Amongst the topics touched on in Thursday's speed-lecture was that of a text's "moral economy." Some questions that came up in class and later yesterday made me aware that I had used this term inexactly. Here then is an attempt to tease out a couple of different (and related) meanings of this phrase.
First, my use of the phrase "moral economy" was not correct, in a technical sense. The phrase is actually a highly specific one, which I know of from the work of E. P. Thompson, the great Marxist historian of 18th and 19th century England. Thompson uses the idea of a “moral economy” to rewrite the history of peasant revolts and worker uprisings in the 18th and 19th century. Prior to Thompson, these events (and really any “action” done by the poor or the working class) was seen strictly in terms of political economy—wages go down, prices go up, peasants riot because they are angry and hungry. Thompson (and pretty much everyone after him) instead postulates that these uprisings and riots, which appear like spontaneous eruptions of anger and passion, are actually concerted actions that derive from a moral purpose and are in fact the invocation (or demand) for a “moral economy,” which in the case of 18th and 19th century Britain was one that assumed that people (even peasants) had rights, that it was unjust for some to profit while others starved, and so forth. Economy in this sense is not just the workings of a machine (supply goes down, prices go up, i.e. the old-fashioned political economy), but the workings of a machine that are everywhere inflected by the shared values and norms (about moral behavior, justice, fairness, etc.) of those that constitute the machine.
My use of the term is much more casual, though based on Thompson. When I say “moral economy” I’m referring to two ways of thinking simultaneously. First, like Thompson, I am suggesting the way in which moral questions and judgments are attached to traditional ideas of economy. For example, saving and thrift are “good,” while debt and wastefulness are “bad”; working hard is “good,” and being “idle” is bad; and so forth. Second, novels create worlds and universes that have their own logic, which to me means something like the rules that govern how things happen in a novel, or in other words morality. What actions are considered good, responsible, etc. What behaviors are bad, injurious, etc. Usually that logic is very similar to that which we attribute to and believe to be present and operating in our own world (i.e. realism), but sometimes it is not (fantasy and romance). Regardless of whether the logic is something we recognize or not and regardless of whether it is “realism” and therefore (supposedly) closely matches our world, each novel chooses to privilege some aspects of that logic over others. By that I mean, the novel rewards/praises certain kinds of behavior and punishes/criticizes others. (Obviously, no book is consistent in its application even of its own rules, but that’s not a flaw—that’s the pleasure of reading.) What I’ve just described as “logic” is really nothing other than an “economy,” where economy means something like the mechanism that manages resources or distributes goods, services, energies, etc. Thus, every novel has its own “moral economy,” its own mechanism for exchange and distribution at the level of morality and moral judgment.
