Moral economy

The concept of a moral economy was first elaborated by English historian E.P. Thompson,. Actually the term "moral economy" was already used by various eighteenth century authors, at a time when economic and moral concerns increasingly seemed to drift apart (see Götz 2015). In a Russian variant - моральная экономика - it was coined by the economist Alexander Chayanov in 1920s, see Oeuvres Choisies de A.V. Cajanov, S. R. Publishers Limited Johnson Reprint Corporation Mouton & Co, 1967. Thompson wrote of the moral economy of the poor in the context of widespread food riots in the English countryside in the late eighteenth century. According to Thompson these riots were generally peaceable acts that demonstrated a common political culture rooted in feudal rights to “set the price” of essential goods in the market. These peasants held that a traditional “fair price” was more important to the community than a “free” market price and they punished large farmers who sold their surpluses at higher prices outside the village while there were still those in need within the village. In the 1970s the concept of a moral economy was developed further in anthropological studies of peasant economies. The notion of a non-capitalist cultural mentality using the market for its own ends has been linked by others (with Thompson's approval) to subsistence agriculture and the need for subsistence insurance in hard times.