The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism

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A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral slightly than material lens

What’s flawed with capitalism? Answers to that question today focal point on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was once not all the time so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was once less important than moral or spiritual desolation.

Tim Rogan specializes in three of the twentieth century’s most influential critics of capitalism―R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, and E. P. Thompson. Making arguments about the relationships between economics and ethics in modernity, their works commanded wide readerships, shaped research agendas, and influenced public opinion. Rejecting the social philosophy of laissez-faire but fearing authoritarianism, these writers sought out forms of social solidarity closer than individualism admitted but freer than collectivism allowed. They came upon such solidarities at the same time as teaching economics, history, and literature to workers in the north of England and elsewhere. They wrote histories of capitalism to make these solidarities articulate. They used makeshift languages of “tradition” and “custom” to describe them until Thompson patented the idea of the “moral economy.” Their program started as a way of theorizing everything economics left out, but in challenging utilitarian orthodoxy in economics from the out of doors, they anticipated the work of later innovators inside economics.

Examining the moral cornerstones of a twentieth-century critique of capitalism, The Moral Economists explains why this critique fell into disuse, and how it might be reformulated for the twenty-first century.

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