Edited by Ute Frevert
Is there a moral economy of capitalism? The term “moral economy” was coined in pre-capitalist times and does not refer to economy as we know it today. It was only in the nineteenth century that economy came to mean the production and circulation of goods and services. At the same time, the term started to be used in an explicitly critical tone: references to moral economy were normally critical of modern forms of economy, which were purportedly lacking in morals. In our times, too, the morality of capitalism is often the topic of debate and controversy. Moral Economies engages in these debates. Using historical case studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the book discusses the degree to which economic actions and decisions were permeated with moral, good-vs-bad classifications. Moreover it shows how strongly antiquity’s concept of “embedded” economy is still powerful in modernity. The model for this was often the private household, in which moral, social, and economic behavior patterns were intertwined. The do-it-yourself movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was still oriented towards this model, thereby criticizing capitalism on moral grounds.
Table of Contents of Moral Economies
- Introduction (Ute Frevert)
- Moral Economies, Present and Past. Social Practices and Intellectual Controversies (Ute Frevert)
- Reconsidering the Moral Economy in France at the End of the Eighteenth Century (Laurence Fontaine)
- Moral Economy as a Site of Conflict. Debates on Debt, Money, and Usury in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (Mischa Suter)
- The Moral Economy of the “Inner Colony”: Cooperatives, Reform, and Race in the German Settlement Movement (1893–1926) (Anna Danilina)
- Women’s Work: The Moral Economy of Municipal Housekeeping in New York (1880 –1917) (Björn Blaß)
- The Joys of Work and Self-Confidence: The Moral Economy of Disabled Veterans’ Social Re-Integration in Cisleithania (1914 –1918) (Thomas Rohringer)
- Make or Buy? Modes of Provision and the Moral Economy of Households in Postwar Germany (Reinhild Kreis)
- Moral Economies of Love and Labor in the GDR. Family Values and Work Ethics in Advice Correspondence, circa 1960 (Till Großmann)