What Is Economic Personalism? A Phenomenological Analysis

The task set forth in the title of this paper involves, among other things, the analysis of a linguistic symbol, a name, an unfamiliar name whose meaning has not been clearly articulated to date. The name economic personalism was developed in 1996 by Gregory Gronbacher to refer to the union of two areas of investigation: free-market economics and an obscure philosophical movement called personalism. ² Much like phenomenology, the existence of economic personalism as a philosophical movement has preceded its complete and clear awareness of itself, its principles, and its methodology. Five years after coming into being as an idea, the work of clearly defining the meaning of economic personalism and demarcating its scope is just beginning. The present investigation is thus the first attempt to articulate those truths that pertain to economic personalism.

Unlike socialism or market socialism, economic personalism is no utopia. Kevin Schmiesing shows instances of economic personalism in the world that occurred even before its formal inception. ³ Economic personalism is thus not only the name of an idea that occupies interdisciplinary investigations, it is an idea abstracted from particular real-world instances that share the same meaning in common. The examination of its meaning and of what particulars fall in this kind shall require three steps. First, a linguistic analysis of the name economic personalism will be given by means of an investigation of its sources. Second, an examination of the essential nature of economic personalism. Third, and finally, a description of the things that themselves realize economic personalism.

Let us begin by laying the ground for a linguistic analysis. It is impossible to conceive of any complex ideas without the aid of verbal expression. Consider a moral value judgment such as “This king is just” (or, good, kind, courageous, heroic, and so on). How do we bring to mind the idea of justice without recalling the word justice? It is difficult to conceive of abstract thought without employing words as symbols that have meanings that more or less persist through infinite applications and are impervious to the status of the particulars to which the meanings apply. Meaning is thus tied with language and, thereby, the proper use of language not only makes the precise referent clear and distinguishable from any other possible referent, but it captures the aboutness of the idea applicable to the relevant referent. Language also facilitates the development and understanding of abstract ideas, and it serves to document them in theoretical research with names. ⁴ Names denote things, either as kinds (king, queen) or as particulars (King George, Queen Sofia).

The examination of the nature of names is relevant at this juncture, since economic personalism is a name. Shakespeare sheds light on this examination. He was not fooled by names. In Scene II of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare clearly points out that names do not alter the essential nature of the things they name. “What's in a name?” asks Juliet. “That which we call a rose,” she observes, “by any other name would smell as sweet.” But there is an even stronger point that is suggested in a lesser-known line of Juliet's famous soliloquy. “What's a Montague?” asks Juliet. She answers, “It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.” Juliet's existential reflections distinguish names from individual substances, but also from independent substances. ⁵ In other words, even a proper name such as Montague does not itself have any intrinsic existence independently of a particular and independent substance such as is this man Romeo Montague. Yet, Shakespeare also recognizes that the name Romeo Montague does not merely stand for a person. Instead, proper names do carry sense or meaning. Otherwise, the name Montague would not mean “enemy” to a Capulet. Names acquire sense or meaning in virtue of the particulars to which they are associated and within a context and situation. In this sense, all names, even proper names, tell a story. ⁶ The name rose tells about the sweet scent of the particular roses one may encounter. The name Montague tells the story of a family and its relation to the Capulet family in the context of the story, Romeo and Juliet.

If we attempt to distill from Shakespeare a common-sense view of names, we could say that names neither enjoy independent nor real existence in the same way as a person or a concrete thing does, but names do acquire a meaning that is carried by the essential nature of the named persons and things. In this way, names tell a story about the things being named. But we must ask whether the story a name tells is a true story. If we consider concrete, tangible things, the answer is easy. The meaning of the name rose is verified and confirmed with every encounter one has with an instance of the category rose: its distinctive scent, its beauty, its velvety petals, its thorns. We know a rose from anything that is not a rose. An artificial rose, then, is a misnomer since it is not a special kind of rose but no rose at all, despite any possible resemblance.

If we consider abstract, intangible things, the answer is not so easy. Is there a true story that can be objectively told by the name of an idea? The idea of conformity with fact, for example, is known by the name of truth. To say that something is true is to say that it is a fact, or that it conforms with an actual state of affairs. This is the story that the name truth tells. Nonetheless, truth is widely disputed today. There is no truth, some may argue, so the name of this idea tells us nothing. We may reply, however, that we encounter truth in our ordinary experience of things in the world. Every time that there is a correspondence between belief and fact, truth is found. If I believe, for example, that there are roses in a vase on my desk, there are facts in the world that will settle the truth or falsity of my belief. The only problem may be that we may not have knowledge of such facts to be certain of the truth. It is perhaps this lack of complete certainty that kindles people's suspicions about truth. But suppose that I am blindfolded when I sit at my desk, so I cannot see that the roses are there. Further suppose that I have a cold, so I cannot smell their sweet scent. It is, nonetheless, true that the roses are in a vase on my desk even though I do not have knowledge of this fact. Truth is not dependent upon knowledge. The absence of certain knowledge of some facts does not and should not prevent us from advancing theories that attempt to formulate a truth of something in the world. If we formulate it correctly, whether we ever gain certain knowledge of this accomplishment, we shall have discovered the objective story, the truth, the facts, of this something in the world.

However, all ideas do not correspond neatly to a whole (a rose) or a unified collection (a bunch of roses) that has concrete, physical existence. Consider the ideas of liberty, beauty, and promise. To what whole or unified collection in the world do these ideas neatly correspond? This is difficult to say. Nonetheless, these ideas are abstractions from properties of real particulars. Suppose that we are presented with a situation of a promise between two people and besides perceiving the physical objects that constitute it, we also apprehend the nature of the situation itself. Perhaps it is a business contract between two industrialists. But we may have also observed a similar situation between a man and a woman about to be betrothed that, although in a context distinct from the first, shares the same nature. We thus form the idea of a promise by abstracting from particulars. The determinate properties of any abstract idea are, then, timeless, unchanging, and impervious to the coming into being or ceasing to exist of the particulars to which they apply. Once the idea thus exists in the mind, it becomes realized in the world with every instance. The idea of liberty may be realized, for example, in unfettered societies of honest and responsible individuals, or in the flight of an eagle, and in the abolition of slavery. The idea of beauty may be realized in a sunset, the color of a rose, or the language of Shakespeare. The idea of a promise is realized in an honest handshake following an agreement, in someone's fulfillment of an obligation, or in someone's claim against a broken agreement.

The names of ideas thus hold meaning. But the meaning associated with the names of ideas presents two problems. The first is presented when the meaning of an idea is not known at all or not well-understood. This is the case with those who object to the idea of “truth”; the solution to this problem is straightforward, though not necessarily easy. The second problem is more troublesome insofar as the meanings of some names only refer to immanent things and, thus, do not express truly something that is the case in the world because either they are sine fundamento in re or the real existence of an instance is impossible. Names such as Sherlock Holmes, Pegasus, Meinong's square-circle, and market socialism, exemplify this case. ⁷ This second problem is not presented by fictional names, since we are capable of directing our minds to fictional objects and situations with such surrender as to experience feelings in response. Yet this surrender does not lead us to confuse fiction with what is real. We do not confuse response feelings to the fictional situation with bona fide feelings we would experience in real situations. ⁸ Rather, the problem presents itself whenever names are arbitrarily created to distinguish objects in the framework of a theory. A reasonable person who would never have assumed Sherlock Holmes to be a real person, may have believed that there could be real-world instances of market socialism as it was theoretically and most optimistically portrayed. ⁹ It is precisely because of this problem that it is safest to maintain suspect any new name for an abstract idea until it has been rigorously examined and, if possible, subjected to a test of truth that attempts to find a real-world correspondence to the idea. The idea of economic personalism should not be immune to this type of analysis. Let us proceed, then, with an examination of its composite name-parts economics and personalism to investigate separately the story that is told by each.

During the classical period of economic thought, which lasted from the late eighteenth-century to the late nineteenth-century, economics was described as a science that targets the study of wealth and of actions motivated only by the incentive of profits. It is now clear that profit-seeking behavior is only one manifestation of the necessity of choice in man's natural economizing behavior. We may characterize this behavior as natural since it arises from man's recognition of the state of scarcity in nature in the sense of having more wants than means to satisfy them. ¹⁰ The formulation of the theory of subjective value helped to bring about this change in the views of economists concerning the scope of their discipline. According to this theory, economic value is the significance that a subject attaches to a thing whenever he perceives a causal connection between this thing and the satisfaction of a present, urgent want. ¹¹ Economic value is subjective because its existence depends on it being felt by a subject. But the subject may be wrong in his value judgment such that he attributes value to a thing that, in fact, will not or cannot satisfy his present, urgent want. The truth of economic value judgments is settled, then, by those facts about the thing that make it the case that it can satisfy the relevant want as expected by the agent.

Since the advent of the theory of subjective economic value, economics has been viewed as a general theory of choice whose primary focus is the investigation of economic value in relation to an individual's total utility. ¹² The province of economics is thus broader than what is still typically believed. In the late twentieth-century in particular, economists have applied economic analysis to advance a multitude of theories that examine choices concerning ends not usually associated with economic investigations. For example, Gary Becker and George Stigler have advanced theories of love and marriage founded in economic analysis. ¹³ Other theories include the economic analysis of crime, political decision-making, law, and sex. ¹⁴ This broad application of economic analysis to all aspects of human choice has provided interesting insights that no other discipline could have provided.

Nonetheless, this direction has led many economists to hold the extreme view that economics is a science that provides the tools for examining every kind of human action. ¹⁵ Accordingly, then, we could suppose that moral action could be subjected to economic analysis. Moral propositions, too, could be assumed to be derivable from propositions concerning economic facts. But if we consider the moral proposition that one ought to be charitable within the tools of economic analysis, this proposition would be inadmissible within economic criteria. It is clear, then, that the extreme view of the applicability of economic analysis must be put into question. This extreme view ignores the categorical distinction between propositions of fact that economics may legitimately advance and those moral propositions that fall outside the disciplinary boundaries of economics.

We can accept the view that economics is the science of those kinds of human actions that target specific, definite ends. These, perhaps, constitute the majority of human actions. Nonetheless, since economics is not a normative science that aims to prescribe how an agent ought to act, economics is not equipped to deal with broad ends that require specification. If the ends are, for example, to be virtuous or to be rich, then economics will have little to say about what are the best means to attain such ends, for the description of such ends require clarification, definition, or specification. Similar to those human actions that have specific, definite ends, human actions with broad ends are also purposeful. It must be clear that all purposeful behavior is economizing behavior insofar as determining a purpose involves a choice among alternatives. But all purposeful action does not necessarily target specific, definite ends. This suggests that economics is not equipped to analyze all economizing behavior, but only those with specific, definite ends. Consequently, economics cannot legitimately address every kind of human action, at least not those actions that fall under the heading of broad ends.

However, if the end is to have a coat for the winter, then the agent is confronted with specific, alternative ways to allocate his resources toward this end by sacrificing other, less urgent needs. In this case, an economist may examine the agent's alternatives and say that this or that action is the most appropriate to achieve the agent's desired end. If an economist's role were to elucidate what an economic choice should be, then economics would not be wholly distinct from ethics or sociology, and it could thus attempt to tackle advancing prescriptions for broad ends such as being virtuous or being rich. But no general theory of choice as is economics could be obtained from broad ends since, at best, an economist could only speculate what purposeful actions the agent intends to take in order to achieve such ends.

The story that economics tells, then, is a story of choice in light of the condition of scarcity in which every individual, whether rich or poor, finds himself. The economic analysis of means to meet ends requires precision and specification in the description of ends in order for the means to be deliberated and evaluated according to their suitability in satisfying a particular end. As a result, those actions whose ends are general or abstract in nature, or obscure in their descriptions, present cases of human action inaccessible to economic analysis.

Consider the case of an entrepreneur whose firm is suffering from cash flow problems. He recognizes that increasing his cash flow is not only a specific end, but also the most urgent one to save his firm from bankruptcy. He evaluates three alternatives to achieve this end: obtaining a loan, lowering production, and laying off employees. Among these, the latter is the most efficient solution since it will not impose the burden of a debt as the first alternative would and, if he selects management employees, then his production would not be directly affected. But his management employees have been part of the firm since the beginning and they are friends. Furthermore, one of them is two months away from becoming fully vested in his retirement benefits. Even if economic analysis confirms that laying off the management team is the most efficient means to achieve the end of solving the cash flow problem, this solution conflicts with a broader purpose he has of leading a virtuous life. Harming persons, especially friends, is irreconcilable with this broader purpose, even if the harm is unintentional. If a case such as this is examined with the tools of mainstream economic analysis, we could expect two kinds of replies. One reply may be the attempt to reduce the entrepreneur's broad end of virtue to a specific end such as to save friends. The decision would be thus between laying off his management team (and thereby save his firm) and the speculated specific end of saving his friends. This reply is neither satisfactory nor rigorous in its contribution to ideas that may fall at the boundaries of other disciplines. The other reply may be that moral dilemmas are not analyzable by means of economics. This would be the correct reply. Nonetheless, this does not help us in finding a solution for the multitude of ordinary situations in which our specific goals and our broad goals come tied together in one problem. Enter personalism.

The name personalism is a derivative of the name person. A person is not merely an individual substance but, a fortiori, an independent substance. ¹⁶ This is to say that a person's existence is independent relative to the existence of another being in the world. ¹⁷ But the definition of a person is controversial because of the philosophical difficulties involved in stating exactly what a human person is. One of these difficulties is associated with the disagreements that result from the distinction between the essential features that define a person and those accidental features that arise, go away, or are a result of the passage of time. An accidental feature may be a property, such as size, since the same individual being grows from conception to adulthood and may grow a lot or not so much relative to others of the same kind. But accidental features may also refer to proper parts of an individual being such as hair or the lack thereof, since one's baldness does not affect one's personhood.

This distinction between essence and accident is very old and one of the most significant legacies we inherited from Aristotle. The disagreements concerning this distinction are many. According to Boethius, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. ¹⁸ To say that rationality is the essential feature of the human person, for example, is to exclude the unborn, children younger than six years of age, the mentally ill, and older adults who are no longer able to function rationally. Nonetheless, one can eliminate this problem by simply saying that the potential for rationality is an essential feature of the human person. In this way, the unborn and children younger than six years of age can be seen as having a rational potentiality that shall be actualized at a later time. The case of the mentally ill can thus be seen as a class of human beings whose rational potential may never be actualized. Aging adults can be seen as a class of human beings who have enjoyed the actualization of their potential rationality, but this state is now reversing to its potential status. Despite all this, rationality is perhaps not the single essential feature for man and we shall examine this in our discussion. However, solving this problem does not clear all the obstacles from our way, since there are many other issues. Consider that rationality, the feature that Boethius first stated as a feature proper to man, Kant appropriated to lay the foundation of the moral principle that this feature marks man as an end in itself, and not merely as a means to an end. ¹⁹ For Kant, then, rationality is not merely one of the essential features of man, but the only feature from which man obtains a morally relevant value.

A second disagreement results from the problem of personal identity. What does it mean to say that I have a unique personal identity that is distinct from all other persons? We could argue that a second essential feature of man, besides the potential rationality, is numerical identity in the sense that one member of the class of human persons can be recognized as distinct from other members of the same class. But there is more to the problem of personal identity, since we have only identified the individuating aspect of the problem. In addition, the individuated member of the class must also be recognizable over time and despite any changes. Consider the case of seeing a friend you have not seen since childhood. This bald, bearded, round, bespectacled man bears no resemblance to the young boy you remember. Despite these changes, you are able to recognize your friend's smile, his sense of humor, and, most perspicuously, the shared memories of an earlier time. What characteristics, then, show the personal identity of any human person? We could say that there are physical characteristics, such as facial features, skin coloring, and fingerprints that do not change substantially over time. Hence, these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for describing the personal identity attached to each individual person. These are not sufficient conditions since, suppose one person loses his memory or, worse, his mind, then it would be difficult to say that his personal identity has continued despite any continuity in certain physical characteristics.

No one is a dualist any more. The mind and body, we have discovered, are not two separate Cartesian substances. Clearly, there is a body that can be uniquely identified for each person. It is nonetheless difficult to say what is the thing that distinguishes a living body from a cadaver. Some, such as Locke, argue that this ineffable thing is memory. ²⁰ This argument has some problems: persons forget, children only have short-term memories, older adults may lose their short-term memories, and, ultimately, it presupposes personal identity so it does not help in laying the foundation for specifying what is personal identity. Hume argued that our belief in such a thing as personal identity is not justified, since any individual is just a collection of perceptions. ²¹ The fact that these perceptions invariably change serves to show that there is no identity to be found or grounded in changing things. That we fail to see this problem, Hume says, is only the result of our tendency to link the superficial similarity of our perceptions because some changes occur in regular and recurring patterns.

Hume's argument, perhaps unintentionally, pointed to the ancient epistemic problem of vagueness. ²² Suppose that a person loses his hair and becomes bald. Intuitively, we will still believe he is a person and the same person as before. Now suppose that Beethoven had not only lost his hearing, but also his sight and both hands before losing his mind. Is he the same person, the same Beethoven as before? Would he have still written his ninth symphony? What changes are allowed in a person in order to be considered identical to the person he was before such changes? It is difficult to indicate the exact extent of allowable changes, hence the vagueness problem in our knowing the exact boundary for personal identity. But this epistemic shortcoming does not present an obstacle to an ontological examination of the person. ²³

We can affirm thus far that the human person is an individual substance with the potential for rationality. It is also true that the human person is an independent substance, such that his existence does not depend on another human person's concept of him, or on the existence of some other human person. ²⁴ The fact that a human person is dependent on things for his survival, as well as being spiritually, emotionally, or psychologically dependent on other persons, does not alter his ontological status as an independent substance. The personal identity issue, however, is quite problematic. ²⁵

As we have discussed earlier, there are two criteria that we can accept of individuation and personal identity: the physical criterion and the memory criterion. The difficulty is in stating precisely what constitutes each of these. But this is not all. There are two additional considerations at the center of personal identity: moral agency and vocation. Is the latter, for example, a physical attribute? Were Beethoven or Mozart born musicians? Or did their respective experiences stored in memory help to shape their individual musical genius? All we know is that each of them is known and recognized by the music they composed. In this sense, their creations are evidence of their identity. Mother Teresa, too, can be identified by the work to which she dedicated her life. In following her divine vocation, she also created something uniquely hers in the world. If we now turn to moral agency, similar questions arise. Is moral agency, for example, hardwired in our brains or an acquired attribute? The question of what agency is raises other difficulties, but we shall not go into these. ²⁶ What is clear is that neither the physical criterion, nor the memory criterion, adequately account for the moral agency or the co-creatorship of the person's being.

Personalism thus arises within this background of philosophical problems concerning the ontological status of the human person and all related epistemic problems with which we are confronted. As a twentieth-century philosophical position, personalism is relatively new. ²⁷ What exactly is such a position, however, remains unclear. The standard description of personalism is that the person is at the center of its analysis. But this description is vague since it does not explain the context in which the centrality of the person is fundamental. The centrality of the person in the context of an ontological investigation could mean that the only denizens of reality are persons. From an epistemic perspective, this position could mean that we can know only persons. But there are myriads of other contextual possibilities. ²⁸

Rather than adopting one of the interpretations of personalism already set forth in the literature, I shall propose a new one. I believe that personalism is best described as an ontological structure in which reality is fundamentally personal. This means that all existents stand in an immediate one-sided dependence relation or in n-sided dependence relations to the person. Since the person is fundamental, there are no mediate relations between nonperson objects and persons. The human person, for example, stands in an immediate two-sided dependence relation to certain consumption goods obtained from nature, such as wheat and chickens. This relation is two-sided because the human person depends on these fruits of nature for survival, and these fruits of nature depend on man for either their cultivation or farming to exist as they do today. Without man, there would not be vast wheat fields, nor could we find millions of chickens protected from other predators. These cases exemplify symbiotic relations.

There are other goods that may suggest the existence of mediated relations between persons and nonperson objects, such as cars or airplanes because these are not what economists call first-order goods, meaning that they are not at man's immediate disposal as are tulips and apples. Instead, these goods, called higher-order economic goods, require other goods as mediate means for their production. ²⁹ Accordingly, a car requires factories, steel, petroleum, and so forth, all of which are mediate goods. Nonetheless, these higher-order economic goods stand in a direct relation to a person, since factories are built and run by persons, the ore employed to make steel is mined by miners, steel is produced by steelworkers, and petroleum is drilled for and refined by persons. The person-to-factory and person-to-steel dependency relations, however, are different to the person-to-petroleum relation. The person-to-factory relation is a two-sided dependency relation because man depends on factories for the existence of industrial production, and the existence of factories as such depends on man, for otherwise they would be merely buildings with artifacts. The person-to-steel relation is similarly a two-sided dependency relation because man depends on steel for the existence of cars and other capital equipment, and the existence of steel is dependent upon man, for otherwise there would be only naturally existing ore in the world. The person-to-petroleum relation is different, since it presents a one-sided dependency relation. Man depends on petroleum for various uses, but there is no reverse dependency relation here as there was in the previous cases.

Two-sided mutual relations can and do exist between persons. This is the case with marriage and the mutual dependency of husband and wife, such that a husband would not be a husband without a wife and vice versa. This is also the case with friendships, a buyer and a seller, a doctor and a patient, and so on. There are also numerous cases of n-sided relations, such as associations, firms, governments, and churches. But not all complex wholes are constituted only by n-sided relations among persons, lest we do not consider cases such as the space program, universities, and every nonservice enterprise.

If the foregoing characterization of personalism is correct, then it should also suitably describe any of the various strands of personalism. Let us explore this further. The chief difference among the various strands of personalism lie in what is meant by personal or the person. These can be divided into two kinds of personalist ontologies. First, there is the ontology of idealist personalism that depicts reality as consisting only of a society of persons. Accordingly, nothing exists independently from persons. In this sense, then, idealist personalism assumes that the human person is central to reality and, as such, reality is the human society and, thus, human knowledge shapes reality. ³⁰ This assumption is founded on an idealist epistemology that denies our knowledge of things in the world that exist independently of our perception and the language employed to describe such things. Instead, it relies on the following premise: All that exists is that which is thought of or perceived. If something is not capable of being thought of or perceived, then, it does not exist. Idealist personalism thus equates the human person with the human mind, human perception, or human knowledge.

Is idealist personalism adequately characterized by an ontological structure of existents standing from one-sided to n-sided relations? The answer is yes, although most, if not all, relations in this ontological framework seem to be only of the one-sided type. If any nonperson object in the world exists and, furthermore, its existence is dependent on a person's knowledge or perception, then not only this but every nonperson object has a one-sided dependence relation with a person. There could be cases, however, in which n-sided dependence relations arise whenever there is a complex whole such as a government or a legal system. For a court proceeding, for example, the existence of a particular crime must be accepted by the judge under the principle that the police have knowledge of this crime or, at least, a justified belief of its existence. Suppose that the crime was an unwitnessed murder, then the existence of the crime is dependent on the beliefs of the authority investigating and submitting it for a criminal trial. The judge at this trial has no direct knowledge of this crime, so the basis of the trial is dependent on the representation of the police authority.

The problem with this ontological framework is that it fails to account for the possibility that something may exist, but whose existence is either not known to us and thus remains unthought of, or whose existence lies beyond the limits of our unaided human perception, so it remains unperceived. From an ordinary common-sense perspective alone, it would not be difficult to begin from the assumption that there are individuals who exist in places too distant for us ever to have the chance to know them or perceive them in any way. Yet, we would not doubt that they exist simply because we do not know them, see them, or think of them. This simple deduction allows for the introduction of other possibilities, such as that there are microbeings, for example quarks, or macrobeings, for example galaxies, or relations of any such beings in the world to which we have no access and, thus, no knowledge of their existence. Without this realist direction, no scientific discoveries would have been attempted for anything that is beyond our sensorial reach. The idealist strand of personalism is thus ontologically weak.

It is important to point out that, for some, idealist personalism also went hand in hand with atheism. ³¹ The case of God raises two additional problems for idealist personalism. First, since it presumably holds atheism on the basis of having no direct or evident knowledge of God, this does not necessary lead to the conclusion that God does not exist. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that God's existence is not known or verifiable. Second, one of the principles of atheist personalism is the denial of the existence of God. This judgment necessarily conjures up the idea of God in order to produce a rejection of the idea. It would follow, then, that God exists in virtue of being the subject of thought, even if God was the subject of a negative judgment. Consequently, a personalism that is both idealist and atheist is logically inconsistent.

The second ontological framework is what has been called realist personalism and it presents a contrast with idealist personalism. It can be described as a structure constituted by two types of beings: persons and objects. This framework of reality is called personalist because it grants persons a higher value than that of any other object in the world. It is a realist ontology because, despite this hierarchical value ordering, it does not make the existence of any object dependent on a person's direct knowledge of it. The realist personalists in the Christian anthropological tradition include the French Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. If the German Max Scheler is to be characterized as a personalist, as he has been by some commentators, he would rightfully belong to the realist camp. Perhaps he is called a personalist because of his hierarchical structure of person-values as realizations of the good or evil. For Scheler, the value moral goodness is always a quality of the will itself, never an object of the will. Since acts of will are always acts of a person, the existence of a person is a necessary presupposition of all volitional acts, good or evil. Polish personalism also follows a realist direction, and its best exponent is Karol Wojtyla.

We must now ask, Is realist personalism adequately characterized by an ontological structure of existents standing from one-sided to n-sided relations? Once again, the answer is yes. There are some differences with idealist personalism in the framework of relations, since the dependencies are not founded on the knowledge or perceptions of persons. Realist personalism in the Christian anthropological tradition, for example, presents a structure of n-sided dependencies for a value hierarchy of existents. Positive-value persons are at the top, followed by all other nonperson objects, starting from sentient living beings, nonsentient living beings, then things and, finally, negative-value persons. The human person is only one of four classes of persons. The other three classes are the Divine person, angelic persons, and demonic persons. God and angels, in addition to the human persons, are all positive-value persons; whereas the last class of persons only has negative values or disvalues. Since Christian personalism is realist, human knowledge of the members of any of these other three classes of persons is not a requirement for their existence. When we consider the entire complex whole of persons and objects, what we have is an ontological structure in which reality is fundamentally, but not exclusively, personal. The existence of this person-object complex whole is dependent upon the property relations between their members. Hence, there are some relations that are one-sided dependency relations, some that are two-sided dependency relations, and some that are n-sided dependency relations.

The story that personalism tells is thus a story of the dependencies and interdependencies between persons and of persons with every other thing in the world. The recognition that there are flowers, mountains, and planets in the world, which may or may not be outside of the human person's knowledge, is tied with the significance that these things have in a fundamentally personal world. In the latter, there are complex wholes such as disciplines of study such as botany, geology, and astronomy, works of art such as van Gogh's Irises or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, cuisines developed around the fruits of nature of a mountain range, literature about everything existing or imaginable, and so on. These things would not be part of a world that is not fundamentally personal. By contrast to the concerns of economics, propositions of faith, of morality, of aesthetics, and any other that is not purely of fact, do belong to personalist concerns. For example, the proposition that one ought to honor one's word is not only admissible to personalist investigations, but necessary for the existence of fundamentally personal complex wholes such as a promise. ³²

When we bring together the respective stories told by the words economics and personalism, this integration does not produce a special kind of economics or economic methodology. To conceive, for example, of a personalistic economics would be unintelligible, for economics is already personal in the sense that it is a theory of human choice. How, then, do these two stories relate? On the one hand, personalism carries with it the significance of the world viewed from every aspect of human activity and thought. It applies to every realm of human experience such that reality can be investigated accordingly, for example, a moral reality, an aesthetic reality, a religious reality, a supernatural reality. In this sense, personalism has a broader scope than economics. On the other hand, personalism does not have the conceptual machinery to do the kind of analysis that economics can do. It is for this reason that economic reality is a difficult subject for personalism but not an impossible one.

To arrive at the integrated whole of economic personalism we must start with an economic situation, meaning a situation of scarcity that leads to a choice and a cost imposed by the choice (and not merely a situation involving financial assets). Let us start by assuming a mainstream economic analysis. Accordingly, we shall rely entirely on an efficiency criterion that points to the least costly way to achieve a person's particular economic goal. Efficiency, broadly understood, is an action for which the benefit is greater than the cost. Cost minimization and utility maximization are the neoclassical principles of economically efficient, optimal outcomes.

These goals, however, do not lack a normative, utilitarian aspect. The efficiency principles are derivatives of what is called Pareto optimality, which is the standard for evaluating the desirability of an allocation of resources. An allocation is Pareto optimal if there is not other feasible allocation that would make one person better off without making anyone else worse off. The influence of Bentham's utilitarian principle is clear. His moral maxim, as we shall recall, states that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.” The strongest criticism that can be raised against Pareto optimization is that it is impossible for a third party to know what makes a person better or worse off. Even if this condition is known, it would be impossible to measure and compare.

Modern-day economics has evaded the measurement problems that plague Pareto-style utilitarianism by replacing the principle of utility maximization with the analogous principle of wealth maximization. But replacing utility with wealth does not change the utilitarian criterion for the analysis; it only makes it easier to measure. This criterion has become not only the prevailing basis of analysis in the making of economic decisions, but also the method for solving difficult moral dilemmas. ³³ The only problem is that even if the consequences of an action bring about the greatest wealth for the greatest number, the action itself could be morally wrong. What is worse, utilitarianism is the breeding ground for relativism. Consider, for example, a world in which the greatest number consists of Nazis, Fascists, Maoists, or Islamic Jihad terrorists. Further suppose that their goal is to kill anyone who is not a Nazi, Fascist, Maoist, or Islamic Jihad fighter. Relative to their goals, their actions are good and they bring about the greatest happiness to the greatest number. In absolute, objective terms, however, their actions are not only wrong but evil. Utilitarianism cannot account for this and it is, for this reason, ill-conceived and not a means for discovering truth.

It must be clear that mainstream efficiency analysis has been quite successful in pointing to efficient resource allocation and, generally, how best to make means meet ends. Economics today, or at any stage of its development since its emancipation from moral philosophy, has earned the character of a science. This is not due to its measurement or prediction capabilities, although these do provide great insight despite errors and imperfections. Three features make economics scientific. The first is the universality of its principles, such that any economic principle is applicable to every particular economy. The second is the coherence of these principles as a system. The third is the search for the truths that apply to its domain–their discovery, clarification, and continuous refinement in their articulation. The first two features are evident in neoclassical economics. But if science is also to be identified with the seeking of truth, then some strands of positivist or empirical neoclassical economics may not qualify as scientific. ³⁴ To the extent that economics is a science of human choice, its principles must be grounded in human social reality and not merely in mathematical formulas that work in the sense of producing generally correct predictions. A fortiori, the assumptions of economics must account for the average person's common-sense view of the world.

However, neoclassical economics is not the only alternative. The Austrian school of economics presents a formidable nonmathematical rival. ³⁵ Owing to its nonmathematical character, its theoretical corpus is composed of general laws that have a priori foundations. ³⁶ More important, it is precisely because of its nonmathematical character that Austrian economics has not been forced to adopt a utilitarian principle that lends itself to mathematization. The advantage is that Austrian economics does not assume the principles of Pareto optimality or wealth maximization to address neither morally nonrelevant nor morally relevant economic problems. This, however, does not help the broader personalist enterprise, since Austrian economics is not equipped at all to address morally relevant economic problems. In this sense, neither neoclassical economics–because of its ill-conceived utilitarian assumptions–nor Austrian economics–because it has no morally relevant assumptions–can tackle morally relevant economic problems alone.

Regardless of which framework one chooses to employ, it must be clear what are the shortcomings of its respective analyses. In this way, economic analysis of any brand would not have to be altered in any way, only tempered by the filtering out of the biases in their solutions. If the wealth maximization principle has been applied, then it needs to be recognized that the bias is in the end-state focus of the analysis: the consequences of the situation under scrutiny. This bias can be corrected by directing the analysis instead to the facts of the situation itself and their significance to personal considerations. In the case of Austrian analysis, it needs to be recognized that the focus of the scrutiny will be the economic value of the thing under scrutiny and its correlative economic valuation by the relevant agent. This means that moral value, or any other sort of noneconomically relevant value, will not be part of an Austrian analysis.

The essential nature of economic personalism is, then, that the form of the analysis is supplied by economic theory, but the content of the analysis also matters significantly. In other words, it would matter if the enterprise is harmful to any person's dignity and well-being. This would be the first thing to settle and, once cleared, then the economic analysis may begin. ³⁷ The specific prescription obtained from the economic analysis must, too, be cleared against personalist criteria. It may be the case that, in light of the personalist criteria applied to the initial economic scenario, the agent will need to revise his specific goals. In this case, a new economic analysis must be applied to the revised scenario. However, the agent's recognition of alternative, specific goal, might not have been possible apart from the economic analysis.

The essence of economic personalism is thus akin to a filter of person-mindedness that is applied from above as a meta-analysis, to an economic investigation or situation. Person-mindedness can be described as a network of relations of persons and things, for example, moral things, aesthetic things, musical things, and every other aspect of human social reality. We know person-mindedness intuitively as an attitude that can be present in our minds or forgotten. It is present when our minds are present in the situation before us and we are able to appreciate the personal character of the world. It is forgotten when our minds are otherwise occupied and thus not grounded in the here and now of the personal character of the world. An act of forgiving exemplifies one of the most pure forms of person-mindedness. It is not self-interested, for sometimes it is difficult and even painful to forgive. An act of forgiveness draws empathy from the very core of personhood and the interconnectedness of persons that underlies it. Any act that exhibits person-mindedness is connected to the human social world in a meaningful way. But if the person disconnects from this world and retreats into his own mind, due to worries or reflections about ideas, then person-mindedness wanes and disappears. Person-mindedness is thus ephemeral.

Let us summarize what we have to this point. We have examined the name economic personalism as the name of an idea. Toward this goal, we have analyzed the meanings of its composite parts, and the time and space situatedness to which these meanings apply. From this, we have also distilled the essence of the idea of economic personalism. Now, we must discover the thing to which this idea refers. How do we recognize the thing we can call economic personalism? This question presupposes that economic personalism exists in the world. Is this the case?

Consider the case of an airline that borders on bankruptcy. Consumer confidence is so low that the only passengers who will fly on this airline are those who receive free tickets as compensation for filling out an application for a major credit card. Everything points to major budget cuts, employee lay offs, and fare reductions. A new chief executive officer of this failing company is named, and he does exactly the opposite. He increases the budget for employee bonuses in order to reward any increase in the efficiency of the operations. Accordingly, each employee of an operation center receives a substantial bonus every month for their contribution to sustaining a record of on-time departures and arrivals. Instead of firing those employees at closing operation centers, he attempts to relocate them in needed, but previously ignored, geographical areas. Furthermore, he does not reduce fares because, as a person, he understands that to build a following of loyal customers, he needs to provide them with good service. This means, therefore, on-time arrivals and departures, comfortable and well-maintained seats, quality in-flight attention, and better than average airline food and beverages. All of this is costly; hence, fares could not be lowered to compete with budget flights. This did not present a problem in the CEO's mind, since budget-flight passengers are sporadic and not likely to be drawn in the high volume necessary to save the airline from bankruptcy. He focused, instead, on the repeat customers that did not travel only because of bargain fares. It did not take long before this airline company became one of the top-ranking airlines in the industry. ³⁸ There is no question that the decisions taken by this leader were founded on sound managerial and economic planning. But what stands out most of all is his ever-present person-mindedness. He helped displaced employees find a relocation site or alternative employment. He thought about the needs of the ordinary person sitting on the coach section of any one of the airplanes owned by the airline. He included his entire operations staff as part of the solution, and he rewarded each one for their contribution toward this goal. The bottom line was important, since his job was on the line every moment that the airline remained at the border of bankruptcy. But he recognized that the bottom line would not improve if he lost sight of the persons who were employees, the persons who were customers, and the persons who were his potential lenders. His decisions and his actions exhibited person-mindedness not as a satellite concern, but as part of his firm's recovery plan. The actions of Gordon Bethune, the chief executive officer, and the effects these had on Continental Airlines, exemplify the existence and success of economic personalism. ³⁹

How do we recognize other cases? The idea of economic personalism is an abstraction from our observations of conduct or real states of affairs that share the same essence. Consider the idea of forgiveness. This idea is wholly distinct from our idea of a flower. When we think of a flower, we may call to mind specific memories of concrete things we call flowers. But when we think of forgiveness, there is no readily concrete thing in the world to call to mind as such. Instead, forgiveness is an abstraction from particular instances that have the essence of forgiveness. There are formal properties of forgiveness that make it recognizable despite any differences in the situation in which it is presented. The thing at issue here, then, is the formal properties that make economic personalism recognizable and, thereby, describable. In other words, the task is to formulate the sufficient and necessary conditions for some fact, state or affairs, or conduct to embody ec