Introduction: The Moral Economy, The Careers of a Concept

This essay explores the history of the idea of the moral economy—and the moral economy as an idea. It shows the ways in which debates about the market since the eighteenth century have been shadowed by debates and concerns about the ethical foundations of economic life. The history of capitalism has contained within it an internal tension between a romance with the market and nostalgia for worlds it dissolved. Moral economy has been a concept with many, global origins and different temporalities, depending on when the “transition to capitalism” ignited social movements and social ideas. In India and Mexico, as well as France and England, a plenitude of ideas about moral economics emerged to flow into a single, varied language of opposition and anxiety about market life.