Assessing the Transformative Impact of Love-Based Microsocial Communities: From Existential Peripheries into the Nexus of the Common Good

This chapter draws a parallel between the macro-social dynamics of the nexus of the common good and the dynamics of personal agency within micro-social communities, where peripheral, vulnerable people experience stable relationships of personalised care. This parallel is plausible: authentic human and social development are both rooted in having experienced, at least embryonically, a possible answer to one’s innermost aspirations—love, truth, beauty, justice…—and freely walk along that path. This paper summarises our research on micro-social relations, discussing how they can contribute to understanding and measuring the nexus of the common good. Do transformative micro-social relations also generate a dynamic of the common good, and how? What can we learn about the inner dynamics of the common good at the macro level, by looking at the micro-dynamics of personalised relations of care involving vulnerable people? These are reasonable questions: one can argue that the good of peripheral people is also good for society (we find echoes of this idea in different visions—from Rawls to Christian social teaching); or even that peripheries are a privileged viewpoint for observing reality.