The talk revisits the concept of "moral economy," as laid out in E. P. Thompson's classical article. I will argue that the concept, which is notoriously strung out between the concretion of Thompson's historical topic - the history of corn riots in eighteenth-century England - and the high level of abstraction of the component terms, can be re-interpreted in terms of both its theoretical and historical underpinnings. I will propose to regard moral economies as sites on which social collectives process the meaning and theory of "value," i.e. "axiology" in philosophical terminology. I will develop this perspective for another historical context, the emergence of humanitarian movements for saving lives from shipwreck in the early nineteenth century. From the vantage point of this context, I will seek to offer an account that also makes clear why axiology is, always, historical in a strong sense, as the site of a constant reworking of the triangulation of the moral, the political, and the economic, the nature of which also changes profoundly around 1800.
Practical information
The seminar will be organized as a hybrid event at Håndbiblioteket on the 5th floor in Niels Treschow’s hus, University of Oslo.
Join us on Zoom by following this link