A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lensWhat’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalis...

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Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Rogan, Tim (Author)
Format:	Electronic eBook
Language:	English
Published:	Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press [2017]
Subjects:	Thompson, Edward P. > 1924-1993 Tawney, Richard H. > 1880-1962 Polanyi, Karl > 1886-1964 Kritik Wirtschaftsethik Kapitalismus
Online Access:	DE-1046 DE-859 DE-860 DE-739 DE-1043 DE-858 Volltext
Summary:	A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lensWhat’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus 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 not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation.Tim Rogan focuses on 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 discovered such solidarities while 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 began as a way of theorizing everything economics left out, but in challenging utilitarian orthodoxy in economics from the outside, 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
Item Description:	Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Aug 2018)
Physical Description:	1 online resource
ISBN:	9781400888023
DOI:	10.1515/9781400888023