STAY IN THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS
The conceptual history of the term 'moral economy' shows a great diversity of meaning over a 200-year span. The concept of moral economy helps us to clarify alternative ways of utility maximisation through the construction of altruistic meaning for economic transactions. Moral economy joins collectively held values and feelings with economic choices, and has been at the core of the moral economy theorem. The term ‘moral economy’ remained bound to a specific epoch and a particular historical context. The term ‘moral economy’ offers an antithesis to the ‘rational choice theory’ imperatives that conflate rationality and utility maximisation. Moral Economy is the central characteristic of economic activity in a tribal society. Moral economy exchanges are driven by moral obligations created by kinship structure and relations, gift giving, and rituals. In a moral economy, like in a hunter gatherer society, a hunter or food gatherer may by obliged to give much of the food to a network of relations, accounting for the distribution of food within the community.
Moral economy has rarely been seen as a concept linking its two concurrent fundamentals, that is, ideational and utilitarian ends. The potential of the term 'moral economy' as a dynamic analytical tool that can illuminate the workings of civil society in the modern world has not yet been realised. It was the final collapse of moral economy, and economic exchange as moral obligation that Karl Marx bemoaned when he described the cash nexus that has become the central medium and motivator of exchange in capitalism and capitalist society. The concept of a 'moral economy' might see its future utility in the field of welfare, civil society, and the non-profit sector if moral concerns and economic resources coincide.
E.P. Thompson defined ‘moral economy’ as a traditional consensus of crowd rights that were swept away by market forces. There is as little reason to be content with the limitations of moral economy as defined by Thompson as there is interest in updating a concept that challenges the anthropological claims of current micro-economic doctrine. E. P. Thompson's 1971 article ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, both contradicts and confirms this. The term ‘moral economy’ succeeded in assigning meaning to a set of empirical observations by integrating them into a nomothetic framework.
The moral economy embodies norms regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions with respect to others and regarding the nature and qualities of goods, services and environment. The story of capitalism and modernity is often told as one of the replacement of moral economy by a political economy, in which the fate of actors comes to depend on the outcomes of anonymous contending market forces, the positioning of people as consumers turns moral judgements concerning the social good into matters of private preference.
A moral economy is an economy that is based on fairness, and justice, as opposed to one where the market is assumed to be independent of such concerns. Moral economy is generally only stable in small, closely knit communities, where the principles of mutuality. Where economic transactions arise between strangers who cannot be informally sanctioned by a social network, and a moral economy becomes harder to maintain.
Adam Smith's classic liberal economy works well only when economic and political power is well distributed. The distribution of power in the twenty-first century depends on which of three paths we take: interventionism, libertarianism, or the middle path proposed. This path is called the moral economy. It seeks balance of power among social groupings, in which socially desirable behavior is imposed sidewise-by group acting upon group-rather than downward, through government regulation.
Thompson (1991, 340) opposed taking moral economy ‘out of the context of a
particular historical formation’, with its unique configuration of class and
social forces. He insisted that his findings on the entitlement to necessities
internalised by the English crowd in the eighteenth century were not applicable
to other cases.
In his 1991 review article he cited Charles Tilly's
suggestion of a general definition of moral economy, with which Thompson
inclined to acquiesce: The term ‘moral
economy’ makes sense when claimants to a commodity can invoke non-monetary
rights to that commodity, and third parties will act to support these claims –
when, for example, community membership supersedes price as a basis of
entitlement. (Tilly, cited in Thompson 1991, 338).
This was followed by Tilly's disclaimer that moral
economy would lose its conceptual force if it were merely to mean custom,
tradition, or non-market exchange. Both Tilly and Thompson assert that a broader
use of the term moral economy would lead to a loss of focus. However, the
critical question is: broader than what standard?
Tilly's definition of
moral economy was more abstract than Thompson's contextual understanding, but it
was confined in two respects: on the one hand it reserved moral economy to
claimants, and on the other to the domain of rights.
Thompson and Tilly did not address the logical problem
of how to motivate the public to equate moral economy with the view shared by
the crowd and by paternalist authorities in early modern England. Instead, both
qualified the generic concept by reference to a particular context, as evidenced
in Thompson's own title, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century’.
The same argument can be applied to the dominant way
in which references to moral economy have proliferated since the 1970s as a
slogan of critics of the market system. While fascination with the concept
resulted from pre- or non-market arrangements being taken as a proof of the
feasibility of a socialist post-market system, such a reading overextends the
analysis of Thompson and others (Gailus and Lindenberger 1994, 471; cf. on a
leftist reading Dogan 2010; Thompson 1991, 340–341).
Moral economy might
be an ideal of economic relations in their totality, or could as well refer to a
particular dimension or economic sector. Whereas one case promotes system
change, the other is content to improve the market by casting light on blind
spots and correcting failures. Thus, while discontent with the ideal-type market
system as propagated by modern economic theory fuels all notions of moral
economy, the concept does not incorporate a self-evident position with regard to
the workings of market economy in its social environment; nor does it imply
either revolutionary or reformist strategies.
The legitimacy of redistributive welfare state
arrangements is therefore conceivable as a result of the larger ‘moral economy’
surrounding modern ‘market economy’. The current crisis of the welfare state
reflects normative disorder as much as it does fiscal constraints and
proliferating bureaucracy (Sayer 2000, 97).
Martin Kohli's criticism of Thompson's understanding
of moral economy as ‘still relatively imprecise’ was followed by a definition
that was not more than a deduction from the latter's ideas. However, he released
the concept from Thompson's historical contextualisation in pre-industrial
society, arguing that an industrial market economy was a new system that
contained its own form of moral economy. While traditional society relied on a
moral economy of consumption, modern society was founded on a moral economy of
labour – one that was institutionalised in the welfare state and particularly in
cross-generational transfer arrangements tied to the life career.
Peter Swenson
examined the moral economy of wage setting in industrial capitalism from a
similar vantage point, concentrating on trade unions and excluding direct state
interventionism (Swenson 1989, 11–12).
Stefan Svallfors reframed moral economy to signify the
public's opinion of the welfare state, although as a catchy title rather than a
consistent interpretation. He understands moral economy as the result of an
ongoing clash of norms. Thus, he adapts it to the notion of the welfare state as
the outcome of a democratic class struggle, and simultaneously associates the
term with consensus about welfare state regimes (cf. Korpi 1983; Svallfors 1996,
20, 217).
Svallfors (2006, 2) proposed a stratified moral
economy of class as well as a societal moral economy resulting from ‘normative
feedback effects of public policies and formal institutions’.
The integration of research on the welfare state and
on public opinion was elaborated by Steffen Mau. He identified the equalising
redistribution of the welfare state and the social acceptance of its effects as
a ‘moral economy’. This institutional and attitudinal arrangement encompassed
both the principle of reciprocity and a commitment to the fate of the
disadvantaged. In view of the rights-based approach of modern welfare state
institutions, the concept was paradoxically redirected from claimants of
resources towards their providers: moral economy became primarily that of the
net sponsor of the state budget and social insurance. Mau's homo reciprocus did
not expect an equal return, but was content with the collective management of
contingencies and risks (Mau 2003, 1–2, 31, 188, 196–197). From a similar
vantage point, Nicoli Nattrass (2004) has written a case study on the moral
economy of AIDS in South Africa.
The discourse on moral foundations of the welfare
state is in accord with the suggestion that juxtaposing moral economy and
political economy resembles Habermas’ distinction of lifeworld and system (Sayer
2000, 89, 95; recourse to Habermas [1981] has earlier been made by Booth 1994,
653). In contrast to the main strand of welfare state research, literature on
the moral economy of the welfare state focuses on civil society, trade unions,
and the public sphere, rather than on the socio-political system or specific
policy instruments. The concerns for legitimacy, rather than formal rights, and
for the more or less affluent, whose support of redistribution is an issue more
critical than the demand for it by the less well-off, are key characteristics of
current research on the moral economy of the welfare state.
The Moral Economy of the
Mexican Miner - Adrian Bantjes, University of Wyoming.
The moral economy of the Mexican miner was not accepted by the State, which
imposed cooperativism, mass unionism, and deskilling on this
"labor aristocratic" sector of the workforce. The relative freedom and
independence of the Mexican miner would soon be a thing of the past.
The Moral Economy of the
Peasant - Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia - James C. Scott -
yalepress.yale.edu - Scott draws from the history of agrarian society in lower Burma and
Vietnam to show how the transformations of the colonial era systematically violated the
peasants' moral economy and created a situation of potential rebellion
and revolution.
The Moral Economy - John P. Powelson is Professor of Economics Emeritus,
University of Colorado - press.umich.edu. The Moral Economy proposes a desirable world
that is historically possible, if world power becomes more diffuse. Shows how a moral
economy, a balance between interventionism and libertarianism, and economic prosperity are
mutually reinforcing.
Moral Economies Revisited. by Didier Fassin. The success of the concept of moral economy was not refuted for nearly forty years, a success that went well beyond the circles of the social history of Marxist thought, where it inspired as much enthusiasm as criticism. In the United States, it was the object of a relatively faithful re-appropriation in anthropology, thanks especially to James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion, a political scientist, whose work on the moral economy of the peasants of Southeast Asia opened the path to a network of researchers working on economic logic and social mobilization in rural areas in developing countries.
Moral economy: its conceptual history and
analytical prospects
Norbert Götz, Institute of Contemporary
History, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Stockholm, Sweden.
Abstract: This
article challenges E.P. Thompson's definition of ‘moral economy’ as a
traditional consensus of crowd rights that were swept away by market forces.
Moral economy was a term invented in the
eighteenth century to describe many things. Thompson's approach reflects only a
minor part of this conceptual history. His understanding of moral economy is
conditioned by a dichotomous view of history and by the acceptance of a model
according to which modern economy is not subject to moral concerns. It is on
principle problematic to confine a term conjoining
two concepts as general as ‘moral’ and ‘economy’ to a specific historical and
social setting. Recent approaches that frame moral economy as an emotively
defined order of morals are also misleading since they do not address economic
issues in the way they are commonly understood. The most promising current
approaches appear to be those that consider the moral economy of welfare,
humanitarianism, and civil society.
MORAL ECONOMY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. Andrew Sayer Lancaster University, UK Published in (2000) Studies in Political Economy, 61, 79-104. Geoffrey Hodgson has recently argued, economists need to restrain their utilitarianism and re-establish moral considerations as a proper part of their understanding and evaluation of economies. The moral economy embodies norms and sentiments regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions with respect to others. The term moral economy has usually been applied to societies in which there are few or no markets, hence no competition and law of value, and in which economic activity is governed by norms regarding what people's work responsibilities are, what and how much they are allowed to consume, who they are responsible for, beholden to and dependent on.
The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. Professor James C. Scott Review: By Faruk Ekmekci.
Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism. Charles Tripp.
Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) by Paul Gilroy.