‘Moral economy’: its conceptual history and analytical prospects

By N. Götz. 2015

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fce28dfefd78809786b0b05551a29979c6d7cf72

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Citations in the corpus

Moral economy: What’s in a name (2018, background): “Thompson and Scott were hardly the first to use the phrase (Götz, 2015), but their writings have been the sources most commonly invoked in scholarly work on moral economy.”
Moral economy: Rethinking a radical concept (2016, background): “The most popular critique is that this schema constitutes a highly dichotomous and evolutionary view of history: it allegedly romanticizes past social arrangements vis-à-vis amoral or ‘less moral’ capitalist formations (Fox-Genovese, 1973; Popkin, 1979; Booth, 1994; Götz, 2015).”