ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the positioning of creative practice within professional and business development, cultural policy-making and the wider cultural economy. In twelfth-century Italy, Florence and Sienna were going through an early industrial revolution as the textile trades expanded and thousands of people flocked to the cities. The churches and their interiors become a permanent testament of the spirit of kinship offering more open access to anyone as part of a public realm. Social Contract Ethics, found in philosophical traditions such as Utilitarianism and (sort-of) Pragmatism is a debate about ethics that focuses on the outward consequences of actions rather than the inward nature of goodness and virtue. The vernacular economies form an immune system with which people can mutually protect each other from the ups and downs of the Big Global Economy. People are all prey to self-delusions such as bad faith, collusion and alienation in order to make the often harsh World out there more psychologically palatable.
