Bodies politic: gift, reciprocity and the personality of the polity in the civil economy tradition

This paper argues that the civil economy tradition fuses ancient with new elements to provide a relational alternative to modern contractualist and utilitarian models of economic and political life. At its core is the idea of gift as reciprocity and gratuitousness, which grounds human sociability, the production of relational goods and the pursuit of the common good. Drawing on the work of Antonio Genovesi and the Neapolitan School, the paper shows how human happiness is inherently shared and linked to the good, understood as both immanent in social practices and transcendent in its divine origin. Genovesi’s Neo-Platonist civic humanism emphasizes reciprocity, public trust and virtue as the foundations of economic cooperation and political order. Against the modern separation of private interest from public welfare and market from society, the civil economy paradigm interprets market exchange as a form of gift-exchange embedded in social ties and intermediary institutions. It advances a covenantal conception of the polity as a plural and nested union of persons, groups and corporate bodies bound by shared ends rather than merely contractual arrangements. By re-embedding economic and political structures within relationships of mutual recognition and collective action, the civil economy tradition offers conceptual and practical resources for renewing civic life and fostering a more moral, cooperative market order, including practical proposals for institutional and policy transformation.