A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens. What’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Tim Rogan focuses on three of the twentieth century’s most influential critics of capitalism―R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, and E. P. Thompson. Making arguments about the relationships between economics and ethics in modernity, their works commanded wide readerships, shaped research agendas, and influenced public opinion. Rejecting the social philosophy of laissez-faire but fearing authoritarianism, these writers sought out forms of social solidarity closer than individualism admitted but freer than collectivism allowed. They discovered such solidarities while teaching economics, history, and literature to workers in the north of England and elsewhere. They wrote histories of capitalism to make these solidarities articulate. They used makeshift languages of “tradition” and “custom” to describe them until Thompson patented the idea of the “moral economy.” Their program began as a way of theorizing everything economics left out, but in challenging utilitarian orthodoxy in economics from the outside, they anticipated the work of later innovators inside economics. Examining the moral cornerstones of a twentieth-century critique of capitalism, The Moral Economists explains why this critique fell into disuse, and how it might be reformulated for the twenty-first century.
Author(s): Karl Polanyi
Year: 2001
Language: English
Commentary: ---PDF Conv---
Pages: 499
Title Page......Page 2
Dedication......Page 3
Contents......Page 4
Foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz......Page 6
Introduction by Fred Block......Page 17
Note on the 2001 Edition......Page 70
Acknowledgments......Page 71
Part One: The International System......Page 73
1. The Hundred Years’ Peace......Page 74
2. Conservative Twenties, Revolutionary Thirties......Page 98
Part Two: Rise and Fall of Market Economy......Page 110
3. “Habitation versus Improvement”......Page 111
4. Societies and Economic Systems......Page 127
5. Evolution of the Market Pattern......Page 142
6. The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money......Page 162
7. Speenhamland, 1795......Page 176
8. Antecedents and Consequences......Page 187
9. Pauperism and Utopia......Page 209
10. Political Economy and the Discovery of Society......Page 219
11. Man, Nature, and Productive Organization......Page 251
12. Birth of the Liberal Creed......Page 256
13. Birth of the Liberal Creed (Continued): Class Interest and Social Change......Page 277
14. Market and Man......Page 295
15. Market and Nature......Page 323
16. Market and Productive Organization......Page 345
17. Self-Regulation Impaired......Page 355
18. Disruptive Strains......Page 365
Part Three: Transformation in Progress......Page 379
19. Popular Government and Market Economy......Page 380
20. History in the Gear of Social Change......Page 397
21. Freedom in a Complex Society......Page 413
Notes on Sources......Page 426
2. Hundred Years’ Peace......Page 431
3. The Snapping of the Golden Thread......Page 433
5. Finance and Peace......Page 434
6. Selected References to “Societies and Economic Systems”......Page 435
7. Selected References to “Evolution of the Market Pattern”......Page 441
8. The Literature of Speenhamland......Page 447
9. Poor Law and the Organization of Labor......Page 451
10. Speenhamland and Vienna......Page 463
11. Why Not Whitbread’s Bill?......Page 466
12. Disraeli’s “Two Nations” and the Problem of Colored Races......Page 467
Index......Page 472
