St.Benedict’s Legacy: an European Lesson of “Civil Economy” about System’s Competitiveness and Company’s competitive Advantage

St.Benedict, the Patron Saint of Europe, has handed down a precious legacy to posterity not only spiritually, but economically. The Benedictine Order has represented a light in the darkness of early Middle Ages. It has been a bulwark of civilization in gloomy times characterized by war, invasions, plagues, starvation after the collapse of the Roman Empire. It has anticipated the birth of Europe from an historical, spiritual, political, social, and even economic point of view. This last contribution is surely less known as regards the more classical (and more celebrated) Christian roots of Europe, but it has sown the seeds of the birth of the mercantile economy and contributed to the economic recovery which took place around the year one thousand through its labour ethics, the enlivening of the territory, the birth of the first nucleus of entrepreneurship, being the Benedictine abbey the forerunner of modern non profit company. Different lessons can spring from Benedictine Rule at macro, meso and micro economic level. First: one can wonder the role that an institution, like spirituality (in a second moment crystallized into a monastic Order), can generally play for the market. Second: the theory that capitalism arises only from Protestant religion can be critically confuted, having Benedictine monks and Franciscan Friars (who were born, originally, like a form of radical and critical expression of Catholic Church) given, through different ways, an important push to the birth of a proto-capitalism (which will develop, more consistenly, later on at the time of the Italian free cities). Third: the special quality of urban embryonal capitalism to which Benedictine abbey has given origin which consists in a civil economy, not violent like nineteenth-century industrial capitalism or predatory like modern financial capitalism. Fourth: the role of social capital in building market can also be seen because around abbeys developed a trustful and peaceful atmosphere which meant the return to market exchange, the birth of the commercial fairs, the cultivations of neglected lands according to new lease contracts and institutions, the implementation of the first forms of economic accounting. Fifth: the organization of the territory and the increasing of system’s competitiveness can be discovered from the fact that Benedictine abbeys became the proto-agent of a “polarized development a là Perroux” giving a great contribution to the birth of towns, of commercial and manufacturing activities in their neighbourhood all together interrelated (many modern industrial districts show a coincidence of localization with monastic areas of settlement). Sixth: the federalist organization existing among abbeys, which were independent one from each other, but coordinated at European level in a democratic assembly (ahead of the modern European Parliament). But the lesson does not exhaust itself only at macro and meso economic level. Seventh: at micro economic level Benedictine abbey represents a prototype of the modern social cooperative company characterized by non profit nature, production of relational goods, mutuality among members, high intrinsic motivation, active participation to the life of the organization, democratic governance. But Benedictine abbey offers also to contemporary profit companies some useful suggestions to increase their competitiveness and to rejoin ethics and economics in their action, becoming civil. Infact they can mutuate from Benedictine abbey the labour ethics, the model of work-social life conciliation and the wise time-management, the celebration of some virtue which are also business virtues, the attribution of tasks according to person’s qualities, the principle of corporate social responsibility through a multi-stakeholder approach, the centrality of innovation, all requisites which make companies more competitive.