Personalist Economics: Unorthodox and Counter-Cultural.

There are two reasons why personalist economics lies outside the mainstream. Personalist economics (1) rejects the premises of mainstream economics, and (2) takes exception to certain dominant values of today's culture whereas the mainstream is much more at ease with contemporary Western culture. This paper addresses both reasons and is organized accordingly. In it the author argues that the individualism and the autonomous individual of mainstream economics have their roots in the seventeenth-eighteenth century Enlightenment, that is well before the development of electronic means of communication. Personalism and the acting person of personalist economics emerged during the electronic stage of communication and, the author argues, are much better suited to the twenty-first century. The author calls for a reconstruction of economics which would replace the autonomous individual with the acting person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]