New perspectives on the concept of 'moral economy'

What is it about?

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. Instead, it suggests that the concept has the potential of improving the understanding of modern civil society. 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. The concept of moral economy may help us to clarify alternative ways of ‘utility maximisation’ through the construction of altruistic meaning for economic transactions.

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Why is it important?

This article attempts to expand the critical potential of the term moral economy by liberating it from the connotation of pre-modern hunger rioters clashing with emerging market forces. Instead it is viewed as a concept capable of representing the workings of modern civil society.

Perspectives