Moralities

The term moralities refers to the notion that economic processes and particularly actions in the marketplace have social and cultural foundations that yield ethical and moral questions, without which economic conduct and consumption cannot be properly understood. The following observations depict this problem from a sociological perspective.

Major Dimensions and the History of Morality in Economic Thought

For large stretches of the twentieth century, the notion that (social) morality, (cultural) values, or (individual) emotions play a significant role in the way we conduct business was a marginalized sentimentality. Neoclassical economic theory and its derivatives, which dominated economic as well as politico-economic discourse, imposed a strictly rationalist conception of economic action. Still, the roots of this prevalent doctrine of the market are of relatively recent origin. Two rough strands of this development, which may themselves be called a conventional and thus ultimately value-based conception of the economy, can be identified: (1) the scientification and labor-specific differentiation of modern society and its academic investigation, in the wake of Max Weber and other pioneers of economic and social thought in the first part of the last century. Weber drives forward a radical notion of a materialist rationality that [Page 999]emphasizes the instrumentalist nature of a certain modern-day, self-interest-promoting kind of cognition. Weber's immense contributions to a then young social science have had far-reaching ramifications for both sociology and economics and can still be traced today, down to the core concept of methodological individualism, which remains a prominent foundation for many strands of social and economic theory. (2) In conjunction with this development in the history of ideas, we can observe a shift of focus within economics from the moral-philosophical, macro-perspective treatise of founders such as Adam Smith (who focuses in his Theory of Moral Sentiments on social contexts in which the morality of actors plays a dominant role among personal exchanges) toward narrower, mathematical approaches that are oriented toward the explication of economic “laws” such as the notion of an equilibrium (Pareto-optimum). Economists' interests in the markets might thus be said to have been narrowed down to a mere “theory of exchange” (Harrison C. White: Economics and Sociology, 1990), which rests on a few presuppositional but typified assumptions and then moves on to ever finer models. There is no debate that general equilibrium theory, the calculable actions of the homo oeconomicus, or economic man, and other axiomatic figures of economic theory represent a “model approach” to economic and thus social reality. Indeed, rational choice models have been successfully applied even outside economic questions, for example, in political science.

Although there have been several attempts to introduce considerations of consumption (Thorstein Veblen, John K. Galbraith, etc.) and to break with political economy's preference for matters of production (most famously John M. Keynes's general theory), the mainstream of economics went down the road of an ever-narrower consideration of a specialized economics resting on its own premises, regardless of the social foundations and cultural embeddedness of economic action. Even sociological accounts were preoccupied with matters of production (Marxism paradigmatically so) and the analysis of the material structure of industrialism—both in capitalist and socialist economies. Against such notions were increasing attempts to break with these myopic tendencies, within the theory of economy as well as in sociology (e.g., new economic sociology, new institutional economics). Another strand challenging the existing theoretical orthodoxy for a more comprehensive account of modern day economy comprises cultural approaches to consumption as an important contemporary means of social participation, an approach that has been particularly successful in English-language cultural studies (not least due to its engrained departure from political economy).

...