The Greatest Transformation E. P. Thomps

“The Greatest Transformation:”

E. P. Thompson, Moral Economy, Capitalism

Michael Merrill

The Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies

SUNY Empire State College

325 Hudson Street, Suite 600

New York, NY 10013

August 2013

DRAFT: DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION

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Edward Palmer (E. P.) Thompson was one of the great historians of the working class,

and one of the great working-class figures, of the 20th

century. Not only did he change the way

history was written but, as an anti-nuclear and civil liberties campaigner, he also played a

significant role in its making. His most important historiographical contribution, of course, was

The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which added greatly both to our appreciation

of the complexities of class formation during and after the transition to capitalism, and to our

understanding of the part that "the working-class presence" played in the politics of the capitalist

age. But his subsequent studies of custom and culture in eighteenth-century England also made

original contributions, especially to our understanding of the social dynamics of pre-capitalist

communities struggling to contain the capitalist advance. I have discussed Thompson's Making

elsewhere.1 Here I wish to focus on his conception of the “moral economy” that in his view

animated English opposition to emergent capitalism. In particular, I want to review that part of

his argument where he addresses objections raised by economists and neo-classically-minded

economic historians. In responding to these objections, it seems to me, Thompson gave away too

much. My goal is to suggest ways in which his response might be revised, in this or that

particular, to reinforce the moral economy case.

“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” appeared in the

English social history journal, Past & Present, in 1971. Thompson had briefly developed the

idea of a “paternalist moral economy” in The Making of the English Working Class, where he

discussed the values in the name of English “mobs” rioted in order the 1790s to protect and

defend their standard of living. “Any sharp rise in prices,” Thompson wrote, “precipitated riot,”

the instances of which were “properly regarded as acts of justice, and their leaders held as

1 "E.P. Thompson's Capital: Political Economy in The Making," Labour/Le Travail 71 (Spring 2013), 151-6.


heroes.”2 “Actions on this scale,” he had concluded, “indicate an extraordinarily deep-rooted

pattern of behavior and belief” and it is therefore no surprise that he set out to explore this

pattern more fully in his 1971 essay. In particular, he sought to challenge the settled conviction

that the so-called "food riots" in England and other parts of western Europe during the late

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries could explained by the rioters’ deprivation rather than

by their social ideas and moral principles. On the contrary, if hunger were the chief cause of such

disturbances, he pointed out, there would have been many more riots and rioters. But it was not

the hungry who rioted. It was the outraged. Many of the former passively accepted their fate. The

latter did not. According to Thompson, what distinguished the protesters was a firm belief that

any shortages were not the will of God and thus inevitable, but rather an act of Man and thus

reversible. They saw their difficulties as a political or social failure and protested to secure

redress.

Their willingness to do so, Thompson argued, had to do with their conception of a

traditional "moral economy" enshrined in earlier Elizabethan and other statutes. A set of well-

established precedents and practices, this “moral economy” provided a way for the protesters to

understand the cause of their problems. It also held particular individuals and practices

responsible for them and suggested particular actions as appropriate and adequate solutions.

With this morality at hand, the protesters could justify their outrage and direct it, be not only

outraged but also savvy, protest both for and to effect. Where there were riots, officials could not

just complacently write off the hungry. Instead many felt compelled to distribute what grain they

could and to preserve what peace they might. Moreover, even if removing local and national

barriers to trade and enlarging the market for grain meant an enlarged supply, the gains from

such policies, whatever they were, did not, in the opinion of the protesting crowds, justify asking

2 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 62-8.


the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the population to bear the costs associated with the

improvement. Those who benefitted, they argued, ought to bear the costs. And Thompson agreed

with them. A truly “moral economy” would not only expand the supply of food but also would

ensure its equitable distribution.

I will not go into all these issues here.3 But I do want to look more closely at a single,

crucially important aspect of Thompson's argument. In 1993, after more than a decade of anti-

nuclear campaigning, Thompson revisited the debates that his initial essay had inspired with a

lengthy response to critics entitled “Moral Economy Reviewed.”4 In this response, among other

thrusts and parries, Thompson turned the tables on his critics and levied his own salvoes against

prevailing conceptions of "market" and "market economy." He felt that we knew far too little

about these central features of our economic life, especially in a properly historical way. We did

not actually know how eighteenth-century markets really worked; and what we did know had

more to do with ideology than actuality. Reference to “the market” or “markets” in the literature

did not necessarily signify the presence of an actual market process. It often signified nothing

more than an idealized image of such process. Historians who supposed otherwise, who believed

that a “perfectly competitive” market or its equivalent actually did exist in eighteenth-century

England, Thompson reasonably proposed, ought to “show it to us." It was what he sought to do

with regard to the morals of food rioters, and the injunction applied with equal force to the

mechanics of marketing as to the morality of basic provision. "A metaphor, no matter how grand

its intellectual pedigree, is not enough" (305).

3 There is a large and growing literature on the subject for anyone interested. Roger Wells, “E. P. Thompson,

Customs in Common and Moral Economy,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 21:2 (1994), 263-307; and Adrian

Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds., Moral Economy and Popular Protests: Crowds, Conflict and Authority

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) are convenient starting points.

4 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies of Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993).

Further references in the text.


For his part, “market economy" usually seemed to Thompson just "a metaphor (or mask)

for capitalist process." As such, he thought that it often employed to cover naked inequities

(305). If we were to sort out such matters, we needed to do so carefully and in context. He

thought the meaning of "market economy” clear enough when contrasted to "the centralized

direction of old-style collectivist states." But to say “what was 'a market economy' in eighteenth-

century England" was not so easy, precisely because no one could point to a “non-market

economy” to contrast it with. Or so he believed. On the contrary, "even the most zealous food

rioters, such as Cornish tinners or Kingswood miners or West of England clothing workers,”

according to Thompson, “were inextricably committed to the market, both as producers and as

consumers.” They could not “have existed for a month or a week without it" (304). This fact had

direct consequences. The eighteenth-century English crowd, he insisted, accepted the reality, and

even the utility, of markets. Food rioters expected only that markets, especially those in food and

other basic necessities, would conform to community expectations—their expectations—about

fairness.

In other words, Thompson agreed that the English crowd understood markets to be

necessary; it demanded only that they be "moral." The protesting crowds did not imagine that

there was a choice between different "economies," different systems of production and exchange,

and therefore neither did Thompson. He used “moral economy” to signify, not a systemic or

qualitatively different way of life (or mode of production), but an older regulative tradition,

which operated in principle to ensure that the poor were at least fed. And it was this difference—

between an economy in which taking care of the poor mattered and one in which it did not—that

marked an economy as “moral” or not. The “moral economy” that Thompson evoked did not

differ at the level of structure, or in its constitutive social relationships. It differed at the level of


policy, and had to do with the ways in which those in charge of it, conducted themselves. In

Thompson’s view, the eighteenth-century record revealed neither qualitatively different kinds of

markets, nor qualitatively different kinds of economies. It revealed only “different ways of

regulating the market, or of manipulating exchanges between producers and consumers to the

advantage of one party or the other" (304). And it was these ways that were, in his terms, the

“moral economy.” Regarding "the special case of the marketing of 'necessities' in time of

dearth,” his reading of the available evidence led him to conclude that "the crowd's preferred

model was precisely the 'open market' in which petty producers freely competed, rather than the

closed market when large dealers conducted private bargains over samples in the back parlour of

inns" (303-4).

It is on this point that I wish to push back. And I wish to do so because Thompson’s

argument here seems to me to be indistinguishable from that of Adam Smith; which is an odd

result, to say the least, especially given Thompson’s spirited denunciations of Smith both in

“Moral Economy of the English Crowd” and in “Moral Economy Reviewed.”5 Indeed, Smith’s

famous observation about what happens whenever members of the same trade gather together

could have been imported directly into Thompson’s pages without remark, right down to the

public house where Smith charged the malefactors with gathering to conspire: “People of the

same trade seldom meet together,” he had written, “even for merriment and diversion, but the

conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” To

be sure, Smith goes on to denounce regulations that enable those of the same trade “to tax

themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans.”6 Nonetheless

5 See Customs in Common, especially 200-7 and 270-286.

6 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Consequences of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library,

1937[1776]), 128.


the similarities are striking. The “moral economy” of the crowd was, on Thompson’s account,

simply a properly Smithian competitive market in which customers could exercise effectual

discipline over suppliers.

It was here, I think, that Thompson conceded too much to his critics. He appears to have

assumed that the only option available to the eighteenth-century the crowd, or to the authorities

to which it appealed, was to “regulate” the market, manipulating its exchanges “to the advantage

of one party or the other.” But there was another option—namely, to insist that the expanding

market in food be organized on the same basis as the local market. Instead of encouraging

competition and zero-sum bargaining (in which one party’s advantage is another’s loss), the

authorities could have encouraged cooperation and mutual gain, which we now know is how

most local markets were generally organized, however imperfectly. that is to say, an alternative

“moral economy” actually did exist in eighteenth-century England, not only at the level of

regulative principle, but also at the level of everyday life, where as we shall see in more detail

below it was the predominant practice for much of the period about which Thompson was

writing. There is therefore every reason to believe that the crowd rioted, when it did, not merely

to insist upon paternalistic regulation but to defend its way of life. It seems to me that the market

to which "the most zealous food rioters, such as Cornish tinners or Kingswood miners or West of

England clothing workers, were inextricably committed," and without which they could not

“have existed for a month or a week" (304), was most likely not Adam Smith’s but their own—a

reciprocal network of cooperation and exchange by means of which they traditionally conducted

their affairs.

Thanks to Craig Muldrew, we now have a detailed account of the inner workings of this

eighteenth-century “moral economy,” which perfectly fits Thompson’s implicit model. As


Muldrew makes plain, almost all buying and selling in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

England “involved credit of one form or another—whether it was the husbandman selling corn in

the marketplace, a cordwainer selling a pair of shoes, a labourer bargaining for a piece of work,

or a wholesaler importing coal from Newcastle.”7 “Every household in the country,” he observes,

“from those of paupers to the royal household, was to some degree enmeshed within the

increasingly complicated webs of credit and obligation with which transactions were

communicated” (95). In the terms presented here, such webs of credit and obligation constituted

a widespread system of reciprocity. Certainly, they were not gifts. As Muldrew notes, “[t]hese

numerous debts … had to be paid eventually.” But neither were they commercial purchases as

conventionally understood. “Because credit was so common, most people eventually

accumulated numerous reciprocal debts over time, and these were either remembered or recorded

in account books, and then mutually cancelled at convenient intervals.” Such “reckoning”

operated according to very different principles than those which characterized the expanding

commercial system. In particular, they were not tied to a fixed repayment schedule and, most

importantly, “interest was not charged on sales credit to account for any risk.” In this regard, the

reciprocal system differed markedly from “moneylending or lending on bond, where interest was

standard by the seventeenth century” (107-8).8

The connection between Muldrew’s moral economy of obligation, with its constitutive

“sociability of credit and commerce,” and Thompson’s moral economy of paternalistic regulation

7 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England

(New York: Palgrave, 1998). Further references in the text.

8 Standard but not preponderate: according to Muldrew, “even though many people used bonds at one time or

another, they still formed a minority of their total indebtedness.” Economy of Obligation, 112. In a sample of

Hampshire account from this period, only 11 percent were on bond, and most of them were for larger amounts of

money “where lenders understandably desired more security” (113). It is also important to note in this context, too,

that moneylenders were not wholly immune from non-economic considerations: “In contrast to sales credit which

depended more on consumer need, many larger loans were commonly obtained from kin” (113).


is obvious. The established practices described by Muldrew involved sellers giving goods to

customers more or less upon request, if they had them to give, without the expectation of

immediate payment (whether in cash or by means of an instrument of commercial credit, such as

a bond, check or bank note). To be sure, sellers were not required to give when asked. But

neither were buyers required to pay upon receipt. The willingness to give was an act of faith, as

was the willingness to pay. Both were affirmations of a desire to forge and maintain a continuing

connection. It was just such affirmations that warrant describing such an economy as “moral.”

To invoke Kant’s stringent terms, it involved treating people not as means to an end, but as ends

in themselves. Not surprisingly, when suppliers sought to change these expectations and conduct

business on a different basis, one involving the maximization of individual income rather than

the provision of needs upon demand, there was an uproar.

As Muldrew would observe elsewhere, Thompson was “not concerned with the social

structure of marketing,” or, in our terms, the form and structure of exchange per se.9 Rather he

focused on the “cultural forces” that operated “during times of dearth,” when “traditional

paternalistic moral notions about the entitlement of the poor to locally produced grain came into

conflict with a new, more absolute utilitarian ideology of free trade advocated by Adam Smith

and others, to which a new breed of middlemen subscribed” (169). Muldrew agreed with

Thompson that when food was in short supply, people sought to impose an “older regulatory

morality” on the market “by seizing grain which was to be exported, [and] selling it [to locals] at

a ‘fair’ price instead.” But Muldrew also argued that the morality of eighteenth-century local

markets was not simply a matter of “regulatory ideals.” Rather the early modern market system

in general constituted “a moral economy of individualistic contractual relations,” which were

9 Craig Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England,”

Social History 18:2 (May 1993), 163-83. On the “form and structure of exchange,” see below, pp. 9-11.


governed by expectations “much more normative than the older regulatory morality stressed by

Thompson” (169).

Muldrew may overstate the case a bit here. The “moral economy of individualistic

contractual relations” of which he writes, and which he later dubbed an “economy of obligation,”

was not the only economic option in early modern England. It had a rival: the commercial

market that Adam Smith championed. And over the course of the eighteenth-century the former

would retreat before the globalizing pressures of the latter. Muldrew also seems sometimes to

argue that the morality of his “economy of obligation” was irrational and selfless (i.e., not

“rationally self-motivated”), and therefore not “simply or even primarily concerned with self-

interest in the Smithian sense” (169). That the eighteenth-century “economy of obligation”

allowed debtors to delay repayment for as long as possible, and provided only relatively

expensive procedures to facilitate collection from delinquents, however, does not make it

irrational. It simply made it different. And it is a difference that deserves to be called “moral.”

Repayment in the reciprocal system impressed itself on debtors, not as a structural requirement

of initial receipt, as in the commercial system, but as the obligation of a continuing relationship.

In the first case, there is no getting without immediately giving back. The rule is: get what you

pay for, pay for what you get. In the second case, in contrast, it is possible to get without

immediately giving back. Here the rule is: give when you can, pay when you can.

We can in fact generalize these notions even further, going so far as to agree with Adam

Smith that there is a “natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange” without also agreeing that

there is one, and only one, way in which this natural propensity can be, or ever has been,

expressed. Rather we can plausibly identify at least four different elementary “forms of

exchange,” within which any natural propensity might express itself, of which commercial


exchanges are but one.10

Define exchange as any transaction in which something is voluntarily

given with an expectation that something will also, at some point, be voluntarily received.

Further, call the initial giving of something in exchange an “opening,” and the subsequent receipt

that completes the exchange a “closing.” Every exchange can then be classified on the basis of

two sets of binary distinctions: 1) whether the closing occurs at the same or a different time as

the opening; and, 2) whether it comes from the same or a different person or enterprise than that

to which the opening was given. These rules constitute a 2 x 2 exchange space, each quadrant of

which defines a separate and distinct forms of exchange, each of which define a family of

systems that are familiar to us (see Figure 1).

Same: Different:

Sam

e:

Barter/

Commerce

Reciprocity/

Trust

Dif

fere

nt

:

Cooperation/

Team work

Gifting/

GenerositySOU

RC

E O

F R

ETU

RN

SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE

TIMING OF RETURN

Thompson’s “market” and “market economy,” like Adam Smith’s, belong to the upper

right-hand corner of this space. In these systems, each elementary transaction involves only two

people, a giver and a receiver, a buyer and a seller, and every exchange is always brought to

closure more or less immediately upon opening. The point of these systems is that when

10

I call the forms I have in mind “elementary” because, though constituted by the simplest possible rules, they

define complex “systems of exchange,” which are both familiar and relatively widespread.


someone buys (i.e., receives) something, they are expected to pay for it (i.e., give something in

return), not just sooner or later but at the time of purchase.11

The “moral economy” of the

English crowd, however, belongs to the upper right-hand quadrant. Like those of the upper left,

closing returns come from those to whom received the opening was given. But whereas traders in

commercial markets are expected to pay immediately upon receipt, those in reciprocal systems

are neither required nor expected to do so. On the contrary, because the closing in such systems,

when payment is received, may be not only delayed, but in practice usually is delayed, often

indefinitely, we may with justice call them “moral economies.” The recipient is still expected to

pay back the opening, but the timing and character of the return is very much the subject for

negotiation and mutuality.12

There is thus plenty of evidence to support the claim that a distinctive “non-market

economy” existed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, if we understand “non-market”

11

When payment takes the form of other produced goods and services, we call the exchange “barter.” When it takes

the form of money—i.e., a specialized commodity, token or credit instrument, the purpose of which is to serve as

a means of payment—then we call it “commercial.” But in each case, both the timing and the source of the

closing return are the same as the opening gift, or as nearly so as it is possible to make them. I want to be as clear

here as I can be: money is traditionally said to have three functions: standard of value; means of payment; and

store of wealth. The first of these functions is historically the oldest, money’s original form, as it were: any

exchange system in involving an exchange of equivalents has to have a standard of value to facilitate the expected

transactions. But every exchange system does not have to have a universal means of payment, a “money” or

“currency,” which is given in return for items received. There have long been such means (examples include

precious metals, gemstones, cowrie shells, minted coins, beaver pelts and tobacco leaves) and they have long been

traded back and forth as part of a series of on-going transactions. But until recently all such monies have been in

relatively short supply and therefore unable, or unavailable, to serve as a universal means of payment. (Relative

scarcity is in fact a prerequisite of a means of payment: too large a supply of a given money renders it valueless,

or relatively so.) A fully “monetarized” exchange system, one in which every transaction involves an immediate

monetized payment upon receipt, the kind that we commonly call “a market,” depends upon an adequate supply of

a reliable “money”—i.e., a widely available currency whose value is at least relatively stable. And it is only with

the diffusion of modern systems of paper money and commercial credit that human societies have had access to

such currencies, without which what we call “capitalism,” or the commodification of everything, is not possible.

12

I have described a similar “moral economy” in North America and reconstituted its individual dynamics and

relations of exchange using account books and probate records from the Hudson River valley. In my view, it

played its own prominent part in the economic life of eighteenth- and 19th

-century America. See Merrill, “The

Monetarization of Everything: The Gift of Credit, the Social Relations of Exchange, and the Transition to

Capitalism in the United States” available at commons.esc.edu/michaelmerrill/files/2013/04/ Monetization-of-

Everything.pdf accessed August 29, 2013.

http://commons.esc.edu/michaelmerrill/files/2013/04/Monetization-of-Everything.pdf

http://commons.esc.edu/michaelmerrill/files/2013/04/Monetization-of-Everything.pdf


to mean “non-commercial:” i.e., not based on a commercial system in which payment is

expected immediately upon receipt. “Markets” were every bit as central to this alternative moral

economy as they were of the emergent commercial economy. But the “moral markets” of the

alternative were based upon a distinctly different form of exchange than that which characterized

the commercial economy. Certainly, the desire to do things in the most efficient manner could be

found in either system. But the markets of the alternative “moral economy” differed from those

of the commercial sector not merely in the degree to which they were or were not “regulated.

They differed in systematic and qualitative ways—with effects that were (and are) important

enough to warrant designating them, not just as different markets, but different economies.

We can also estimate the relative size of each of these alternative economies and chart

how the balance between them shifted over the course of the eighteenth century. To do so, we

need to compare estimates of the size of both the commercial and the moral economies at the

beginning and the end of the century. Muldrew has produced estimates of the former using the

work of Gregory King, revised to reflect the fact that King systematically and intentionally

overlooked the non-commercial and un-monetized sales credit that was the mainstay of the

economy of obligation. Correcting for this oversight, Muldrew estimated that the English GDP in

1688 stood at £146 million rather than at King’s considerably lower figure of about £50

million.13

Of this £146 million, about £110 million, or approximately 75 percent, was likely to be

accounted for by the non-commercial “moral economy” sector. By way of contrast, the

conventional estimates of English economic activity in 1801, which Muldrew accepts at face

13

Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have also revisited King’s estimate, though they raised his figure only

lightly to to £54 million. But they too seem also to have ignored non-monetarized sales credit, which formed the

bulk of most household transactions. See Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, “Revising England’s Social

Tables 1688-1812,” Explorations in Economic History 19 (1982), 385-408 at 395. The whole controversy is too

involved and complicated to settle here and demands further work. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 86-92.


value, give a total GDP of £204 million, of which I estimate the “moral economy” to account for

about 25 percent.14

Such numbers are of course speculative and offered for purposes of

illustration only. But they do serve to suggest the wrenching scope of the shift that England

seems to have experienced in the eighteenth century. From a predominantly cooperative, though

hardly egalitarian, “moral economy” at the beginning of the period, it had become a

predominantly competitive commercial market economy by its end. It is this shift that we now

call “the transition to capitalism,” and it is marked by two vastly different social experiences—

dynamic growth on the one hand and debilitating contraction on the other.15

On Thompson’s

account, both were true, and it is their conjunction that helps to explain the passions and the

turmoil of the age.

By way of conclusion permit me to offer some final reflections on the implications of

Thompson’s conception of a “moral economy” for our own possibilities. In the introduction to

Customs in Common, Thompson refers more or less off-handedly to “capitalism (or ‘the

market’)” (15) The latter he believed was merely “a superb and mystifying metaphor” for the

former, “a mask worn by particular interests, which are not coincident with those of ‘the nation’

or ‘the community’,” even though they very much want to taken as such (305). One purpose of

“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd” was to remove the mask and to expose the

14

Muldrew, 92, as corrected by Lindert and Williamson, 403. The comparatively rapid growth from £54 million to

£204 million between 1688 and 1801 works out to an average of about 2.5 percent per annum. My estimates of

the size of the commercial and moral economies assume a constant “structural velocity of money” equal to 3. On

the basis of such an assumption, the standard quantity theory of money, MV = PQ, yields an estimate of the size

of “monetarized” or commercial sector. In 1688 it is MV = £12 million x 3 = £36 million, or 25 percent of the

estimated GDP of £146 million; and in 1801 the commercial sector is MV = £51 million x 3 = £153 million, or 75

percent of the estimated GDP of £204 million. For a fuller discussion see Merrill, “The Monetarization of

Everything.”

15

Using Muldrew’s estimates gives an average overall growth rate of only 0.3 percent per annum, which is much

lower than the more widely-accepted rate of more than 2 percent. But looking at each sector separately yields two

different stories. The commercial sector may then be seen to grow from £36 million to £153 million, or an average

of about 2.9 percent per annum, while the moral economy shrinks from £110 million to £51 million, or an average

rate of decline equal to about negative 1 percent per annum.


underlying capitalist myth-making to view, which he proposed to do by teasing from the record

an alternative “moral” (as opposed to “profit-maximizing”) logic animating the crowd’s actions

in the eighteenth-century food riots he studied. Thompson thought the stakes of such myth-

making immense. “The industrial revolution and [its] accompanying demographic revolution,”

he wrote in the introduction to Customs in Common, “were the background to the greatest

transformation in history,” which revolutionized needs and destroyed the authority of customary

expectations. Moreover, “this remodeling of ‘need’ and this raising of the threshold of material

expectations (along with the devaluation of traditional cultural satisfaction) continues with

irreversible pressure today.” Indeed, it has been “accelerated everywhere by universally available

means of communication.” Pressures once felt by only a few million Europeans “are now felt

among one billion Chinese, as well as countless millions in Asian and African villages” (14).

As an historian of labor, Thompson avowed himself well aware “of the self-interest and

the class-based apologetics” that could “always find reasons why the poor should stay poor”

(14). But they should not and they will not: “Global expectations are rising like Noah’s flood.”

He worried that the result might well be a disaster: the readiness of the human species “to throw

all the globe’s resources onto the market [threatens] “the species itself (from South and North)

with ecological catastrophe” (15).16

Thompson offered his studies of pre-capitalist custom and

culture, including the moral economy of the eighteenth-century crowd, as a potential port in this

storm. “The engineer of our catastrophe,” he wrote, if it comes, “will be economic man, whether

in classically avaricious capitalist form or in the form of [the] rebellious economic man of the

orthodox Marxist tradition.” “As capitalism (or ‘the market’) made over human nature and

human need, so political economy and its revolutionary antagonist came to suppose that this

16

Actually, Thompson wrote, “may threaten,” a softer blow, which I have hardened here, to underscore the fact that

the danger is now more imminent and his mood, in any case, was rather more imperative than conditional.


economic man was for all time.” At the end of the 20th

-century, Thompson believed, “this must

now be called in doubt.” We cannot expect to return to a time before capitalism. But we may

hope that a reminder of the “alternative needs, expectations and codes” of pre-capitalist cultures

might “inspire the rediscovery, in new forms, of a new kind of ‘customary consciousness,’ in

which once again successive generations stand in appreciative relation to each other, in which

material satisfactions remain stable (if more equally distributed) and only cultural satisfactions

enlarge, and in which expectations level out into a customary steady state” (15).

Thompson was far too pessimistic here, I think, too despairing. To be sure he despaired

honestly. He did not see a way out that did not require a change in human nature itself. But we

do in fact have other options, which not only have been lived but also are being lived, even now,

in the wake of the “greatest transformation.” Moreover, Thompson’s account of the eighteenth-

century moral economy not only helps to illuminate our options but also to bring them within

reach. We do not need to abandon what we know. We need only learn from what we do. For

which purpose we can take Thompson, among others, as a guide. “We shall not ever return to

pre-capitalist human nature,” but we can “renew our sense of our nature’s range of possibilities.”

He urged us forward to “a time when both capitalist and state communist needs and expectations

may decompose, and human nature may be made over in a new form.” But we do not need to

wait upon the complete transformation of existing society or human nature in order to turn the

tide. It is enough that we simply bend the arc of our common endeavors away from the tightly

calibrated, intense and ultimately fragile imperatives of competitive commercial systems

(“capitalism”), and toward the more flexible, more forgiving, and ultimately more robust

imperatives of reciprocity, cooperation and generosity. That will be transformation enough, and a

moral economy, indeed.