The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics

30/03/2026

Amid endless AI predictions and prognostications, is there enough genuine insight? Naoise Grenham makes the case that Encountering Artificial Intelligence — born from three years of Vatican-backed theological dialogue — delivers where much commentary falls short: cohesive anthropology and coherent ethics. He highlights its defence of irreplaceable human relationality against the growing appeal of "risk-free" AI companionship.

Naoise Grenham comments on the first of a Vatican-led, three-volume series of theological investigations into AI, which is heavily influenced by the late Pope Francis’s theology of encounter.

27/03/2026

The Price of Our Values stresses the need for ‘value pluralism’: for economics to acknowledge the shortcomings of some of its default analytic positions and make greater room for moral concerns, as well as the need for moral thinking to allow greater space for economic considerations.

'The Price of Our Values' calls for 'value pluralism': economics must engage with moral concerns, and moral thinking must reckon with economic costs.

26/03/2026

Public discourse routinely describes AI systems as entities that 'think', 'understand', or 'decide'. Andrei Rogobete argues that this anthropomorphisation is not just imprecise but actively harmful. It leads users to overestimate what AI can do, shifts accountability away from the humans who design and deploy these systems, and fosters misplaced emotional trust — with particular risks for children. Drawing on John Searle's distinction between syntax and semantics, Rogobete maintains that linguistic fluency in a machine is not evidence of comprehension. He then offers a Christian perspective: human beings are uniquely created for loving, transformative relationships with God and one another — a capacity no computational system can share. Responsible adoption of AI, he concludes, requires honest language about what these tools are and are not.

Anthropomorphising AI is rhetorically seductive but intellectually unsound.

25/03/2026

Philip Booth assesses an argument for a limited state and dispersed, competing forms of governance based not simply on a concern for increased freedom, but the ability to flourish.

24/03/2026

London's great aristocratic estates used leasehold development and private law to perform planning functions long before the rise of public town planning.

Kroencke examines how London's great aristocratic estates used leasehold development and private law to perform planning functions long before the rise of public town planning.

23/03/2026

Modern life is increasingly governed by a single source of authority — the centralised state — while the self-governing institutions that once ordered much of civic, professional, and economic life have steadily lost their independence.

David Thunder's The Polycentric Republic argues for a different model: a system of dispersed, overlapping governance in which enterprise associations and local civil bodies hold real authority, with power flowing upwards rather than downwards.

In this review, Philip Booth welcomes Thunder's contribution while probing its relationship to classical liberal arguments for a limited state. He notes that Thunder's justification rests not on maximising individual freedom but on creating the conditions for human flourishing and the practice of the virtues — an approach that should be of particular interest to Christians engaged with questions of political order.

Philip Booth assesses an argument for a limited state and dispersed, competing forms of governance based not simply on a concern for increased freedom, but the ability to flourish.

19/03/2026

As a volume that explores the history of economic thought 'The Invention of Infinite Growth' is strong, but Andrew Packman suggests that it adds little to debates over how to approach the tension between growth and the need to conserve the natural world.

Andrew Packman reviews The Invention of Infinite Growth — strong on economic history, but adding little to debates on growth and the natural world.

25/02/2026

In our latest review, Jan Bentz explores On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom, a book that is at once philosophical meditation, political testament, and quiet act of intellectual recovery.

Sunstein organises his case around six cardinal principles — freedom, pluralism, security, equality, the rule of law, and opportunity — drawing on Mill, Hayek, and Rawls not as combatants but as partners in conversation.

What sets this defence apart from those of Fukuyama or Pinker, Bentz argues, is its realism. Sunstein's liberalism is neither sentimental nor technocratic: it insists that markets are indispensable to liberty yet must be tempered by law and animated by conscience. His closing call for "freedom with fire" — moral energy without moralism, conviction without cruelty — is as much a challenge as a hope.

Yet Bentz argues that liberalism's problem has never been its ideals but its optimism — the belief that decency can always substitute for depth.

Jan Bentz reviews what may be the most lucid and unembarrassed defense of liberalism in recent memory, expressing a quiet faith that humanity is improvable, that reason can temper rage, and that freedom, properly tended, can still burn bright—without burning down the house.

22/02/2026

Drawing on the Vatican's landmark document The Vocation of the Business Leader, Fr. Mota challenges us to move beyond thin moral language — efficiency, CSR, advocacy — and engage with the deeper questions that ethical leadership demands: desire, virtue, sin, and transformation.

Fr. Francisco Mota S.J. on why business leadership is a true vocation—and why good goods, good work, and good wealth demand more than advocacy alone.

19/02/2026

We're delighted to share our latest blog post by Francisco Mota S.J., Spiritual Advisor of UNIAPAC International, adapted from his address at the UNIAPAC Think Tank in December 2025.

Drawing on the Vatican's landmark document The Vocation of the Business Leader, Fr. Mota challenges us to move beyond thin moral language — efficiency, CSR, advocacy — and engage with the deeper questions that ethical leadership demands: desire, virtue, sin, and transformation.

Fr. Francisco Mota S.J. on why business leadership is a true vocation—and why good goods, good work, and good wealth demand more than advocacy alone.

17/02/2026

Why did giant corporations dominate the twentieth century — and why did they eventually lose their grip?

In this review, John Kroencke examines Richard Langlois's sweeping reinterpretation of American business history, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century. Langlois challenges the long-standing narrative made famous by Alfred Chandler — that large, vertically integrated firms triumphed because they were inherently superior.

Instead, he argues that these corporations filled a temporary institutional void: when wars, depression, and misguided regulation destroyed the market infrastructure needed for decentralized coordination, big firms were simply the last ones standing.

As those market institutions matured in the late twentieth century, the corporate giants were dismantled in turn.

Blending corporate, intellectual, and political history across 816 meticulously researched pages, Langlois delivers what Kroencke calls "a tour de force" — one with sharp lessons for today's renewed appetite for antitrust enforcement and industrial policy.

The Corporation and the Twentieth Century shows how contingent history—wars, Depression, regulation—shaped the Chandlerian corporation's rise and fall.