Monday, July 7, 2008

"Moral economy" as a historical social concept


















Dan said...

I enjoyed this post thoroughly, and even more so as E.P. Thompson is on my prelim reading list (and Scott is a personal favorite, though I have not yet read the work cited here). Additionally, I am particularly interested in various uses the terms "market" and "economy" and how our understandings of those terms have evolved and multiplied.

One related questions occurs then, more so for Thompson than for Scott - how (if at all) did 18th century peasants understand the distinction between the economic and social/civil/political/howeveryouwanttosplitit spheres? If Mitchell (1998) is to be believed, the development of the economy as a separate object of study is fairly recent, but clearly the outcome of a process begun at least a couple hundred years ago. My question is, to what extent were peasants themselves capable of thinking in terms like 'economy' vs. 'society' and to what extent is that an anachronistic description? Does it matter? Have the words changed but not the guts of the understanding? Or has there been a more fundamental shift that makes the attempt to project those categories backwards perhaps invalid?

Daniel Little said...

I think Thompson's reply would include some of these points. First, he might agree that ordinary people in 18th century Britain would not come equipped with a strong conceptual distinction between economy and society. This was part of the conceptual shift that the politician economists were trying to establish -- and of course the distinction is clear in Adam Smith in 1776. But second, Thompson would point out that the "economic" realities were as vividly accessible to ordinary people as the sharp point of a stick. When the price of bread escalated 100% over the course of a few months in the local market, peasants and townspeople immediately registered this economic fact and judged it to be wrong and unjust. And when landlords insist on collecting the fixed land rent even in times of severe dearth, peasants registered this economic fact as well.

Is there an element of moral economy reasoning that underlies current protests about gas prices > $4.00 a gallon?

smokin joe said...

thanks for posting this, I read your post on the "moral economy" and enjoyed it. I have read Thompson’s essay on the moral economy of the English peasant and working classes, and I just finished Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987).

In Weapons of the Weak, Scott finds empirical ethnographic evidence that he feels contradicts Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. It seems to me, that Scott’s evidence shows that the poor of Sedaka actually do participate in hegemonic ideology of the traditional, Islamic sort, and that the rich are in a transition from their former Islamic ideological justifications to a capitalist ideology that has not had time to take root among the poor. It seems to me to be a very similar situation to E.P. Thompson’s 18th century scenario. Does this necessarily have to contradict Gramsci who had industrial capitalist society in mind when he wrote about ideological hegemony?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for breaking this essay down ..I found your summary and questions raised extremely helpful!

Jay said...

I know that I am very late to the party here, but in light of the current urban riots in England is anyone studying or writing about a corresponding "moral economy" of urban "peasants" (for lack of a better term). In these cases the riots are not just about food, but all kinds of consumer goods which did not exist in the 18th century. Also what about rebellion against police as guardians of the social order?