Editorial: Friendship, Markets, and Reciprocal Gifts

Abstract

In his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the inadequacy of a social imaginary that only includes the market and the state:

"The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society. The market of gratuitousness does not exist, and attitudes of gratuitousness cannot be established by law. Yet both the market and politics need individuals who are open to reciprocal gift."

How might we conceptualize these “economic forms” of “reciprocal gift” that reside in “civil society” and are “based on solidarity” but are neither market nor state? Friendship fits the bill.

Dylan Pahman, "Editorial: Friendship, Markets, and Reciprocal Gifts," Journal of Markets & Morality 26, no. 2 (2023): 145-150