Fraternity: an old/new concept for economics

‘Fraternity’ has been missing in the economics vocabulary for a long time until the attempt of Bruni and Sugden to popularize it. In the past, economists like Antonio Genovesi and Adam Smith employed similar concepts such as friendship, mutual assistance, sympathy, mutual sympathy, and fellow-feeling. However, they cannot be considered synonymous with ‘fraternity’ although they share characteristics of the aforementioned expressions. This article shows how fraternity conceptually enriches the economic lexicon for its ability to describe behaviours which arise through the perception of considering trading partners as siblings, and on the basis of the team reasoning logic.