Moral economy
The concept was developed in 1971 by British Marxist social historian and political activist E. P. Thompson in his essay, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century".
When they talk about the tendency of large masses of capital, and the division of labour, to increase production and cheapen commodities, they do not tell us of the inferior human being which a single and fixed occupation must produce.
[4]: 67–73 [5] This "crowd" included "tinners, colliers, weavers, hosiery workers, and labouring people",[6] regularly rioted against grain merchants and traders who raised their prices in lean years.
Thompson explored how peasants' grievances reflected a popular consensus that economic activity should occur in accord with commonly held values.
Thompson said that the English riots were not just a response to physical hunger, but reflected public outrage against what rioters perceived to be the immorality of the new economic system.
[11] He spent almost a decade gathering evidence for his 1971 Past & Present journal article "The Moral Economy of the Crowd in Eighteenth Century".
[citation needed] In his 1964 book, The Crowd in History, George Rudé "explored the pattern of food riots and market disturbances in terms of their geographical distribution, frequency, level of violence".
However, he claimed that the riots were powered by the sense that old norms had been unjustly discarded and that the new ways were illegitimate, specifically referring to marketing, milling, and baking as examples.
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.
[3]: 336–337 Götz wrote that in pre-capitalist England, the customary order had roots in both the Edwardian[clarification needed] and Tudor eras and was based on market exchange.
Thompson's concept of moral economy was adopted by scholars from disciplines outside history, such as political science, sociology, and anthropology.
[18]: 189 Prior to the eighteenth century rise of classical economics, European and colonial economies were governed by a variety of (formal and informal) regulations that had accumulated over time.
[19] Thompson claimed that the emerging political economy was epitomized by Smith's chapter, "Digression concerning the corn trade"[21] in The Wealth of Nations.
[3]: 276 [clarification needed] Thompson held that a community consensus agreed that rioters were "informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs.
"[7]: 78 Patrick Collinson said in his chapter in the 2001 book Puritanism and the Poor that clergymen in the sixteenth and seventeenth century preached against economic practices that were not strictly illegal, but were "uncharitable".
"[3]: 271 Thompson attempted to clarify that his concept of moral economy was focused on a specific geographic, political, social, and temporal context.
[24] Scott reported that during 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 summarized peasant ideas of economic justice and exploitation as their moral economy and that violations of those norms led to revolts.
Chayanov did not directly introduce the term ‘moral economy’ in his works in the 1910s-1930s, he largely prefigured its emergence, including the methodological aspects of the later research.
[29] In the chapter, "The 'Moral Economy' of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality" John Stevenson criticized Thompson and the other British scholars who, he claimed, followed the lead of the French Annales school-historians, shifting away from traditional historiography.
[37] Other works that invoke moral economy include: Thompson was described by Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas in 2020 as one of the "most important social thinkers of our age", whose work informed critical theory, alongside Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel (who was highly influential in the Annales school), Mikhail Bakhtin, Carlo Ginzburg, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
[47] In his 2017 book, The Moral Economists, Tim Rogan included Thompson in his trio of the 20th century's most influential critics of capitalism—along with Tawney and Polanyi because they were read widely, informed research, and influenced public opinion.
