Louis-Joseph Lebret

Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897-1966) was a French socio-economic planner and ethicist who initiated the discourses of ‘humane economics’/‘the humane economy’ and ‘the ethics of development’ and progressively extended these into a global ethics framework. He was an architect of the Catholic Church’s entry to the post-colonial intellectual and institutional spheres of international development and global justice, post-World War Two. Lebret emphasized: 1) counterbalancing doctrinal philosophical and/or theological orientations by strong bases in empirical life-experience, practical learning, and social sciences; 2) considering concrete life-needs, not only a generalized language of freedom; and 3) studying capitalism not only ‘development’. He insisted that the unified fabric of living requires transdisciplinary approaches in observation, planning and action, and applied such ideas in planning and advisory work for harmonized ‘integral human development’ in countries around the world. Studying an interconnected world, he came to demand adoption of global and cosmopolitan frames, not only national and ‘community’-level frames, in both explanation and ethics.