The Wound and the Blessing: Economics, Relationships, and Happiness
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
The crisis that market societies are undergoing is essentially a crisis of relationships. It originates in the illusion that the market, through the actions of an invisible hand operating in impersonal market relationships, can present us a good common life that is exempt from the possibility of being wounded by the other.
Luigino Bruni offers an authoritative and innovative look at the cultural and anthropological premises underlying contemporary market economies and their promises. He suggests that the market has betrayed its promises, offering the prevalence of unhappiness in our cities as evidence, and points out the need for balancing the increasing tendency toward isolation with the human need for relationships.
Bruni proposes gratuitousness -- free and open reciprocity, quite different from altruism -- as a means of maximizing the benefits of the market (and the equality and freedom that market contracts propose) without losing the joy that comes from putting the relationship with the others in the market as the primary good.
This is a Logos Reader Edition. Learn more.
- Provides an insightful exploration of the cultural and anthropological foundations of modern market economies
- Highlights the importance of balancing the growing trend of isolation with the human need for connection
- Proposes gratuitousness as a means of maximizing the benefits of the market
- The Angel and the Other
- Modern Economic Science: a Science without Gratuitousness
- Corporate Social and Civil Responsibility: Immunitas and Communitas Compared
- Eros, Philia, and Agape
- Joyless Economy
- Relationships as Goods
- The Economic and Civil Significance of Charisms
- Conclusion: Embraced by the Other
Luigino Bruni is one of the few scholars with both the knowledge and courage to seek to integrate the humanities and social sciences. He has written a stimulating and thought-provoking book that is well worth reading.
—Richard Easterlin, Professor of Economics, University of Southern California
What is most remarkable about Bruni’s book is its refusal to romanticize social relations – they are at once necessary to human happiness and a source of human sorrow and pain. One of the attractions of market exchange is its impersonal nature, but a market economy cannot by itself promote human happiness. Bruni proposes neither a utopian dream of universal brotherhood nor a libertarian values-free market. Instead, he sketches a framework within which we may more carefully identify the respective roles of state and market in a social order in which social relations are recognized as central.
—Andy Yuengert, Professor of Economics, Pepperdine University
The Wound and the Blessing is the kind of work that is urgently needed … Bruni wants to affirm relatively free markets, but do it by placing them in the larger context of, and operate them for the benefit of, the inherently relational character of human life, including acknowledging the risks – the “wounds” – that come with those relationships … Bruni’s argument ignores (and transcends) more American ways of framing these issues, and lays bare the “traps” in both free market (largely Republican) and social equity (largely Democratic) approaches … because both have been trapped in the narrow box of Modern individualism. Bruni’s work is a contribution to [the emerging asset-based community development] movement to re-think not only economics, but more deeply, how we understand human.
—Carol Johnston, Christian Theological Seminary, in Claritas: Journal of Dialogue & Culture
[Bruni] sheds considerable light on how our “business relationships” became so separate, and less real, than our private relationships … he does not reject the notion of markets and contracts; what he rejects is the arbitrary extension of market relationships into all arenas of life, like healthcare and education. The market must make way for gratuitousness. Bruni calls for a return to the Italian tradition of “civil economy” (as opposed to the dominant tradition of “political economy”), in which he locates his own work, because it associates economics with happiness instead of wealth. Bruni proposes a theory of happiness based in relationship: “one cannot live a ‘good life’ unless with and thanks to others.” This theory points to what is known as the “paradox of happiness” emerging from recent economic research. The paradox of happiness asserts that happiness depends on genuine relationality, which makes reciprocity, and the potential for being wounded by others – gratuitousness – absolutely essential. Once people have enough income to live decently, their relational well-being becomes the primary source of their happiness.
—Joe Davis, At Englewood Book Review
- Title: The Wound and the Blessing: Economics, Relationships, and Happiness
- Author: Luigino Bruni
- Publisher: New City Press
- Print Publication Date: 2012
- Pages: 148
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- ISBNs: 9781565484283, 1565484282
- Resource ID: LLS:WNDBLSSNGHPPNSS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-03-15T00:44:05Z
Luigino Bruni, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Political Economics, Università di Milano-Bicocca and Resident Faculty at Istituto Universitario Sophia in Loppiano, Italy. He is co-editor of the International Review of Economics (IREC, Springer) and has written numerous books and articles, including the award-winning Civil Happiness: Economics and Human Flourishing in Historical Perspective and The Economy of Communion (ed.).