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DRAFT: DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION

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

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

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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 wellestablished 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.

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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 antinuclear 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. Martins Press, 1999) are convenient starting points.

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

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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 eighteenthcentury 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 expectationstheir expectationsabout
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 notthat
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

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policy, and had to do with the ways in which those in charge of it, conducted themselves. In
Thompsons 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 Thompsons
argument here seems to me to be indistinguishable from that of Adam Smith; which is an odd
result, to say the least, especially given Thompsons spirited denunciations of Smith both in
Moral Economy of the English Crowd and in Moral Economy Reviewed.5 Indeed, Smiths
famous observation about what happens whenever members of the same trade gather together
could have been imported directly into Thompsons 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

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

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Consequences of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library,
1937[1776]), 128.

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the similarities are striking. The moral economy of the crowd was, on Thompsons 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 optionnamely, 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 partys advantage is anothers 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 Smiths but their owna
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 Thompsons implicit model. As

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Muldrew makes plain, almost all buying and selling in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England involved credit of one form or anotherwhether 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 Muldrews moral economy of obligation, with its constitutive
sociability of credit and commerce, and Thompsons moral economy of paternalistic regulation

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.

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).

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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 Kants 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.

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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 selfinterest 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

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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).

SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE
Different:

Same:

SOURCE OF RETURN

Same:
Barter/
Commerce

Reciprocity/
Trust

Different :

TIMING OF RETURN

Cooperation/
Team work

Gifting/
Generosity

Thompsons market and market economy, like Adam Smiths, 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.

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10

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 moneyi.e., a specialized commodity, token or credit instrument, the purpose of which is to serve as
a means of paymentthen 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, moneys 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 moneyi.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-ofEverything.pdf accessed August 29, 2013.

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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 wayswith 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 Kings 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 Kings 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 Englands 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.

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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 Thompsons
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
Thompsons 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 Muldrews 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.

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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 crowds actions
in the eighteenth-century food riots he studied. Thompson thought the stakes of such mythmaking 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 Noahs flood.
He worried that the result might well be a disaster: the readiness of the human species to throw
all the globes 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.

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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, Thompsons account of the eighteenthcentury 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 natures 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.

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