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unrealistic as believing it to be universal, and that re-introducing the civil and socialised dimensions to economic modeling would enable the discipline to work with a better, because more accurate, understanding of human motivation. As they note, in Genovesi’s understanding of civil economy, ‘there is no opposition between the various forms of reciprocity, or between virtue and self-interest’ (p. 32). Although the book says nothing of the Anglican tradition of social thinking epitomised by William Temple, and only briefly mentions Beveridge’s welfare state, there are interesting echos of the British, and Anglican, experience here. For Beveridge followed his monumental report on social security with another entitled Voluntary Action which argued that state welfare needed the parallel institutions and practices of voluntary neighbourliness if it was to survive. And was Temple unconsciously or consciously echoing Genovesi when he remarked (in Christianity and Social Order, Penguin, 1942) that the ‘art of government in fact is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands’ (p. 65)? There is much more that could be said about Bruni and Zamagni’s arguments—in 147 pages, they have brought together one of the most effective critiques of our current economic orthodoxies, and this effectiveness stems in large part from their refusal to resort to rhetorical exaggerations or zero-sum games between competing ideas. Their critique is the more devastating for being expressed with such generosity. And this may be because, unlike many who write comparable critiques of economic orthodoxy, capitalism or globalisation, they are drawing explicitly upon a tradition of thought that has deep roots, failed to become dominant, but has never gone away. At the time of the financial crisis in 2008, it was frequently observed that, whilst the economics of the previous forty years had been in gestation for some thirty years before that, tested in theory since the 1940s and briefly in practice in Chile under Pinochet, nowhere in the world’s business schools and economics departments was there any alternative economic thinking that had been scrutinised, tested and refined to such a degree. Orthodoxy had, it seemed, driven out all manifestations of contrary thought. Bruni and Zamagni have shown here that alternatives to current economic orthodoxy do not have to be conjured up out of thin air and that there has always been, in the Italian tradition they describe, a foundation on which a better and more human economic environment could be constructed. It remains to add that the authors’ translator, N. Michael Brennan, has done a superb job on the original Italian text. The English edition reads fluently and naturally with hardly any of the awkward constructions or clumsy neologisms found in many technical translations. Civil Economy is lucid and eminently readable—detailed enough to be convincing and short enough to be widely read, one hopes.