need for work as such. This work is best captured in his 1998 book Personalist Economics: Moral Convictions, Economic Realities, And Social Action. Most recently he has extended his interest to include the premises of mainstream economics, how those premises differ from the ones employed in personalist economics, how those differences influence the way in which economists observe and understand economic realities, and the policy positions which follow. He has served on the economics faculty at Louisiana Tech University since 1977, and at different times over the past 10 years as visiting professor at Poznan School of Management (Poland), the National University of Ireland in Galway, and the University of Verona.