The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia
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The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia by James C. Scott (1976).
During the Vietnam War, Scott took an interest in Vietnam and wrote The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976) about the ways peasants resisted authority. His main argument is that peasants prefer the patron-client relations of the "moral economy", in which wealthier peasants protect weaker ones. When these traditional forms of solidarity break down due to the introduction of market forces, rebellion (or revolution) is likely. Samuel Popkin, in his book The Rational Peasant (1979), tried to refute this argument, showing that peasants are also rational actors who prefer free markets to exploitation by local elites. Scott and Popkin thus represent two radically different positions in the formalist–substantivist debate in political anthropology.
