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Anthropological Theory
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Moral economy: ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499617735259
journals.sagepub.com/home/ant
James G Carrier
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale),
Germany, and Department of Anthropology, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Abstract
The idea of moral economy has been increasingly popular in the social sciences over the
past decade, given a confusing variety of meanings and sometimes invoked as an empty
symbol. This paper begins by describing this state of affairs and some of its undesirable
corollaries, which include unthinking invocations of the moral and simplistic views of
some sorts of economic activity. Then, referring especially to the work of EP Thompson
and James C Scott, this paper proposes a more precise definition of moral economy that
roots moral economic activity in the mutual obligations that arise when people transact
with each other over the course of time. It thus distinguishes between the moral values
that are the context of economic activity and those that arise from the activity itself.
The solution that the paper proposes to the confused state of ‘moral economy’ can,
therefore, be seen as terminological, as the sub-title suggests, but it is intended to have
the substantive benefits of a better approach to economic activity and circulation and a
more explicit and thoughtful attention to moral value.

Keywords
Moral economy, anthropology of economy, neoclassical economics, EP Thompson,
James C Scott

In 2006, Fred Block said that ‘moral economy’ could ‘serve as the organizing
narrative for a revival of progressive ideas’. Since then, it is clear that it is a
phrase whose time has come. Bernie Sanders, campaigning to become the
Democratic presidential candidate in the United States, said that we need one
urgently (Sanders, 2016). Moral economy was the theme of the 2016 meeting of
the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE, 2016). Conferences

Corresponding author:
James G. Carrier, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany, and Department of
Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA.
Email: carrier@eth.mpg.de
2 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

and periodicals in the social sciences (including this one: Anthropological Theory
16:4) are littered with panels and papers that invoke the phrase. Part of the reason
for this may be the way that ‘moral’ offers a contrast to the calculating and self-
serving materialism that many people take to characterise modern market societies
and that many anthropologists see in neoliberalism and the neoclassical economics
that is its intellectual foundation.
As often happens when a phrase becomes this popular this quickly, moral
economy increasingly has become a symbol to be invoked rather than a concept
with a substantial meaning, a process that Didier Fassin (2009: n.p.) calls ‘the
trivialization of the phrase in the social sciences’. The result, as Chris Hann
(2016: 3) puts it, is that ‘the status of the concept of moral economy seems at
present thoroughly muddled’. My purpose here is to help correct this state of affairs
by encouraging us to think of the phrase in terms of clear intellectual substance.
One sign of that muddle is those who describe people’s economic actions and the
relationships and understandings that shape them, and say that they are presenting
a moral economy. Given that anthropologists have been dealing with people’s
economic activities in this way for decades without the phrase, it is hard to see
what useful purpose it serves. Almost as obvious is the use of the phrase to identify
economic activities that reflect some degree of concern for values other than sheer
material gain as an end in itself. Given that it is difficult to imagine gain that way,
rather than as a means to or symbol of something else as it was for Weber’s (1958
[1904–05]) ascetic Protestants, for example, it is hard to take this usage seriously.
Both of these uses can be unfortunate. For one thing, they suggest a specificity
where none exists and a spurious intellectual novelty that can produce disciplinary
amnesia. In addition, almost inevitably such usage wraps the pertinent activity in
the positive cloak of ‘moral’, without obliging us to specify just what moral value is
involved or to think carefully about the vision of the good that it entails, its
assumptions and implications. In this case, ‘moral’ becomes something like ‘free-
dom’ or ‘justice’, perilously close to a slogan, a rallying cry that calls for support
and hinders reflection. When it is used in this way, then, ‘moral economy’ impedes
careful thought rather than encouraging it. This is unfortunate in public discourse,
and especially so in academic discourse. Here I hope to encourage that thought by
giving the phrase a different and more precise definition than it often seems to have.
As this suggests, the argument that I make here is terminological. Perhaps, but
terminology can have significant implications for the ways that we think about
people’s values and economic activity, and economy more generally.
I defend that different definition in two main ways. One is by relating it to how
the phrase is used in EP Thompson’s ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in
the eighteenth century’ (1971) and in The Moral Economy of the Peasant by James
C Scott (1976), who drew on Thompson. Thompson and Scott were hardly the first
to use the phrase (Götz, 2015), but their writings have been the sources most
commonly invoked in scholarly work on moral economy. The second way that I
defend my preferred meaning relates to something that I have mentioned already.
By presenting that definition, I make that phrase something to think about rather
Carrier 3

than take for granted in the way that it is when it is simply a symbol to be invoked.
That can reduce the muddle that Hann perceives, by encouraging us to think anew
about some of the things that commonly are called moral economy, or ordinary
economy, as well as the things that commonly are called moral. That in turn may
allow greater insight into people’s economic activity, to economy more generally
and to how we might approach them.
I begin my task by considering the two elements of ‘moral economy’. Then I
present my preferred meaning for the phrase and lay out some of the understand-
ings of people and economy that it entails.

Economy, moral
To say that something is a moral economy is to say that it is a type of economy. So,
I start with ‘economy’, which has been the subject of debate and has many mean-
ings, two of which are especially salient in anthropology. Karl Polanyi called them
formalist and substantivist, and I shall consider them in turn (see generally Carrier,
2009).
The formalist is effectively the dominant understanding of economy in popular
thought and academic economics, where commonly it goes under the name of
neoclassical economics (here I use formalist and neoclassical interchangeably).
At least in the English-speaking world, its roots are in the eighteenth century,
and it is worth sketching its development. It appears that in Britain before the
second half of that century, the realm of people’s lives that we would call economic
was not commonly distinguished from the rest of their lives. That is, their economic
and social lives, and hence the orientations in each, were roughly the same. Late in
that century, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment argued that they should be
separated. According to Allan Silver (1990), this separation entailed the idea that
people’s activities in the social realm, especially their friendships, should not be
tainted by what was called interest. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith, a
member of the Scottish Enlightenment, presented the complementary idea. That
is, that people’s activities in the economic realm, especially their dealings with
others, should not be tainted by sentiment.
From this foundation the study of economic activities developed, and one way
that it did so led to the marginalists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
They were concerned with the balance between the cost and utility of things and the
way that this explained people’s purchasing decisions. In other words, marginalists
saw people as assessing what they would gain and lose in their transactions, and
their approach turned into modern neoclassical economics.
By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the economic realm came to be seen
as a particular realm of life that was distinct from another realm, illustrated by
Weber’s distinction between Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, translated into English as
Economy and Society (1978 [c. 1914]). By the middle of the twentieth century this
realm came to be seen as a substantive thing made of linked parts that could, at
least in principle, be measured and modelled (Mitchell, 1998). ‘Economy’, that is,
4 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

took on the definite article and with it a substantive denotation, as when people
speak of, for instance, the British economy. Moreover, that substantive came to be
seen to have attributes, like gross domestic product, rate of inflation or balance of
payments.
These attributes indicate that the economy to be measured and modelled is,
roughly speaking, a monetised market economy. In the formalist view, that econ-
omy rests on people with a range of wants. Those people enter the market, where
they confront a variety of things for sale that would help satisfy those wants. They
then decide which, if any, of those things are worth the money required, and buy
accordingly. The view also holds that people’s means are scarce or limited relative
to the desires that they have and to the things on offer to satisfy them (Sahlins,
1996); only the mythically wealthy and the mythically ascetic have enough money
to buy the things that would satisfy all of their desires. Lionel Robbins (1945
[1932]: 16) put it this way: ‘Economics is the science which studies human behav-
iour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.’
This explains Polanyi’s (1957: 243) calling this a formalist view, one concerned with
the form of the activity, effectively market choice.
Economic policies and popular thought routinely assume that people are inter-
ested in maximising their material benefit, getting the most possible things for the
least possible cost. However, Robbins’s definition points to something different and
more general – choosing. For him, economic analysis does not require that the
means are money, that the ends are material or that the decisions are made in a
market. As he (1945 [1932]: 26) put it: ‘The distribution of time between prayer and
good works has its economic aspect equally with the distribution of time between
orgies and slumber.’ In their thinking about economics, understandably given the
ways that the economy often is invoked in public discourse, anthropologists are
prone to forget that neoclassical economics rests on the assumption that people’s
lives are full of choices of all sorts, and that people make their decisions in a
reasonable way given their circumstances.
I turn now to the substantivist view of economy, and I present it more briefly
because it is likely to be familiar to anthropologists. If the formalist view
approaches economy in terms of how things happen – those individuals allocating
their limited resources among alternative ends – the substantivist view is concerned
with what happens. That is the production of things and their circulation as they
move from the point of production to the point of consumption (I use ‘things’ in
the broad sense, to include material objects, labour and services). This is what
Polanyi (1957: 243) called ‘the means of material want satisfaction’, and it takes
different forms in different societies. He identified three broad forms of economic
circulation, one or another of which may be dominant in any given society:
reciprocity, redistribution, exchange.
Substantivism, then, differs from the more rigorous sorts of formalism in the
object of study. That is, formalism studies moments of decision and, in principle,
that includes decisions of all sorts, although those most commonly of concern are
market decisions. On the other hand, substantivism studies the set of activities and
Carrier 5

relationships through which move the things that satisfy people’s wants. Further,
the substantivist approach differs from the formalist in that it makes no assump-
tions about how people think and act. This has the advantage of analytically
separating the economy and economic activity on the one hand and the values
that motivate people on the other, which encourages us to think clearly and expli-
citly about them and their relationship.
The definition of economy that I prefer is the substantivist one, which Polanyi
adopted and which reflects the fundamental place of material subsistence in human
activity, though I prefer to extend it to include the satisfaction of all wants. It is
also the definition that Thompson and Scott used. The former was concerned
especially with how grain got turned into meal and then baked into the bread
that people ate; the latter was concerned with how agricultural households did
or did not produce the material resources necessary for survival and a reasonable
degree of comfort.
‘Moral’ presents problems of its own. Particularly, some of its uses are evalu-
ative, as when it is used to praise an act that is carried out in order to express or
achieve something good, in the way that donating blood is called a moral act, and
as I noted above, this evaluative sense tends to accompany common use of the
word, even if only implicitly. Equally, though, ‘moral’ can be used descriptively, to
refer to any act motivated by a transcendent value that a person holds, though this
descriptive use seems to be associated more with ‘morality’ than with ‘moral’. What
makes that value transcendent is that it is not simply utilitarian but is related to
what that person sees as a better world, whether envisaged in the future or remem-
bered from the past.
This distinction between the utilitarian and the transcendent echoes what
Thompson said of the crowd. Their riots were not simply a reaction to hunger, a
utilitarian desire to fill the belly. As well, they reflected a vision of a better world.
Thompson (1971: 78) said that commonly the crowd’s activities were shaped by
‘some legitimating notion’, that ‘the men and women in the crowd were informed
by a belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs’ (as are many of
those whose views likely are less congenial to most anthropologists, the American
far Right as described in Hochschild, 2016). To invoke a different literature, the
distinction between the utilitarian and the transcendent resembles the distinction
that Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1989) made between short-term circula-
tion that reflects people’s immediate self-interest and long-term circulation that
reflects important social values and institutions. In turn, this distinction is elabo-
rated by Benoı̂t De L’Estoile (2014: S69–71), when he describes how the people he
studied valued long-term circulation and the social relations on which it rested as a
way to protect themselves and the relationships that they valued against
un-certainty.
To recall a point made earlier, treating morals descriptively means that one
could speak of a person’s morality even if one were indifferent to or disapproved
of what that person sees as a better world. An example of a vision of such a world
with which many concerned with moral economy might disagree is that laid out by
6 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

the advocates of free-market capitalism, who argue that it is moral, in two ways
(see generally Fourcade and Healy, 2007: 286–291). Firstly, because the market is
relatively free, it allows people to make their own decisions about what will make
their lives better, rather than having those decisions made for them by others.
Secondly, such a system, and especially the drive for increased profit that is part
of it, encourages the efficient use of resources, which means that people generally
will have lives that are more comfortable. This is the view that, as Hannah Appel
(2014: 607–614) describes, led the people she calls Andrew and Patrick to support
the idea of mortgage-backed securities in their financial institutions when they first
appeared: a more efficient mortgage sector would allow more people to purchase
their own homes. One may bridle at the ironic words of Lloyd Blankfein, head of
Goldman Sachs, when he said that his firm was ‘Doing God’s work’ (Dealbook,
2009). Equally, however, it is hard to argue that freedom to decide and freedom
from material want are unworthy goals or that they are not moral.
The common uses of ‘moral’ that I have mentioned have two features worth
noting. Firstly, those uses often relate only to the act and the transcendence of the
value that motivates it, and do not identify the content of that value. All that they
require is that a person think that something is good, and by extension is motivated
to act in ways that express that good or that help to bring it about or protect it
from threat. Secondly, at least in common usage, calling an act moral tends to
justify it, in two ways. It indicates that it is motivated by a transcendent value
rather than being narrowly self-serving and often it implies that the value is one
shared by those using the term.
So, the person who steals a loaf of bread might argue that the act is moral, for it
expresses the desire to feed the thief’s starving child, the transcendent value that
motivates it. Because that theft is an economic act, part of the circulation of bread,
the thief’s justification implies an economic morality (which is different from the
definition of moral economy that I shall lay out). That morality holds that the right
of property in an object (the bread) must yield if the object would alleviate the dire
necessity (starvation) of a person who does not own it. This resembles the morality
that Thompson sees at work in much of the English crowd and the right to
subsistence that Scott describes among Southeast Asian peasants.
There is another and less common view of the moral that is rather different from
those mentioned thus far, and it is the view that I think is closer to Thompson’s and
Scott’s use of the term than are the ones I have described. That meaning refers not
to values but to obligations, those that arise from interactions between people.
There are many such obligations other than those that concerned Thompson and
Scott. There are obligations that siblings and that parties to a marriage can have
towards each other, for instance, or the obligations that co-workers and that neigh-
bours can have. Durkheim pointed to this when he said that the different groups in
societies of a high division of labour become bound to each other because they co-
operate in order to survive. This is true at the level of empirical reality but, he
argued, it is also true at the level of consciousness: ‘In reality, co-operation
has . . . its intrinsic morality’ (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]: 174). To call an act moral
Carrier 7

in this sense is to point not only to the obligation that it expresses, but also to its
basis, the relationship between the actor and someone else. My goal here is to
suggest that we recognise that people’s interaction in their economic activities
can generate obligation.
In contrast, in The Wealth of Nations Smith seems to ignore this sort of obli-
gation, along with the arguments of Thompson’s crowd and Scott’s peasants.
He did so when he restricted people’s motives in economic transactions to only
two possibilities, charity and self-interest. As he (1976 [1776]: 18) put it, ‘It is not
from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’, so that, in our dealings with our
fellows, ‘We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and
never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.’
The view that I have sketched here has an important strength. The sorts of uses
of the idea of moral economy that I described previously in this section see
economic activity as being shaped by one set of values or another (and as I
argued, it is difficult to imagine such activity as not being so shaped). This led
Chris Hann to urge that we not use ‘moral economy’ in that way. Rather, he (2016:
13) says that ‘we do better to speak of a moral dimension, an ethical context of
economic activity’. Alternatively, the moral force that concerns me arises directly
from the economic interactions between people. Certainly it can shape people’s
activity, but it is not what Hann’s ‘context’ implies, something from outside that
activity that shapes it. Rather, in my view the morality and the activity are inex-
tricably linked, so that we can say that the economy itself is (more or less) moral.
In the balance of this paper I address the conjunction of relationship, activity and
morality.

Relationships and obligations

People are in all sorts of relationships, including those that arise from inherited
statuses. All of them, however, have a content that emerges over the course of time.
To a degree, this is true even of those that are inherited at birth. Brothers may have
their relationship handed to them, but it develops through their interactions, which
affect whether they are close or distant, amicable or indifferent, more or less obli-
gated to each other.
This does not mean that the form of the relationship is immaterial. Rather,
social and cultural factors can make it worth our attention. Socially, the form of
the relationship can have empirical corollaries. If brothers are likely to grow up
having the same household and neighbourhood and the same circle of kin, then
these things are likely to influence their interactions over the course of time.
However, those influences, like their formal status as brothers, are distinct analyt-
ically from the history of their interactions with each other, and hence from the
relationship and obligations that emerge from it. Scott (1976: 46) makes this point
when he writes about the relationship between landowners and tenants in
Southeast Asia: ‘The key is the actual content of the relationship – the actual
8 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

patterns of reciprocity – and not its formal descriptive terms.’ Culturally, people
can have expectations about the behaviour appropriate to those in a relationship
of a particular form; in Thompson’s (1971: 91) terms, ‘what ought to be men’s
reciprocal duties’, and these are likely to affect their dealings with each other.
Thus, the form of a relationship can suggest the general sort of content we
might expect. However, it can be no more than an influence on and indicator of
the content. After all, though they may well have the same form, not all marriage
relationships are the same, any more than are relationships between shopkeepers
and customers, among co-workers or between employees and their bosses.
As my example of brothers indicates, the content of these relationships accu-
mulates over the course of time. This is implicit in Scott’s invocation of the pattern
that characterises the reciprocity between landlord and tenant and it is explicit in
Thompson’s invocation, noted previously, of tradition and custom, for patterns,
traditions and customs take time to develop. Each interaction is shaped by those
that preceded it and is part of the foundation of those that follow. In this sense,
those interactions are not only the content of the relationship. They also are
the basis of the expectations that each party to the relationship has about the
other party, about the obligations each has toward the other and about the rela-
tionship itself.
If things pass between people in these interactions, the relationship will be part
of the production and circulation of things, and so will be part of the economy.
However, we need to approach the passing of those things with caution. Scott’s
invocation of reciprocity illustrates why. He (1976: 171) says of the way that
peasants think about their relationship with their landlords, ‘the key element of
evaluation is the ratio of services he [i.e. the peasant] receives to services he pro-
vides’. That invocation might lead us to focus on the equivalence or otherwise of
what is transacted, and that could be wrong. For some relations the focus on what
is transacted can be appropriate, as when an anonymous customer and check-out
clerk in a supermarket transact money for groceries. Formally, at least, their deal-
ings with each other reflect a purely economic relationship that is dissolved as soon
as the transaction is completed. The sort of relationship that is part of moral
economy is different. The parties may have begun interacting for simple economic
and utilitarian reasons, but the relationship is not reducible to what is transacted.
Instead, it can subsume that aspect, as a transaction does not dissolve the relation-
ship but instead strengthens it. This echoes and extends Sahlins’s (1974: 186)
aphorism. He said: ‘If friends make gifts, gifts make friends’; from the perspective
of the position laid out here, if obligations produce transactions, transactions pro-
duce obligations.
The idea that people who interact with each other are likely to be obliged to
interact with each other in the future resembles work by economists on what is
called co-operation and altruism (some of this work is reviewed and put in an evo-
lutionary frame in Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003). In my terms, that work commonly
holds that A is more likely to co-operate with B if A trusts B, which depends to an
important degree on knowledge of B’s past actions (e.g. Antonioni et al., 2014).
Carrier 9

While this work points in the same direction as my argument, it differs in an

important way because of its methodological individualism. This is illustrated
when it refers to A’s knowledge of B’s past, and ignores the existence of a rela-
tionship between A and B, and when it speaks of individual calculation of risk and
reward rather than obligation. Doubtless an interested economist could render
relationship and obligation in disciplinary terms, but I doubt that this would
make the economist’s approach more compelling to those outside the discipline.
As I said, over the course of time transactions and other interactions tend to
reproduce the relationship in which they occur, though this is influenced by the sort
of conditions that I describe below. However, this reproduction is not perfect.
For one thing, the relationship can change because of factors that are external to
it and beyond the control of the people in it. Thompson, for instance, describes
how the price of meal that bakers bought could rise to such an extent that they
could no longer sell their bread at what people saw as a just price even if
they wanted to, which would affect the relationship between bakers and their cus-
tomers. As well, the relationship may change because of factors that are fairly
internal to it. For instance, one party may see the relationship as developing in
ways that are objectionable. In that case, the dissatisfied party may interact with
the other party in a changed way, which changes the content of the relationship.
In extreme circumstances this can bring about the dissolution of the relationship,
as in Rhian Ellis’s (1983) description of the association between the wife’s failure
to cook, the husband’s failure to accept the meal and the breakdown of the
marriage.
This observation that people in a relationship can act to change it indicates that
the people who deal with each other must have some discretion in those dealings if
obligation is to develop. If they have none, then their interactions are likely to be
relatively meaningless socially. Such would be the case with workers on an ideal-
typical assembly line. Their activities mesh with each other, but not because they
are co-operating in a common task. Rather, they mesh because they are coordi-
nated by the division of labour built into the assembly line itself. With no discre-
tion, those co-workers would be unlikely to develop relationships of the sort of
concern here.
Just as there are different sorts of interactions and relationships between people,
so there are different degrees and types of obligation in those relationships. For the
immediate family those obligations are likely to be strong and broad, encapsulated
in the saying that ‘home is the place where, if you have to go, they have to take
you’, which includes incorporating you into the economic transactions within the
family. For more distant relationships that arise from less diverse interaction, those
obligations are weaker and more restricted.
An instance from my own life will illustrate. For over 15 years I have been
buying some of my groceries at a small shop near my home. I have had amicable
chats with the shopkeeper and the two people who have long worked for him, but
the interactions remain confined to the shop. Even so, there are obligations on both
sides, and they are economic. The shopkeeper has felt obliged to spend time
10 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

looking for things that I wanted to buy, even though it is unlikely that the money
he made when I bought them justified the effort it took him to locate them. For my
part, if I do not buy anything there for a week or so, I feel uneasy and make an
effort to visit the shop.
This sort of relatively durable relationship that carries obligations and that
arises from economic transaction appears to have been more pronounced in the
past in Britain and the United States than it is in the present. According to Gerald
Mars, in the North of England around the Second World War such a relationship
was marked by customers paying their shop accounts in round figures, leaving a
slight balance. Mars (1982: 173) says that when the relationship was terminated,
‘the debt has to be paid off – precisely and immediately. The open-ended transac-
tion is closed, and . . . reverts to normal market exchange. The transaction is, in
effect, depersonalized . . . and the family’s custom removed to another shop.’ In the
United States early in the twentieth century the spread of impersonal, large-scale
retail stores and mail-order firms was making such relationships less common,
especially in rural areas. One defender of local shops, William Allen White, com-
plained about this change in terms that stress the relationship and the obligations
that went with it:

there are such things as ‘tainted’ dry goods, ‘tainted’ groceries and ‘tainted’
furniture . . . All of such that are not bought at home, of men who befriended you,
of men to whom you owe a living, are ‘tainted’ because they come unfairly (in
Strasser, 1989: 216).

Firms can, of course, invoke the tokens of such relationships with things like loy-
alty cards or stressing the personality of the firm or its employees. However, these
are invocations of the cultural correlates of such relationships, not the substance of
the relationships themselves.
A different sort of relationship and obligation can arise among co-workers.
James Zetka (1992) analysed automobile workers in the United States from 1946
to 1963. As I noted above, on automobile assembly lines most of the work is
coordinated by the organisation of the line and its sequential tasks, so that there
is little need for workers to interact as part of the economic activity that is their
work. However, there are some tasks that require the co-operation of workers, and
Zetka found that those engaged in such tasks were significantly more likely to
support their fellow workers in wildcat strikes, which were illegal and strongly
suppressed. This suggests that the interaction that the co-operation involves
leads to a heightened degree of mutuality, which I take to indicate a heightened
obligation to fellow workers. And it is important to note that this sort of inter-
action and transaction is, at least in principle, independent of the question of who
owns the means of production and of who oversees the production process.
The idea that interaction can produce obligation appears to apply to firms as
well as to individuals. Two of the best-known sociological analyses of this are by
Ronald Dore, concerned with Japan and Britain, and Mark Granovetter,
Carrier 11

concerned with the United States, and the patterns they describe are similar. Firms
that deal with each other repeatedly commonly establish relationships that have a
moral component: for Dore (1983: 479) these relationships ‘become regulated by
criteria of fairness’; for Granovetter (1985: 490) they carry ‘strong expectations
of trust and abstention from opportunism’. Even in the financial sector of the
twenty-first century transactions appear to create obligation. At least, that is the
import of a comment by a member of a firm that was worried about the actions of
Barclays Bank: ‘we have been a longtime client of Barclays, which comes with its
own responsibilities for Barclays’ (in Stewart, 2017).
As I have presented them, these sorts of relationships and obligations do not fit
neatly into either the category of the social or the category of the economic, at least
as these commonly have been understood in the discipline or among the public (see
Carrier, 2012: 3–7). The obligations look social, different from the impersonal
obligation that one assumes when signing a contract, which could be made with
any legally competent counter-party, or when putting supermarket food into one’s
shopping cart, which could be discharged by paying any authorised check-out
clerk. At the same time, the relationships look economic, for they contain, even
if they do not necessarily revolve around, the production and circulation of things.
In thus combining both the social and the economic, these relationships resemble
gift relationships (e.g. Carrier, 1995), albeit in attenuated and somewhat specialised
form. In those, too, people are linked and obligated by the history of their inter-
actions and transactions with each other. In combining elements of each, these
sorts of relationships conflict with a conceptual separation that, Jonathan Parry
(1986: 458) argues, is our own invention, that between ‘the gift, and . . . the whole
idea of ‘‘economic self-interest’’’. This echoes the separation that, I said, thinkers of
the Scottish Enlightenment advocated.
Saying that these relationships combine the social and the economic may suggest
that they are examples of what Polanyi (1957 [1944]) called embeddedness. Most of
those who invoke him take it and its converse, disembeddedness, to mean the
degree to which the economic realm is affected by institutions, ranging from stat-
utes and formal organisations to custom and usage, that serve to reflect and protect
the interests of the members of society in general. This is the sort of thing that
Thompson said occurred under the older paternalistic system that he described, in
which many economic activities were governed by common understandings of
fairness and obligation. However, the idea of embeddedness seems to rest on a
conceptual separation of economy and society that makes it likely that ‘moral-
political regulation is seen as primarily externally imposed’ on economic activity
(Sayer, 2004: 5), in the manner that Hann invokes when he writes of moral context.
Here, on the other hand, the production and circulation of things takes place in the
activities through which people are related. Consequently, economic activity
cannot be said to be embedded in social relations: the two cannot be clearly
separated, either conceptually or empirically.
That said, interactions of the sort that concern me will be shaped by their con-
text in various ways. For instance, there might be cultural expectations about
12 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

different sorts of people, perhaps that women are centred on the household while
men range outside of it. A couple who decide to live together would, then, likely
expect to interact and transact accordingly. As well, there may be expectations that
people will transact with and relate to each other in particular ways when they
transact things that are morally hazardous (e.g. Parry, 1994) or that are seen as
central to human life (e.g. Titmuss, 1971). To the degree that two people share
those expectations, they will have them in mind when they begin their dealings with
each other, and that will affect what they do and how they think about it. As I have
argued, though, as people develop a history of transaction with each other, that
history will generate its own expectations, so that the common expectations are
likely to become less important.
This does not mean that common expectations lose all their force. That is
because there are likely to be mechanisms that encourage conformity to them,
ranging from law to gossip. The riots that Thompson described is such a mechan-
ism, a form of rough justice by which people sought to impose what they saw as a
fair price for food in the face of the political ascendancy of the beliefs and practices
associated with neoclassical economy. Conformity also can be encouraged by
making sure that transactions are visible to others. In England in the seventeenth
century, transactions were supposed to take place in the open market, which meant
in public: market regulations banned secret or private deals, such as might be made
in a person’s house or an inn (Carrier, 1995: 64). This seems to resemble an aspect
of the regulation of financial markets in the present, the effort to assure that what
goes on in them is public: financial regulators worry about ‘dark pools’, markets
where transactions are not as visible as they are on regulated exchanges.
However, the reason that those regulators worry is different from the reason
why private deals were banned. They were banned so that people could assure that
transactors behaved according to their obligations toward each other, in the way
that Thompson described for the old paternalistic order. Put differently, those old
market regulations reflected the desire to assure that individuals were treated prop-
erly in their transactions; as Jean-Christophe Agnew (1986: 31) put it, ‘the market
made of its publicity the basis for its claim of utility, security, and equity’. The
concern of financial regulators, on the other hand, is impersonal. They are worried
because they think that dark pools reduce the efficiency of markets as vehicles for
determining prices. The difference between this concern with the functioning of a
system and the old concern with equitable dealing between people is illustrated
nicely by a man who works in investment banking, speaking about the efficiency of
the economic system: ‘Inefficiency requires reallocation of assets. That includes
people, and that can be painful, especially if you are one of the people. But society
as a whole is still, without question, better off’ (in Ho, 2012: 420).

Moral economy
Thus far I have been concerned with moral economic activity. As well, I have
pointed to some of the ways that it differs from the sort of economic activity
Carrier 13

that concerns the formalist view of economy, neoclassical economics, approxi-

mately what Thompson called political economy.
As I have described it, moral economic activity occurs in and helps to reproduce
relationships in which the transactors have become obligated to each other because
of their past transactions. This means that such activity is motivated to a significant
degree by the relationship in which it occurs. On the other hand, in its pure form
neoclassical economic activity occurs between transactors who are indifferent to
each other and concerned only with the objects transacted; as Smith (1976 [1776]:
18) characterised their orientation, ‘Give me that which I want, and you shall have
this which you want’. The only obligation such economic activity entails is to
complete the transaction once it is begun: buyers need to pay for what they take;
sellers need to let buyers take what they pay for. This sort of economic activity,
then, is motivated by the individual resources and desires of the transactors.
A moral economy is an economy or a part of one in which moral economic
activity predominates, which is what Thompson said was the case for much of rural
England in much of the eighteenth century and which Scott said was the case for
substantial agricultural areas in Southeast Asia early in the twentieth century.
A neoclassical economy is one in which neoclassical economic activity predomin-
ates, which Thompson said was the case for the expanding national market for
grain and other foodstuffs and Scott said had already been the case for some areas
and was increasingly the case in places that were becoming linked to international
commodity and financial markets.
Thompson and Scott focus on the economic activities related to subsistence,
and particularly food. This is reasonable, but their restricted focus can give the
impression that the economy is all of a piece. However, not all of the activities that
are part of the production and circulation of things need to be equally moral or
neoclassical. In this regard, I mentioned Zetka’s analysis of automobile production
in the US, some of which involved the sort of interaction and obligation that
amounts to fairly moral economic activity. Changes in the organisation of many
sectors of the economy in Western Europe and North America since the 1800s have
reduced the necessity of such interactions (Carrier, 1995: chapters 2–4), but I think
it likely that they exist among at least some co-workers in many parts of the
economy. I do not mean by this that we are wrong to see developed market
economies as neoclassical. I do mean, however, that those economies may be less
relentlessly so than we tell ourselves, and I want to indicate some of the factors that
can make moral economic activity more or less likely.
It is not only the case that we can expect signs of such activity in many part of
the economy that appear neoclassical, as Granovetter’s and Dore’s work indicate.
It is also the case that some parts of the economy seem to be predominantly moral.
This is most obvious in the case of the household, a key part of the economy
generally, especially in the reproduction of the labour force. Household members
are likely to have significant histories of transaction with each other and to have
developed a web of obligations to each other. Less obvious is the work of those in
the service sector of the economy. If such people deal repeatedly with the same
14 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

customers, their dealings may take on a moral tone. This is the sort of thing that
Francisco pointed to. He is a retired bank employee in Ferrol in northern Spain,
and Susana Narotzky (2015: 58) reports him as saying: ‘You knew the people
coming to you and you had been dealing with them for years. You knew their
families. But also, you didn’t want to put them in a bad situation because you
wanted them to keep trusting you.’ However, employers can make service work
strongly routinised, so that those who engage in it have little of the discretion in
what they do that, I said, is necessary for the emergence of moral economic activity.
My point about workers dealing repeatedly with the same customers points to
another contextual factor that would make moral economic activity more likely.
That is the stability of the transactors, for the more stable they are the more they
are likely to develop the history of transaction that leads to mutual obligation.
Recall, for instance, that small shop where I buy some of my groceries. I have been
living in the same place for over fifteen years; the owner and one of the clerks have
been there the entire time and another clerk has been there about eight years. If
the shop had a greater staff turnover or if I had changed jobs and cities more
frequently, that history of transaction would not have developed. Also, because
the shop staff have been there so long, they are relatively likely to develop a history
of transaction as co-workers that generates a degree of mutual obligation. Equally,
of course, as Narotzky’s retired bank employee observed, firms can move staff
fairly frequently, so that they will not deal with the same customers for an extended
period (Narotzky, 2015: 59).
The preceding paragraphs repeat a point made previously, that whether or not
economic activity or an economic realm is moral is a matter of degree rather than
kind; in fact, as Daniel Miller (2002) argues, it may be that if an economy is to operate
adequately, it needs both moral and neoclassical activities. Those paragraphs also
suggest that the broader social and economic context makes moral economic activity
more or less likely. For instance, the more that people are encouraged to think in
terms of a career and moving up the ladder, the less likely they are to develop a
history of transaction with co-workers that would generate mutual obligation.
Equally, in societies, stages of life or economic circumstances where people move
or change jobs frequently, histories of transaction would be fairly short and mutual
obligation would have relatively little chance to emerge.

Conclusion
I began this paper by pointing to some of the corollaries of the increasing reference
to moral economy over the past few years. Those corollaries are unfortunate
because they suggest a lack of attention to two things.
One of those is the ways that people carry out economic activities and the ways
that anthropologists, at least, have approached those activities. This lack of atten-
tion is indicated by what I said is one common use of ‘moral economy’, to refer to
something like economic activities carried out by people who have values and
aspirations and who live and act in a meaningful world. The invocation of
Carrier 15

‘moral’ in this usage implies that this is something different from regular economic
activity, and that studying moral economy is different from what anthropologists
used to do when they studied economic activity. A little reflection reveals, however,
that people everywhere have values and aspirations and live in a meaningful
world; anthropologists who study their economic activity have always known it.
The other lack of attention concerns the meaning of ‘moral’, which often seem to
imply values of which we approve, or think that we ought to approve. Those who
refer to moral economy in this way often do not specify what those values are or
why we ought to approve of them. That means that we can wrap ourselves in the
warmth of being moral without the need to enquire into what we are agreed on,
which impoverishes the study of both the economy and people’s values.
Both of these uses of ‘moral economy’ contribute to what Fassin called the
trivialisation of the concept and what Hann called its muddled state. To help rectify
this, I have put forward an alternative meaning for the phrase in this paper. It
differs from much common usage, I have indicated some of those differences in the
preceding pages and I want to stress them here.
To begin with, it invokes Polanyi’s substantivist view of economy as the pro-
duction and circulation of things, rather than the formalist, market-oriented view
that is more popular in common usage. That view directs our attention to the
activities that are fundamental to life everywhere, those by which people secure
their substance. As well, the way that I have approached ‘moral’ shifts our focus
away from individuals and their values. Instead, it points to the possibility that,
when people engage in economic transactions with others, those transactions can
generate a relationship with those others and an obligation to transact again in the
future. In other words, it encourages us to look at economic transactions in terms
of relationships and their histories. Finally, this definition allows us to see some
economies and some realms of life as more or less moral, depending upon the
degree to which moral economic activity is predominant in them.
What I have suggested here is not especially novel; it could be seen as not much
more than an extended footnote to Stephen Gudeman’s concern with what he (e.g.
2016) calls mutuality in people’s economic activity. Novel or not, however, it is
intended to help reduce the muddled state of the concept, especially by considering
the nature of and relationship between its two terms, economy and morality. Even
if my specific arguments do not persuade readers, they may encourage them to
think once again about what the concept might mean.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank Andreas Streinzer and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann for their helpful comments
on earlier versions of this paper, and the journal referees whose comments helped me to
clarify my argument.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
16 Anthropological Theory 0(0)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

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James G. Carrier is Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. He has long been
interested in aspects of economy and society: Wage, Trade and Exchange in
Melanesia (California, 1989, with A.H. Carrier), Gifts and Commodities:
Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700 (Routledge, 1995), Meanings of the
Market (Berg, 1997, ed.), Ethical Consumption: Social Value and Economic Practice
(Berghahn, 2012, ed. with P. Luetchford) and Anthropologies of Class (Cambridge,
2015, ed. with D. Kalb). He has also worked on projects concerned with anthro-
pology as a whole: The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology (Bloomsbury,
2013, ed. with D.B. Gewertz) and After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought,
Neoliberalism and the Aftermath (Routledge, 2016, ed.).