exchange) and mutual gift are surely two different forms of reciprocity, but

these are both forms of reciprocity that are essential in a good society.

In what follows, I will try, instead, to show that contrapositions, which

often are ideology-laden, can foster, in spite the good intentions of the

authors, non-reciprocity or even conflicts. I will try to show that reciprocity is

instead favoured by a pluralistic and non-ideological vision.

By endorsing an unconventional approach to reciprocity (but normal in

Aristotle and in the Civil Economy tradition), I have hence considered as a

form of reciprocity also the cooperation of the contract and that of the

‘cautious’ repeated interactions. This is the kind of reciprocity less demanding

from the motivational point of view because it does not require gratuity

nor benevolence (or very little), nevertheless it is reciprocity, an encounter of

interests (in the H. Arendt’s meaning of ‘inter-est’, i.e. being between),6 which

plays an essential role in the building of a civil society – it suffices to see what

happens to reciprocity and cooperation in regions and peoples where there is

no culture of contract in order to immediately understand that the place of

the contract is not filled by friendship or mutual love but, very often, by

various forms of power and exploitations.

On the other hand, I have extended the territory of reciprocity up to some

forms of unconditional behaviour, which are normally considered by social

sciences not as reciprocity but unilateral acts of altruism. So, I have gained terrain for reciprocity both in the ‘left’ side (altruism or gift) and the ‘right’

one (contract or interests).

It is straightforward to recognize that not all contracts or repeated selfinterested

interactions are civil or civilizing: where freedom is missing, where

monopolies and oligopolies are present, where the stronger exploits the

weaker even on the basis of formal contracts – here the contract is just a

juridical vest that covers unjust and asymmetrical relationships. At the same

time, it is not less obvious that not all forms of friendships are civil and

civilizing: various forms of mafia are important examples of ‘uncivil’ friendships,

and the ‘friendships amongst firms’ are usually called cartels. Finally,

unconditional behaviour can be uncivil: also the terrorist who kills can be

moved by a form of unconditional reasoning, and the gift that, sooner or

later, is not able to generate reciprocity can often create forms of pathologies

in human relations. In other words, the border between civil and uncivil

behaviour crosses all forms of interpersonal relations.

In this book we shall consider the ‘civil’ reciprocity, that is ‘positive’ relationality

that can be easily translated into ‘cooperation’ (I’ll use, especially in

the first chapters, reciprocity and cooperation often as synonymous), but fully

aware of the dark side that every form of reciprocity can hide (and often

actually does). Furthermore, although I shall measure the degree of civilization

of a given community or society on the basis of all forms of reciprocity,

nevertheless a special weight is given to the ‘unconditional reciprocity’. This

form of reciprocity has been basically disregarded by the founders of modern

political economy: in this book, on the contrary, it occupies a central place.

We shall see, in fact, that the unconditional reciprocity is the kind of

behaviour able to break the closeness of any form of philia, and activates less

courageous agents. Nonetheless, the entire analysis will also (and principally)

show the delicate and critical role of the unconditional behaviour, which is

always under the risk of favouring strategies of non-cooperation in the

population.

The main message of the book about unconditional behaviour can be

summarized as follows: civil cooperation is impossible with only unconditional

behaviour, but a fully civil life is impossible, at least in the long run, without

people able in certain moments and contests to practice also forms of

unconditional behaviour. Most of my theoretical efforts in the following

chapters have been devoted to this tension between this ‘only’ and this ‘without’.

The models and analyses of the book are attempts for corroborating

this intuition, and exploring some of its counter-intuitive consequences for

the life of society.

The entire work can also be read as a criticism to the isomorphism (or

monomorphism) that characterizes the contemporary studies on reciprocity.

In fact, the mainstream economist or game theorist considers only one

kind of reciprocity, which is of the contract or that emerging from repeated

interactions on the basis of individual self-interest (basically that reciprocity

that I shall call ‘the first form’). For most behavioural economists working today with reciprocity, reciprocity is also only one: the ‘strong reciprocity’,

which in its basic structure is similar to the reciprocity of philia, the ‘second

form’ in this book. Others such as K. Kolm or S. Latouche consider the

exchange of free gift the only behaviour worthy of being called ‘reciprocity’,

that is a pure unconditional relation, something like the ‘third form’ of

reciprocity I will consider.

Thus, the message of this book is to look at reciprocity as a complex and

multidimensional entity.

This unconventional and ecumenical choice presents costs and benefits.

The costs are very clear: to have ‘forced’ a commonsense concept (i.e. reciprocity)

and have used it for dealing with issues usually associated with different

categories (i.e. contract or gift). The benefits, however, surmount the

costs: to have a synthetic and unifying concept to start with and then to open

and articulate the analysis as far as new elements are put forward is, for a

social scientist, a temptation too difficult to win.

The chosen three forms of reciprocity do not embrace all tonalities

of human reciprocity – the conflict, for instance, is an important form of

reciprocity, or the very relevant and largely studied ‘indirect’ or generalized

reciprocity, are both very relevant forms of reciprocity totally absent in

the following pages, together with the reciprocity (‘negative’ or ‘strong’)

associated with some form of punishment.

This book begins with a short review of the present debate on reciprocity

and sociality in economics, which represents a sort of outline of my own

discourse that, on the one hand, is in line with what economics is saying on

reciprocity in the last decades, but, on the other, is also an attempt to say

something new and different about reciprocity, a reality that, as all the words

that constitute the grammar of society, is always greater than the abstract

theories trying to describe it.

Chapter 2 is an historical–methodological analysis, aiming at pointing out

how political economy approaches, from its very beginning, the issue of

sociality and, then, reciprocity. Actually, I shall spot basically an absence,

because we’ll see that modern political economy is basically characterized by

‘two hundred years of solitude’ of the homo oeconomicus. In particular, I