Lecture
Moral economy is a way of examining economic activity from the standpoint of its moral rather than its material aspects. The concept was developed in 1971 by the British Marxist social historian and political activist E. P. Thompson in his essay «The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century». He was speaking of a specific class struggle in a specific epoch, viewed from the standpoint of the poorest citizens — the «crowd».
According to Thompson, [ 1 ] James Bronterre O'Brien introduced the term in his critique of capitalism [ 2 ] and of the political economists of the 19th century in 1837. Bronterre wrote: «True political economy is like true domestic economy; it does not consist solely in slaving and saving; there is a moral economy as well as a political… These quacks are ready to destroy the feelings in exchange for uninterrupted production and accumulation… It is the moral economy that they always conceal. When they speak of the tendency of large masses of capital and of the division of labour to increase production and cheapen commodities, they do not tell us of the inferior man whom a single and unchanging occupation is bound to produce».
Thompson first used the term in his 1963 book «The Making of the English Working Class» with reference to the food riots in England of 1795 This «crowd» included «tinners, miners, weavers, hosiery workers and labourers», [ 6 ] who regularly rioted against grain merchants who raised prices in years of poor harvest. In the 1971 essay the traditional feudal economy was described as «moral», in contrast to the «classical» (in the sense of an economy in which prices were determined by supply and demand ). Thompson regarded the «crowd» as active subjects rather than passive objects.
He worked in the nascent discipline of social history , considering the situation from the standpoint of the crowd rather than of investors and business owners, creating a « history from below » in order to explain why the crowd took the decision to riot. He concluded that they were lamenting the loss of their traditional means of subsistence, faced with hunger and/or starvation.
Thompson traced the root causes to the system of enclosure , which converted common lands into individually owned plots, to merchants who raised prices in times of relative scarcity , and to other practices that Thompson associated with free trade , free markets and limited regulation ( laissez-faire ), which he identified with Adam Smith's 1776 book «The Wealth of Nations» .
Thompson examined how peasant discontent reflected a popular consensus that economic activity should be conducted in accordance with generally accepted values. These included social norms , reciprocal obligations and responsibilities. During the period of industrialisation the protective laws disappeared, and previously illegal activity became legal/generally accepted. Feudal peasants became industrial workers who experienced hardship and, in extreme cases, starvation. Thompson argued that the English riots were not merely a reaction to physical hunger, but also reflected public outrage at what the rioters considered the immorality of the new economic system. [ 3 ]
Thompson rethought and re-analysed this notion. [ 2 ] In his 1991 review of his 1971 article and of its numerous critics, Thompson stated that his use of the notion was conditioned precisely by that historical context. [ 3 ]
Thompson called himself an empiricist . [ 10 ] : 19 Thompson's historical writings and his political activism were interconnected. [ 11 ] In the 1960s he supported the students in the student protests at his university, and in the 1980s he became Europe's best-known activist of the anti-nuclear movement. [ 11 ]
He spent almost ten years gathering evidence for his 1971 article in the journal Past & Present entitled «The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century». [ 7 ] The article was based on a joint project he carried out in 1963 with Richard Charles Cobb , who was working on 18th- and 19th-century protests in France. [ 12 ]
Thompson's social history is associated with the phrase « history from below » , as is that of the British social historians Raphael Samuel and Christopher Hill . Its precursors were Georges Lefebvre and the French «Annales» school . Earlier historians had presented peasants and the working class «as one of the problems the government had to contend with».
In his 1964 book « The Crowd in History» George Rudé «examined the patterns of food riots and market disturbances in terms of their geographical distribution, frequency and level of violence». [ 16 ] Thompson focused on the mindset of the 18th-century crowd — accustomed to the old, disintegrating economic system, which Thompson described as a moral economy — which paternalistically protected workers during crises and deaths in exchange for power over them. He contrasted this with the emerging system, which violated this tacit contract. [ 17 ]
Thompson examined how, in rural England in the 18th century, peasants took the decision to riot. He acknowledged that «riots were provoked by sharp price rises, unscrupulous practices by traders, or hunger». However, he argued that the riots were caused by a sense that the old norms had been unjustly discarded and that the new arrangements were illegitimate, citing in particular trade, milling and baking. He defined the moral economy of the poor as «grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community». [ 7 ] : 178–79 In Thompson's view, these riots were as a rule peaceful events, demanding that prices for essential goods be set in accordance with traditional feudal rights. These peasants believed that the traditional «just price» was better than the market price, and punished large farmers who sold their surpluses at higher prices outside the village while need remained within it.
Thompson said that the disturbances were «legitimised by the assumptions of the old moral economy, which taught the immorality of… profiteering upon the necessities of the people». [ 4 ] : 67–73 The disturbances were an attempt by the protesters to restore the disintegrating Tudor policy of provision .
Norbert Götz examined Thompson's moral economy in the context of classical political economy. [ 2 ] He argued that Thompson «treated the notion as a neologism with no prior history». [ 2 ] In 1991 Thompson acknowledged that he had not coined the term. He wrote that in his view the term had appeared at least by the middle of the 18th century. Thompson cited Bronterre O'Brien's use of the term in 1837, which was similar to Thompson's own use. Götz wrote that in pre-capitalist England the traditional order had roots in both the Edwardian and the Tudor eras and was based on market exchange.
Thompson's concept of moral economy was taken up by scholars from disciplines unconnected with history, such as political science, sociology and anthropology.
Thompson presented his work at a conference in April 1966. He described the moral economy as «a traditional consensus of the crowd's rights which was swept away by market forces». [ 2 ] Thompson contrasted the «bread nexus» that arose in the 18th century with the «cash nexus» of the industrial revolution
Before the rise of classical economics in the 18th century, the European and colonial economy was regulated by a multitude of (formal and informal) rules that had accumulated over time. In the old system, economic transactions were based on reciprocal obligations. [ 20 ] : 162 Horwitz argued that as commodity markets developed in the second half of the 18th century «the price of grain ceased to be local and became regional; this [presupposed for the first time] the widespread use of money and a broad liquidity of goods». This occurred at roughly the same time as organised markets were emerging and the economic system was being transformed. [ 20 ] : 164 Horwitz criticised writers on contract law of the late 18th century, such as John Joseph Powell , author of the 1790 «Essay upon the Law of Contracts and Agreements», for condemning the old systems as undermining the «rule of law». Horwitz argued that the old systems were better ways of organising contracts, since they represented more «equitable conceptions of substantive justice». [ 20 ]
Thompson argued that the emerging political economy found its embodiment in Smith's chapter "Digression concerning the Corn Trade" [ 22 ] in The Wealth of Nations . In this chapter Smith rejects a tax on grain exports, writing: "The unlimited, unrestrained freedom of the corn trade, as it is the only effectual preventative of the miseries of a famine, so it is the best palliative of the inconveniences of a dearth; for the inconveniences of a real scarcity cannot be remedied, they can only be palliated" [ 22 ] . In other words, given a shortage of grain, the question was who would be able to eat it: those who could pay, or those who ate when it was plentiful. This essay influenced many British leaders, including William Pitt the Younger , Lord Grenville and Edmund Burke .
Thompson gave examples of British administrators sent to India who resisted government intervention in the market despite the "immense difficulties of the Indian famine" during the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 . Amartya Sen estimated that about 10 million people died as a result of the famine, and Sen described it as man-made. [ 23 ] In England the Poor Laws and charity protected many from starvation in the eighteenth century. [ 3 ] : 287 For example, in 1795 the government introduced the Speenhamland system to combat extreme poverty.
Thompson argued that there was a consensus in society that rioters "were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs". [ 7 ] : 78 Patrick Collinson, in his chapter in the 2001 book Puritanism and the Poor , said that clergymen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preached against economic practices that were not strictly illegal but were "uncharitable". [ 24 ] : 242–58 He said that when the clergy condemned selling food at high prices or raising rents, this may have influenced the behaviour of Christians who were concerned about their reputations. [ 24 ]
Thompson's 1991 collection of essays Customs in Common included the 1971 essay "The Moral Economy" together with his reflections on that article. In the chapter "E. P. Thompson and Moral Economies" in the 2012 book A Companion to Moral Anthropology , Marc Edelman wrote that Thompson's use of the word "moral" conflates "morality" in the sense of "norms" or customs with "morality" as a principled stance — particularly with regard to the "common good" defined by "customary rights and utopian aspirations". [ 6 ] : 55 In his reflections Thompson wrote: "Perhaps the trouble lies in the word 'moral'. Moral is a signal which brings on a rush of polemical blood to the academic head. Nothing has made my critics angrier than the notion that a food riot participant might have been more 'moral' than a disciple of Dr Adam Smith." [ 3 ] : 271 Thompson sought to clarify that his concept of the moral economy is focused on a specific geographical, political, social and temporal context. It comprises a combination of "beliefs, usages and forms associated with the marketing of food" in eighteenth-century England. [ 3 ] : 338
rice cultivation in Cambodia
In the 1970s and 1980s the political scientist James C. Scott revisited Thompson's concept of the moral economy. [ 25 ] He applied it in his 1976 publication The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia . [ 26 ] [ 25 ] He studied colonial archives in Paris and London. He focused on colonisation and decolonisation in the peasant world of Burma and Vietnam , including two failed uprisings of the 1930s. [ 25 ] Scott reported that in the colonial era economic and political transformations systematically violated what the lower classes perceived as social equity, and that this was an important cause of rebellions. Scott generalised peasant conceptions of economic justice and exploitation as their moral economy, and held that violations of these norms led to rebellions. [ 25 ] [ 26 ]
Scott noted that Karl Polanyi's work The Great Transformation influenced his own writing.
Scott, citing Polanyi, described how farmers, tenants and labourers invoked "the moral economy or market logic" [ 27 ] : 6 when it served their interests against market forces. The kind of market regulation they contended with was determined by "the historical origins and institutional structure of any particular economy"
In his preface Scott described the "subsistence ethic based on the 'safety first' principle" that he observed. He argued that this was a consequence of pre-capitalist peasant societies experiencing scarce resources and fearing food shortages. [ 26 ] : 2
Scott distinguished his views from those of Barrington Moore Jr. , author of Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World ( 1966 ) [ 28 ] , and Eric R. Wolf , author of Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969) Scott also cited Richard Charles Cobb, author of The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (1970) [ 12 ].
The conclusions reached by the Russian-Soviet economist A. V. Chayanov largely coincide with the findings of contemporary research. And although A. V. Chayanov did not directly introduce the term "moral economy" in his works of the 1910s–1930s, he in many ways anticipated its emergence, including the methodological aspects of later research. [ 30 ]
In the chapter "The 'Moral Economy' of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality", John Stevenson criticised Thompson and other British scholars who, he claimed, followed the example of the French Annales school of historians in departing from traditional historiography. [ 31 ] In his 1975 book Stevenson criticised Thompson for his attempt to decipher peasant culture in the context of social and economic change. [ 32 ] He rejected Thompson's concept of the moral economy, which was based on what Thompson called an "extraordinarily deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief" that legitimised their protests against "the propertied and those in power".
In the 1998 book The Moral Economy , John P. Powelson wrote: "In a moral economy [an economy that is morally acceptable], with modern technology no one need be poor… A moral economy captures the benefits of technological invention through classical liberalism, while using indirect checks and balances to prevent environmental damage, ethnic and gender bias, and skewed distribution of wealth… In a moral economy, governments facilitate but rarely mandate." [ 33 ] : 19 [ 34 ] Such an economy maintains a balance between interventionism and libertarianism; between economic factors and ethical norms. [ 33 ] Powelson regards the moral economy and economic prosperity as mutually reinforcing. [ 33 ]
Drawing on E. P. Thompson's affirmative conception of populism and Ernesto Laclau's observation that pre-industrial food riots constitute a "good starting point for approaching populism" [ 35 ], Norbert Götz and Emilia Palonen identified the affective dimension, localism and disregard for third parties as key similarities between the moral economy and populism. [ 36 ]
The Quaker Institute for the Future (QIF), founded in 2003, launched the Moral Economy Project. The project expanded the term to include environmental concerns. The project was grounded in Kenneth Boulding's 1966 paper "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth". [ 37 ] Boulding advocated an integrated, holistic, ecological worldview. [ 38 ] : xvi A related 2009 publication, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy , argued that the well-being of the planet requires a "whole earth economy", which they also called a moral economy. [ 38 ] The authors described the moral economy as an ecologically and morally coherent use of resources for the benefit of society. [ 38 ] : 51 The authors consider purpose, function, size, fairness and governance. [ 38 ]
Other works addressing the topic of the moral economy include:
In 2020 Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas called Thompson one of the "most important social thinkers of our time", whose work influenced critical theory , alongside Karl Marx , Walter Benjamin , Fernand Braudel (who greatly influenced the Annales school), Mikhail Bakhtin , Carlo Ginzburg and Immanuel Wallerstein . [ 48 ]
In his 2017 book The Moral Economists , Tim Rogan included Thompson among his three most influential critics of twentieth-century capitalism — alongside Tawney and Polanyi — because their works were widely read and influenced scholarship and public opinion. [ 49 ] All three were historians who, as outsiders, challenged utilitarianism in economics. [ 49 ]
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