Abstract
One of the key variables affecting societal change is the strength of embedded values. For rural societies and populations, the dominant analytical model since the mid-1970s has been the peasants’ moral economy. The moral economy approach sees values as “embedded” in peasant societies, and these values are therefore reflected in the nature of village institutions. Commercialization of agriculture disembeds peasant values and behavior, and displaces existing village institutions with market-based institutions.1 During commercialization, personal networks are replaced with impersonal networks, thereby depriving peasants of the “flexibility” inherent to traditional economies.
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Notes
See William James Booth, “On the Idea of the Moral Economy,” American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 3 (September 1994), pp. 653–67.
See e.g., Carol Scott Leonard, “Rational Resistance to Land Privatization: The Response of Rural Producers to Agrarian Reforms in Pre- and Post-Soviet Russia,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, vol. 41, no. 8 (November–December 2000), pp. 605–20.
For an elaboration of this argument, see Stephen K. Wegren, Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).
Jerry Hough sees a strong Russian state in the economy in general. See Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2001), chap. 2.
See Stephen K. Wegren, ed., Russia’s Policy Challenges: Security, Stability, and Development (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003);
and Dale R Herspring, ed., Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
See Marshall I. Goldman, Gorbachev’s Challenge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), chap. 3;
Padma Desai, Perestroika in Perspective: The Design and Dilemmas of Soviet Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 8;
and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 5.
See A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, “The Agrarian Question, Past and Present,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 25, no. 4 (July 1998), pp. 134–49.
Robert H. Bates, “Lessons from History, or the Perfidy of English Exceptionalism and the Significance of Historical France,” World Politics, vol. XL, no. 4 (July 1988), pp. 499–516.
George C. Comninell, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (July 2000), p. 3.
See William C. Thiesenhusen, ed., Searching for Agrarian Reform in Latin America (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989);
Alain de Janvry, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
Common foci have been economic issues such as agricultural development, ensuring food supplies to urban populations, food price policies, food subsidy policies, food trade policies, peasant differentiation, or land distribution to peasant households. See Henry Bernstein, “Agrarian Questions Then and Now,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 24, nos. 1–2 (October 1996 and January 1997), pp. 22–59.
Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977).
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press 1981);
and Robert H. Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
See David A. J. Macey, William Pyle, and Stephen K. Wegren, eds., Building Market Institutions in Post-Communist Agriculture: Land, Credit, and Assistance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).
Serguey Braguinsky and Grigory Yavlinsky, Incentives and Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 6.
Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 12.
See Marshall I. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), chap. 5.
Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2001), chap. 5.
See e.g., Johan P. M. Swinnen, Allan Buckwell, and Erik Mathijs, eds., Agricultural Privatization, Land Reform, and Farm Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997);
and Stephen K. Wegren, ed., Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1998).
This point follows from Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
Timothy J. Colton, “Economics and Voting in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 12, no. 4 (October–December 1996), pp. 289–317.
Ralph S. Clem and Peter R. Craumer, “A Rayon-Level Analysis of the Russian Election and Constitutional Plebiscite of December 1993,” Post-Soviet Geography, vol. 36, no. 8 (October 1995), p. 84;
and Clem and Craumer, “The Geography of the Russian 1995 Parliamentary Election: Continuity, Change, and Correlates,” Post-Soviet Geography, vol. 36, no. 10 (December 1995), pp. 587–616.
Timothy J. Colton, “Determinants of the Party Vote,” in Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough, eds., Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1998), pp. 75–114;
and Yitzhak M. Brudny, “Continuity or Change in Russian Electoral Patterns? The December 1999–March 2000 Election Cycle,” in Archie Brown, ed., Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 154–78.
Marie Lavigne, The Economics of Transition: From Socialist Economy to Market Economy, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), chap. 4;
and Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), chap. 8.
See Shwu-Eng H. Webb and Francis C. Tuan, “China’s Agricultural Reforms: Evaluation and Outlook,” in Joint Economic Committee, China’s Economic Dilemmas in the 1990s: The Problems of Reforms, Modernization, and Interdependence, Joint Committee Print, 102nd Congress, 1st session (Washington, DC: GPO, 1991), pp. 365–84;
and S. Lee Travers, “Getting Rich Through Diligence: Peasant Income after the Reforms,” in Elizabeth J. Perry and Christine Wong, eds., The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 4.
Douglass C. North, “The Contribution of the New Institutional Economics to an Understanding of the Transition Problem,” (Helsinki: UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research, 1997), p. 16.
However, poliry innovation alone is not adequate. In a very insightful book, Neil Melvin argues that policy innovation was occurring in agriculture even during the Soviet period, in particular the post-Soviet period, but that institutional capacity to implement and fulfill policy was decaying over time. See Neil J. Melvin, Soviet Power and the Countryside: Policy Innovation and Institutional Decay (United Kingdom and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
See Gabriel A. Almond, et al., Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Framework, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 2001), chap. 1;
and Charles E. Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), chap. 10.
For more on which parties had agrarian planks in their party programs, see Renata Yanbukh, “Driving Forces in Russian Agrarian Policy in the 1990s,” in L. Alexander Norsworthy, ed., Russian Views of the Transition in the Rural Sector: Structures, Policy Outcomes, and Adaptive Responses (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2000), p. 49.
V. V. Patsiorkovski, “Problemy sela,” in N. M. Rimashevskaia, ed., Rossiia—2000: sotsial’no demograficheskaia situatsiia (Moscow: Institute for Social-Economic Problems of the Population, 2001), p. 249.
For an analysis of regional differences based on survey data, see Stephen K. Wegren, David J. O’Brien, and Valeri V. Patsiorkovski, “Household Responses, Regional Diversity, and Contemporary Agrarian Reform in Russia,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 31, nos. 3–4 (April–July 2004), pp. 552–87.
Richard Rose, “Uses of Social Capital in Russia: Modern, Pre-Modern, and Anti-Modern,” Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 16, no. 1 (January–March 2000), pp. 33–57.
David J. O’Brien, Valeri V. Patsiorkovski, and Larry D. Dershem, Household Capital and the Agrarian Problem in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), chap. 6.
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© 2005 Stephen K. Wegren
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Wegren, S.K. (2005). Peasants’ Moral Economy and Implications for Russia’s Agrarian Capitalism. In: The Moral Economy Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601130_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601130_6
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