Moral economy at the crossroads of history and social science: A roundtable with Dr Melissa Beresford,Professor Andrew Sayer and Professor Neville Kirk,chaired by Professor Robert McMaster

Professor Andrew Sayer

In Customs in Common, EP Thompson indicated he didn’t want to restrict the study of moral economy and that others may have different approaches that are useful (Thompson, 1991). I have a very different approach to his, though I don’t see it as incompatible with it. I don’t want to claim that my approach should replace his or others either, but I do want to outline it and defend it as something which might sit alongside other approaches.

As Norbert Götz has shown, Thompson is often treated as the father of the moral economy. However, the use of the term goes back to the eighteenth century. Interestingly Götz says that, in premodern times, the adjective ‘moral’ was redundant because in a small self-sufficient household economy, the moral would be tied up with provisioning; and there would be no reason for separating them and their association was taken for granted. So, I argue that concepts of moral economy, if not the term, have been around throughout human history.

Like the word ‘history’, moral economy can refer both to an object, and a kind of study. As an object of study, the economic refers to the provisioning of societies: provisioning them with the wherewithal to reproduce themselves and flourish. All societies have norms regarding what people can and cannot legitimately do and have, and what their obligations to others are when they are involved in provisioning. I therefore argue that all economies are moral economies at least in this sense, though we may not agree with their norms and rules, and indeed may regard them as immoral.

All provisioning is influenced by moral ideas, and in turn, forms of economic organisation influence the moral and ethical ideas of their members. More importantly, the very forms of economic organisation in any society – particularly their property relations – are typically associated with various justifications for their existence, though often those justifications are almost redundant, as the practices have become normalised, naturalised, taken for granted. When new economic relations and practices come into existence there is often some questioning of their justification, but usually sooner or later they become taken for granted as ‘just how things are’. Of course, the justifications are often just rationalisations of unequal power. Always remember the golden rule: those with the gold make the rules.

In James Scott’s book on peasant economies, he notes that the peasants were primarily concerned that their landlord should be a good landlord, that is, one who will take some account of vagaries such as bad weather affecting crops and family crises like illness and bereavement that affect peasants’ capacity to meet their obligations to the landlord (Scott, 1976).

They rarely challenge the very existence of the basic social relations of landlord and peasant, even though some were aware of its contingent and questionable nature. This might be put down to not only habituation, but a mix of recognition of the precarious nature of eking out a living as a peasant and pragmatism in the face of unequal power. Resistance is often more costly than compliance.

To us, the lack of challenge to the institution of landlordism might seem strange, but then the same goes for similar economic relations today. Thus usury, capitalist social relations of production, unequal gender relations in households, limited liability, and unearned income from monopolisation of assets that others need, have all become normalised and legitimised not only in everyday life but sadly in much contemporary social science.

As an approach, a kind of study, for me moral economy should centre on de-naturalising forms of economic organisation and evaluating their justifications. And I see Aristotle as the founder of moral economy as a way of understanding and evaluating provisioning and its organisation. He came up with crucial concepts and distinctions for understanding economies – for example, regarding the difference between use-value and exchange-value, between providing use-values as the goal of economic activity, and accumulating money as the goal (Polanyi acclaimed the latter distinction as ‘probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of the social sciences’ [Polanyi, 1957: 79]). But seamlessly mixed with these positive or analytical concepts in Aristotle, is an evaluation of them – in terms of the human good or what is conducive to human flourishing. Morality and ethics are about how to live together in ways that allow human flourishing. Famously, he argued that the pursuit of money as a goal was an aberration – based on a misconception of what was necessary for human flourishing.

So although today we might call this a normative kind of discourse, for Aristotle there wasn’t a sharp distinction between normative and positive, for unlike many contemporary ways of thinking, he didn’t see human flourishing as purely a matter of free-floating subjective views having nothing to do with the kind of beings we are. We are human animals and as Mary Midgley said you can’t have a plant or an animal without certain things being good or bad for it (Midgley, 2003: 59). And as Midgley’s colleague Philippa Foot argued, the root meaning of ‘good’ refers to this (Foot, 2001). To be sure, there are many different cultural forms of flourishing, and different ideas about what it involves, but it is not just anything, regardless of our nature as human social, cultural animals. It is not a product of unfettered social construction, or mere subjective preferences, as the neoclassicals would say. Our language includes thick ethical concepts, like cruel, kind, generous, selfish, brave, cowardly, racist, that defy any fact–value dichotomy. If you don’t know that cruelty and suffering are bad, you don’t know what they are.

Although this mix of descriptive, analytical and evaluative or normative discourse is often regarded with suspicion or even as unscientific today, we find it again in classical political economy, or moral philosophy as it was called, in the work of authors like Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill – and ambivalently in Marx. Particularly in the work of Smith, who worked on both morality and economics for most of his life, we find descriptions and analyses of economic arrangements closely interwoven with evaluations of what is good or bad about them, including what is good or bad in moral terms. Thus, he not only explains the difference that division of labour makes in terms of efficiency but evaluates it in terms of the harms that it can cause to workers. He not only analyses what landlords do but says that landlords love to reap where they have not sown. And he is critical of greed, vanity and selfishness. I challenge anyone to demonstrate why the latter normative/evaluative comments should undermine the former positive analyses.

Classical political economy preceded the unfortunate fragmentation of social science into separate disciplines that began in the late nineteenth century. One line of fracture was between positive and normative, so on one side you have disciplines like economics that try or rather pretend to be purely positive, and on the other normative ones like political theory and philosophy generally, which often became preoccupied with ideal theory (like Rawls) and show little interest in actually existing society and its injustices. We need to overcome these divisions if we are to make sense of economic life. Moral economy needs to be transdisciplinary or postdisciplinary: forget disciplines and follow the connections wherever they lead.

In the early twentieth century, we still see some authors continuing the classical political economy tradition – Tawney, Hobson, Veblen, for example, who, inter alia, had really important things to say about property, some of them prefigured by Aristotle. And of course there was Polanyi. There are more recent practitioners of what I would regard as moral economy – in feminist economics, and in the work of Anne Pettifor, Susan George, Michael Hudson, Elizabeth Anderson and David Graeber. But these are outside the mainstream economics closed shop.

So far, I’ve been looking mainly backward: I also want to look forwards. The elephant in the room as regards the economy is the worsening environmental crisis that threatens our very life support systems. We are accustomed to thinking about ethics and environment separately, as if our relation to our environment had nothing to do with our relations to one another. But the economic activities through which we provision ourselves affect the well-being of others, and often involve trashing the environment, whether in our own locality or that of others. So harm to the environment is harm to others, including future generations. That too is a moral economic issue. In premodern societies, I suspect that separating the organisation of provisioning from care of the environment made no more sense than separating economy from morality. And finally, to loop back to Thompson and Scott: learning about past economies and contemporary distant non-capitalist economies is important not only for understanding history and cultural diversity, but for helping us to see our own mainly capitalist, environmentally destructive economies in a more critical light, and for offering us lessons for the future.

Dr Melissa Beresford

To answer to this prompt about what we view as a useful way of understanding moral economy, I want to tell you about the perspective I’m coming from and how moral economy scholarship fits. I’ll then explain the approach to moral economies that I take, and I’ll explain why I think this approach is particularly important and useful.

I’m an economic anthropologist, which means I’m interested in understanding how humans get the resources that they need to survive and live what they deem to be a good life. So, this means understanding the ways people produce, consume, distribute and exchange resources. And specifically, I focus a lot on how humans adapt to resource insecurity – how they get the resources they need when they’re scarce or unpredictable. For most of my career so far, I’ve focused on water specifically.

Now, because I’m an anthropologist, I look at this issue in the context of our deep history as modern humans. So that’s over ten thousand-plus years. This gives me a different perspective from scholars who are working in other disciplines that may really be focusing on timespans of a few hundred years, like historians working on industrialisation or deindustrialisation, or a sociologist working on labour issues. Anthropology as a discipline has been trying to understand how humans respond to resource insecurities for a long time. We do this via the archaeological and the bioarchaeological record. We use the historical record, and we use ethnographic research in societies all around the world. ¹

When we combine these bodies of evidence, we know that humans have been able to survive incredibly unpredictable environments and often extreme situations of resource insecurity, largely because of two major behavioural adaptations: migration and exchange. ² Migration is pretty obvious – when we run out of the resources that we need, moving to a new place is an incredibly important behavioural strategy that humans have used throughout history. But that is not what I want to focus on today. The behavioural strategy that I want to focus on is exchange. The anthropological record is very clear that our ability to cooperate in order to distribute and exchange resources is incredibly important; we’re a social species, and our survival depends on us being able to rely upon and cooperate with each other. ³

Now, let me connect this to moral economies. When I talk about moral economies, I’m referring to the concept that EP Thompson developed as a cultural historian in the 1970s and that James Scott, as a political scientist, built on a few years after. For them, a moral economy is fundamentally a system of norms for the exchange and distribution of vital resources. In their case, they were writing about staple food items. They described how moral economies – as systems of social norms – operated in the context of inequality and social stratification. For them, inequality and social stratification were drivers of how moral economies worked.

For example, writing about eighteenth century English peasants, Thompson explained that, to some extent, peasants and labourers begrudgingly tolerated the inequality of their society because people understood that there was at least a basic standard of living that they were morally entitled to. This moral ethos meant that grain prices – peasants’ basic food source – were kept at affordable levels. Again, because having bread basically represented the basic standard of living that everyone should have, grain prices were kept low enough for everyone to afford them. This was a kind of unspoken social contract.

But in the eighteenth century, grain prices rose, and that basic standard of living became unaffordable. People were mad, and they rebelled against elites and others who controlled the price of grain. Peasants and labourers felt the inequality that they begrudgingly tolerated rose to unacceptable levels. That unspoken social contract was broken.

Thompson’s major argument in his 1971 article about the moral economy of the English crowd was that it is a mistake to understand these eighteenth century peasant rebellions as brute economic responses to hunger – rather we must understand them as ideological responses to violations of the understood norms of how the vital resources that support a basic standard of living should be distributed and exchanged in those communities at that point in time.

Now as I mentioned, a few years later James Scott was inspired by Thompson’s work, and he noticed that a similar system of norms regulated exchange and distribution in nineteenth century South East Asian peasant communities. And in these communities, the normative expectation was not just around ensuring affordable price levels for staple food items, but also encompassed expectations that landlords promise that they would provide peasants with food in the event of crop failure. Essentially, in these communities there was also a basic subsistence ethos, and elites were expected to provide a safety net that ensured that by giving food to peasants if and when crops failed. If they refused to provide that safety net, peasants rebelled. Scott argued that the moral economies of South East Asian peasants during this time period were a key way that communities managed the ever-present risk of food insecurity.

Scott’s work specifically resonated with many anthropologists at the time; I think because, in the 1970s, most anthropologists were conducting research in subsistence-based communities that relied heavily on non-market forms of exchange and distribution. But the point is that Scott’s work spurred many anthropologists to investigate and apply the moral economy concept where they were conducting research. And what anthropologists have found over the past 50 years since then is that the concept of a moral economy – and again, I mean a system of norms where people’s moral understandings of justice and obligation regulate how people distribute and exchange resources – exists in a vast array of different societies, cultures and economies around the world.

Now, as an anthropologist I’m interested in understanding humanity broadly, and so, when I see similarities in social systems occurring in vastly different types of human societies across time and cultural contexts, it signals that this is a social formation that must work well for people. And the anthropological record seems to show that moral economies can work well to ensure a basic level of resource access for the most vulnerable in socially stratified communities. But as I dug in to existing studies that we have on moral economies, I couldn’t ignore the fact that a lot of ethnographic research shows that moral economies often do not work well. In many cases, people ignore and refuse to adhere to established norms. People rebel and riot. And as Thompson and Scott’s work showed, moral economies collapse and fall apart.

Reflecting on this, I began to think that we can’t understand a moral economy as static, or as a type of social system that either exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, we need to think of a moral economy as a kind of adaptive social system that constantly shifts and changes according to different social, ecological and political conditions. ⁴ When I started to think about moral economies this way, I wanted to understand what makes moral economies succeed versus what makes them fail. In other words, when do moral economies work well to ensure adequate resource access (especially for the most vulnerable) and relative social stability, versus what makes them collapse and fall apart?

I dug back into the existing studies to figure this out, but I realised a problem: the moral economy literature consists of thousands of different case studies. And in these case studies, scholars weren’t always defining a moral economy in the same way. Because of this, I saw a lot of scholars talking past one another simply because we didn’t have an operationalised definition of the concept. When we don’t have operationalised definitions of concepts, there’s no way for us to make systematic comparisons and start to understand cross-cultural factors that may help us to know, in the case of moral economies, when moral economies survive versus when things lead to their demise.

To solve this problem, I enlisted the help of some key colleagues who are experts in water and resource insecurity, economics and social movements, and we wrote a paper where we operationalise the moral economy concept. And I want to emphasise here that it is not lost on me at all that Thompson argued that to truly understand moral economies you have to understand the very specific historical social and cultural context of the community in which it exists. It was important to me that any operational definition that we developed had to be meta level. So by this, I mean that it needs to allow for broad categories that facilitate comparison while also respecting and emphasising the fact that each specific moral economy will have its own cultural, historical, social context that shapes how it operates in that particular time and place.

So, I’ll now briefly explain how we operationalise the moral economy concept. A moral economy has three elements. First there must be a shared understanding or ethos within the community about how people are obligated to one another based on their various social roles and positions. This often manifests in what we in the West would understand as understandings of ‘justice’. Second, there must be a set of normative economic practices that stem from this cultural understanding. For example, that leaders or governments should be setting prices at affordable levels, or that people with sufficient resources should share resources with people who are in need. The third piece is important: there must be mechanisms of social pressure. For example, people may gossip or snub others who refuse to share food or water when they’re in need. People may boycott a business that’s charging inflated prices. Or people may rebel and riot and when norms are outrageously violated.

You can see how these three elements instigate and reinforce one another. Cultural understandings of obligation and justice engender norms for exchange and distribution. People adhere to these norms because there is a threat of social sanction if they violate them. And if the norms are violated, the social sanctions are enacted and, ideally, people then acquiesce to the norms.

But as I mentioned earlier, we can’t understand moral economies as either existing or not existing. To understand moral economies, we must understand they’re constantly shifting and changing in response to various social, ecological and political conditions that affect each of these three elements of moral economies.

So far, we have identified three basic ‘states’ in which a moral economy may be functioning. When the three elements are working well, they’re kind of balancing and reinforcing one another. And we can say that a moral economy is operating in a state of ‘balanced struggle’ – people are not only aware of the norms, but they’re aware of what might happen if they violate and don’t adhere to those norms. So, because of the norms of social pressure, people follow through and engage in normatively expected practices.

When people ignore and violate these norms, the moral economy may shift to states of what we call ‘intensified reaction’, where people are enacting those mechanisms of social pressure. And if reactions to violated norms are strong enough, a moral economy may even be in a state of ‘riot and revolt’ (as seen in the peasant rebellions discussed by Thompson and Scott). Finally, if notions of justice are fragmented or extremely misaligned, norms are weak or unpredictable, and social pressure mechanism absent of ineffective, we can say that the moral economy is existing in a state of ‘collapse and dissolution’. There may be other states in which moral economies are operating, but these states are what we see in the literature so far.

To conclude. Fundamentally, moral economies are a type of social system though which communities leverage cultural norms, associated economic practices, and mechanisms of social pressure to regulate how vital resources are distributed. When moral economies are operating well – in what we call a state of balanced struggle – people in a given community are able to get the resources they need in ways that facilitate their own locally grounded notions of dignity and justice. But as the name of this state implies, we have to recognise that moral economies are always sites of struggle. People are constantly vying to define and re-define what those norms of dignity and justice are within their communities, and how to uphold those norms.

As researchers, operationalising the moral economy concept is essential to compare moral economies cross-culturally – to understand the broader factors that impact when and how moral economies shift into various states of functioning. But on a practical level, I also believe that knowledge and awareness of the norms that constitute moral economies, and how these norms work, allow people to have conversations within their own communities about when and how they are obligated to and rely on each other. These conversations are crucial because at the end of the day, our only choice for our survival as a species is our connections with and reliance on one another.

Professor Neville Kirk

I come at this as a critical observer. The important thing for me is to look at something as an historian and. . . I’m not saying that history’s necessarily caught the truth or has a special place, but the point that Melissa made about specifics and context are obviously crucial to the study of history. Edward Thompson really epitomised that. He insisted on the importance of context and whether it’s possible to generalise from specific instances.

It’s a big question, but just to contextualise this: I was an MA student at Warwick University, in the Centre for the Study of Social History, between 1968 and 1970. Edward (EP) Thompson set up and directed the Centre from 1965. Everyone associates Thompson’s name with his most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. But in fact, as he said, he was working on the notion of moral economy when he published The Making. It’s quite interesting that he moved back in time rather than forward. He moved back and he developed this notion of moral economy which, in terms of history, was pioneering, conceptually, methodologically and substantively.

What I’ll do is, first, summarise some of these pioneering aspects and then, second, offer some observations and raise some questions. I think a lot of the challenges that Thompson raised, moreover, still exist, at least in historical work, for example around some of the literature on deindustrialisation, which of course we looked at in the ‘Moral Economy at the Crossroads of History and Social Science’ workshop, held at the University of Strathclyde in November 2023.

Thompson’s primary focus was on what he called the political culture or the mentalities of the ‘working population’ of England, during the eighteenth century. He maintained that many of this large social group, comprising rural and urban workers and artisans and, unlike France and some other European countries, very few peasants, subscribed to the notion of custom or tradition. And this was associated, as Melissa has told us, with the regulation of the market, in relation to distribution of grain, and a ‘just’ price and ‘fair allowance’ of the people’s most important daily staple food, bread. These people of the ‘lower orders’ looked back to and derived legitimation from paternalist Tudor and Stuart Statute law ‘from above’ – designed to regulate and protect markets and prices in the primary interests of the community rather than private individuals – as well as regulatory common law and custom ‘from below’. These were particularly important cultural, as well as economic, popular resources during the eighteenth century when paternalism and customary social relations were increasingly, albeit unevenly, being eroded by the growth of the ‘free market’, individualism and the cash nexus.

During the latter there took place a series of conflicts, most prominently in the form of food riots – the most common form of popular protest movements – between this moral economy concerned with custom and tradition, as against the development of the innovative free-market economy or modernisation. The latter, of course, was associated closely with the pioneering work of Adam Smith. Smith championed liberty in the form of an economy and wider social system characterised by deregulation, individualism and the small state, albeit tempered by general rules of justice and positive morality.

In focusing upon food riots as key manifestations of his moral economy, Thompson drew attention to their complex character, involving norms, values and expectations, rather than being simple ‘spasmodic’ economic reactions to hunger. He rejected narrow economic reductionism – so influential in his time in economics and economic history – in favour of a close examination of the interplay between economics, politics, ideology and culture, between ‘structure’ and ‘culture’, being and consciousness. Food rioters and other practitioners of the moral economy were viewed by Thompson as acting in perfectly rational, reasonable and multi-faceted ways. They defended their actions, however rebellious, by appeal to this customary past and did not act as an irrational, unruly and ill-disciplined mob intent upon indiscriminate violence and riot. In so doing, Thompson pioneeringly offered a historical-materialist definition of moral economy in which norms and values were to be situated within and engaged with, rather than reduced to or totally determined by, their material contexts or abodes.

It is interesting to note in this historical-materialist context that Thompson was critical of his equally famous friend and comrade, the left-wing literary scholar Raymond Williams. This was because Thompson thought that Williams divorced culture too much from underlying structure. Thompson also criticised both the ‘idealism’ of postmodernists, such as Patrick Joyce, for underplaying and even denying the importance of material as opposed to cultural/linguistic factors, and ‘structuralist’ Marxists, such as Louis Althusser, for improperly exaggerating the importance of hidden structures and effectively denying the significance of people and their power or agency to influence history.

I will now move on, briefly to raise some observations and points of discussion. First, as noted above, attention to historical context and, we should add, change and continuity over time, were of paramount importance to Thompson. As such, the general could not instantly and easily be extrapolated from the specific object of enquiry at a particular point or period of time. As a corollary, he was very critical of what he considered to be decontextualised usages of the term moral economy. This led to the question, could and did there exist different moral economies, and were they all equally valid? This, of course, was a key question and challenge for us in the workshop.

Now, in my Warwick and post-Warwick years, I sat in on a number of meetings when we discussed these issues. And at times, to put it bluntly, Thompson became agitated and ill-tempered because he said that a lot of people were talking about moral economy as if moral economies existed everywhere. According to his definition, they didn’t, or, at best, that if the term was to be extended to contexts other than his chosen one, then moral economy had to be redefined or lose focus and usefulness. Yet at the same time he was ambivalent about and sometimes far more tolerant of different definitions and usages. For example, he acknowledged the validity of social historian Adrian Randall’s redefinition of moral economy as applied to the industrial moral economy of the Gloucestershire weavers in the eighteenth century. This was because these weavers were part of the same communities that were involved in food riots and industrial actions based upon the same moral-economic values, contexts and actions, according to Thompson. Yet, having accepted and indeed praised Randall’s research and that of some other scholars, such as that of James C Scott and others in the field of moral economy and peasant studies, Thompson still asked: ‘Where are we to draw the line?’ He remained critical of what he saw as loose, unclear, imprecise and insufficiently contextualised definitions. And he continued to insist that the study of values alone, as divorced from social contexts and social relations, did not provide a complete or sufficient picture of moral economy. At the same time, he welcomed more comparative research and looked forward to a post-Thompson future for the study of moral economy. We may thus conclude that his overriding legacy is one of ambivalence.

In conclusion, this takes us to the nub of our current dilemma, as identified by Darren McGuire and Andrew Perchard, of moral economy at the crossroads. Is it possible and convincing to have many moral economies? And do they have equal validity? My own view is that variety and diversity are to be welcomed, provided they meet the ‘Thompsonian’ standards of clear and precise definition, comprehensive and substantial research, proper contextualisation and due attention to culture and structure and change and continuity over time. One final point which for many anthropologists and social theorists may be self-evident, I don’t know, but for historians it’s not been. And that is the argument that when we talk about the economy, we’re necessarily incorporating into our fully embedded picture relevant politics and cultural factors, and norms and values. We have to talk about political economy or social and cultural economy rather than the economy per se.