'Moral economy' and E P Thompson

よく分かっている人たちから、こんな反応をいただき、素直に喜んでいます。
'Moral economy' retried in digital archives.
自負と不安との相半ばするぺーパーだったものですから。
みなさんが EPT と呼んでいるのは、もちろん Edward P. Thompson (1924－1993)のことです。

〈MJB〉
It was very good to hear from you, and many thanks for sending me your essay on Thompson. Its doubly-interesting to me: I am trying to get funding for a research project on the politics of bread from 1300-1815, part of which is about linguistic shifts, and your material is really helpful; and I am also beginning work on a biography of Christopher Hill, so your thoughts about this intellectual milieu are also very stimulating. I didn’t think it was disrespectful or damaging to EPT at all - I am sure he would have been interested in this material, and keen to use it to think about his case.


〈PJC〉
Thank you for your splendid bibliometric investigation into the concept of Moral Economy, which has just reached me. It's a very useful as well as insightful study. I am sure that the late EPT would himself have welcomed it. His conclusions might have differed from yours. (As we all know, he quite enjoyed differing from everybody at some stage or other in his intellectual career).

But I am sure that EPT would be delighted that you have found some key eighteenth-century examples ('I told you so', he would have triumphed) and he would appreciate the care with which you have dissected shades of meaning in the term's application. Well done.

I am currently writing something on styles of digi-research and I intend to quote this essay as a good example of a productive outcome.


〈JSM〉
So good to hear from you and to receive the offprint of your essay on EPT and moral economy. As you know I have made fruitful use of word search on EEBO and BBIH to help me understand the emerging historiography of the seventeenth century and I was very excited by Phil Withington's work on the term 'early modern' and keywords within the early modern.

So I needed no persuading that you had a sound idea and I think you used the technique with real flair to get a real deepening of the great breakthrough that 'Making' represented. I like the way you demonstrate the tensions within the 18th/early C19th usage and suspect EPT would have relieved by what you have found! It helps me because I use Scott's sense of moral economy in my own work on the Irish depositions of 1641, seeking to distinguish the moral economy of the eye-witness testimony with the moral economy of the hearsay. I will be better informed in how I use the terms going forward.