ABSTRACT
This chapter starts their journey adopting a perspective of economy and of the market inspired by the tradition known as Civil Economy. Such a broad subject could seem to be a useless digression in a study, as the present one, whose main arguments concern Values-Based Organizations (VBO). Political Economy as a systematic and autonomous reflection based on the assumption that only self-interests and administration of justice were necessary for the achievement of the "common good" was founded in eighteenth century Europe. The tradition of the so-called Civil Economy that flourishes in the eighteenth century in Italy should be interpreted as the modern expression of the civil tradition started during the Middle Ages in the Benedictine Abbeys, in the studia of the Franciscans and of the Dominicans and in the great age of the Tuscan civil humanism, afterwards. Medieval humanism represented a weaving of saints and merchants, monks and labor, economy and cities.
