Moral Economies Revisited

Abstract

The concept of moral economy that was conceived by E. P. Thompson forty years ago has been undeniably influential in the social sciences, although this influence remains ambiguous. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was taken up by the political scientist James Scott and thus fed into important studies, mostly in anthropology, on forms of resistance and rebellion among third-world peasants. Later, in the 1990s and 2000s, following the work of historian Lorraine Daston, it was used to interpret networks of values embedded in scientific activities and more broadly in various social worlds. After revisiting Thompson’s foundational analysis and highlighting its tensions and paradoxes, this paper analyzes the continuities and departures among his numerous descendants, focusing particularly on the theoretical elaborations and contestations of recent years. It goes on to propose a new definition that is more open than the original (by not limiting the concept to dominated groups or restricting it to the economic domain) and more critical than the one subsequently adopted (by restituting the political dimension of moral economies). In order to demonstrate the heuristic potential of this paradigm, I provide several illustrations from my own empirical work on immigration and violence in various historical contexts.

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