J.G.A. Pocock writes in Virtue, Commerce, and History:
“It was hard to condemn the destruction of rural society without engaging in some degree of nostalgia, and a wholesale condemnation of modernity necessarily entailed some degree of neomedievalism. there was a neomedievalism among romantic gentry who liked to imagine the days when they had been Tory protectors of the poor, Whig defenders of their ancient liberties, and Burkean-Coleridgean upholders of a code of chivalric manners. … Even today, it might not be impossible to classify English Marxist thinkers as either progressive radical Whigs for whom socialism is the rebellious but natural son of liberalism, or alienated Tory radicals who denounce liberal capitalism, instead of praising it for its revolutionary role, as the destroyer of popular community and moral economy.”[1]
Pocock was writing in the middle of the 1980s, and in any case my general unfamiliarity with the discourse of the times renders his judgement the one I admit as prima facie true. But behind this sentiment is the coming together of two disparate lines of thought that are pervasive in most analyses of economic thought, especially when concerned with questions of a moral character. Why is it that questions of the moral economy are wholly dominated by the Germanic ghost of Karl Marx? For someone who eschewed the market en masse, surely, he would find himself surprised to be the progenitor and monopolistic owner of ostensibly an entire field of academic inquiry, which has been abandoned to his dialectical and historical materialism and to the supposition that surely, moral relations in economic forms cannot exist in any scheme of action apart from his. It is this that is my complaint with William James Booth’s otherwise first-rate analysis of the role of households in the moral economy: it is too deferential to Marx; it refuses to see beyond the Marxist paradigm even though it readily and openly admits to the practical and theoretical failures of the doctrine.[2] That the question of moral economy was breached with sufficient detail by Aristotle and Xenophon, Locke and Rousseau, is important — but is the discussion of Marx always the feather in the cap?
Continue reading “A Commodity Fetish: Marx and the Moral Economy”