Moral economy and emancipation

ABSTRACT

Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass are both advocates of ‘moral economy’. To this end, Elder-Vass offers a theory of appropriative practices that enables us to evaluate the enormous variety of forms of provisioning – market and non-market – that are actually found in the world. Andrew Sayer, in the view of the present author, has devoted himself to correcting a great historical error. The error has been trying to do radical political economy without explicitly proposing normatively superior alternatives that are based on objective ethics committed to meeting needs and diminishing suffering. There follow five suggestions regarding how to integrate moral economy with the views on emancipation expressed in early Bhaskar. Perhaps the most important of these suggestions is that to achieve emancipation, rather than over-emphasising relations of production, we should instead identify – in order to, if necessary, transform – the deep moral and legal structures that frame markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral economy
• emancipation
• critical realism
• economic theory
• ethical theory
• Roy Bhaskar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Howard Richards was born on June 10, 1938, in Pasadena, and grew up in southern California. After undergraduate work at Yale where his first philosophy teacher was Richard Rorty, he graduated from Stanford Law School. He worked as a junior fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, and simultaneously earned a doctorate in philosophy at UCSB, until he and his wife Caroline settled in Chile in 1965, although they spent a year at Oxford in 1970–71, where one of Howard’s tutors was Rom Harre. After the 1973 coup, they returned to the US where both taught at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. They have now returned to Chile.

Notes

1 Smith uses the expression ‘natural liberty’ interchangeably with ‘perfect liberty.’

2 I assume that Elder-Vass did not mention in this passage the exceptions to paying labour the full value of its product that Marx made in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, because he did not want to muddle his text with unnecessary detail that detracted little or nothing from the point he was making.

3 Piketty finds that the exceptions to increasing inequality are due to unusual circumstances, mainly wars.