Forty+ thinkers.
None of them adopted wholesale.
The Companion Reader is the reference document behind the framework: a study guide for every scholar/thinker who shaped it, including the ones who argue against it.
A conversation, not a reading list.
Most frameworks cite their influences and move on. This one puts the influences on the table, including the parts that don't fit, and works through them in the open. Every profile in the reader follows the same five-part structure.
No thinker is adopted wholesale. Each is a conversation partner: some closer allies, some useful foils, all genuine contributors to the thinking behind the framework.
Why this range
The list runs from a Greek philosopher, to a French mystic who starved herself in solidarity with factory workers, to an economist who supplied the intellectual cover for shareholder primacy. That range isn't eclecticism for its own sake. Every thinker is doing one of four jobs, and you should be able to name which one by the end of their entry.
Moral grounding
What makes a household arrangement good, not just efficient or stable.
Aristotle, Weil, Bonhoeffer, Baigan
Structural diagnosis
Why the current system produces the outcomes it does, at what scale, through what mechanism.
Polanyi, Weber, Tönnies, Mumford
Constructive design
Evidence and method for how non-extractive coordination actually works, not just that it should.
Ostrom, Schumacher, Jacobs, Sen
Adversarial pressure-testing
The strongest available version of the position the framework is built against, engaged honestly rather than caricatured.
Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Rand, Friedman, Bastiat, Sowell, Marx
A framework built only from the first three categories is a sermon. It persuades people who already agree with it and says nothing to anyone who doesn't.
The fourth category isn't a courtesy to balance; it's a stress test. If the framework cannot survive contact with Hayek's argument about dispersed knowledge, state exactly where Rand's account of the self runs out, or refute Marx's state-scale collectivism, then it's asserting rather than arguing.
This is also why no single discipline could do the work alone. Economists are trained to describe what happens to prices, output, and incentives, and are mostly silent on whether the result is something anyone should want. Philosophers ask what a good life requires, and mostly ignore the financial and institutional mechanisms that make or prevent it. Sociologists and historians supply the vocabulary for what's actually lost when a household is extracted from, rootedness and civic capacity and Gemeinschaft, instead of leaving it as an unnamed feeling of unease. Anthropologists show that entire societies have gotten by, sometimes for centuries, on principles the modern economic imagination treats as naive or impossible and that our system is not the only prosperous way to arrange property, debt, and exchange.
This document is an argument between them, not a syllabus.
Who is in it.
Eight categories. Within each, roughly in order of how central they are to the framework's core architecture. The document is built to grow.
These groupings are disciplinary, so they cut across the four jobs above. Rand sits with the philosophers and does adversarial pressure-testing; Tönnies sits with the sociologists and does structural diagnosis. Which job a thinker is doing matters more than which shelf they sit on.
Philosophers & Ethicists / 6
Economists / 6
Social & Cultural Critics / 4
Political Thinkers / 3
Historians & Activists / 3
Sociologists / 2
Tönnies is where the vocabulary on the overview page comes from. His guide is also a good example of the format doing its job: it credits him with naming the displacement the framework exists to address, then notes that his version of community is tacitly homogeneous and backward-looking, and that he supplies diagnosis while leaving the design work entirely undone.
Anthropologists / 4
No discipline here has been more directly formative to the framework's own architecture than anthropology. Where an economist can explain how a price mechanism works and a philosopher can argue about whether an arrangement is just, an anthropologist can show that entire societies have gotten by, sometimes for centuries, on principles the modern economic imagination treats as naive or impossible.
Secondary Contrasts / 8
Marx and Engels sit here as the Marxist Left, a deliberate counterpart to the free-market economists above: the strongest available case from the other direction. See "Why the opposition gets a fair hearing" below for how the framework engages both flanks.
Why the opposition gets a fair hearing.
The economists in Secondary Contrasts occupy a different relationship to the framework than the others. They're not ignored, dismissed, or simply opposed. They're engaged as serious intellectual contrasts whose ideas illuminate, often by friction, what the framework is actually arguing, from two different directions.
The Free-Market Right, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Bastiat, Sowell, and Friedman, are the economists and philosophers most commonly cited in American conservative and libertarian discourse. Each made genuine contributions to economic understanding. Each identified real problems, including bureaucratic overreach, price signal distortion, and the unintended consequences of state intervention, which the framework takes seriously. They're not wrong about everything, and treating them as if they were would undermine the framework's credibility.
What they share, despite significant differences among themselves, is a foundational commitment to market mechanisms as the primary arbiter of economic outcomes and individual liberty as the supreme social value. Where they diverge from the framework isn't in their defense of markets, since the framework preserves private property and market exchange. It's in what they treat as invisible: the household. In their frameworks, the household is either assumed to be a self-sufficient unit capable of navigating market conditions, or it disappears entirely into the individual. The social infrastructure that makes market participation possible, the trust and care and community reproduction and accumulated relational capital, goes untheorized and unvalued.
The Marxist Left, Marx and Engels, get engaged with equal seriousness, against a target that has to be stated precisely so it isn't mistaken for a broader claim than the framework actually makes. The framework doesn't oppose collectivism outright. Intentional communities that choose, freely and without coercing anyone into or out of participation, to hold and govern property in common have real historical examples, some enduring, some short-lived, and Ostrom's research on communities governing shared resources well, without either privatization or state control, is one of the framework's most important validators. Resource Pooling, the framework's own working mechanism, rests on the same premise: that people can hold and govern things together without either party dominating the other.
What the framework opposes is narrower and more specific: collectivism that's state-mandated or involuntary, imposed on participants who didn't choose it and can't exit it. That's the form Marx's remedy took wherever it was implemented at the scale of the state in the twentieth century, the seizure of the means of production by coercive central authority. Where the free-market right is challenged on its account of markets and its blindness to the household, the Marxist left is challenged on coercion and scale, not on the underlying conviction that people can choose to hold and govern things together, which the framework shares.
The critique isn't that markets are wrong, or that collective governance is wrong. It's that unchecked markets extract and state-imposed collectivism dominates: two different mechanisms arriving at the same outcome, a household stripped of the trust, agency, and standing to govern its own conditions. These thinkers, from both flanks, help define the terrain the framework is navigating.
Get the Companion Reader.
All forty+ study guides, plus the introduction that lays out what the framework is, who it's for, and why it has to stay adaptable. Tell me where to send it.
Where everything else shows up
This form does one job: it sends you the Companion Reader. Everything after that gets published on The Household Project, which is the Substack where this work gets figured out in the open. The framework has a set of practical artifacts still in draft, listed below. They land there first. No dates promised.