Three part series about the British Museum’s show about dissent thru history.
HIGHLIGHTS
...For Tawney, a Christian, Guild socialist, and an economic historian at the London School of Economics, the culprit was the Protestant Reformation. In his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), he argued that the Reformation transformed religion (and with it, morality) into a private matter and left capitalism “the regulating doctrine of public life.” Medieval and pre-capitalist religious societies were, for Tawney, a model of the possibilities for human fellowship that reached beyond the marketplace....
...How to make capitalism moral became central to visions for a new world order after empire by intellectuals, policymakers, and postcolonial critics. The expanded understanding of moral economy travelled beyond the academy in a decade when the global economy itself seemed up for grabs. Oil and grain crises injected new urgency into questions about capitalism’s shortcomings, while a postcolonial lobby pressed the United Nations to pass a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order that would restructure the global economy. Anti-globalization movements and NGOs pressured multinational corporations to adopt more ethical forms of capitalism through boycotts and shareholder activism. Other suggested a model for “humanistic capitalism” that would use the global reach of transnational businesses to protect human rights and promote democratic values. Liberal intellectuals attempted to take the moral economy global, shifting their focus from the nation-state to the world as a whole. By the late 1970s the moral economy had moved outside the domain of politics altogether....
...In this sense, it is worth recalling one of Polanyi’s most important conclusions, written out of Rogan’s narrative: moral economies never emerge out of spontaneous human fellowship. Rather, moral economies are shaped by the state. It took immigration laws, regulations, and taxation to determine the relationships between ethics and the economy in the late 1970s, as they do today....
Despite its radical origins, in other words, the moral critique of the economy never transcended the realm of ethics. Every political economy has an ethics, but to truly reshape the ethics of the market we will need to reform it through state institutions. That requires us to leave the realm of the spiritual and go back to material question of redistribution.
Reading a book about Kepler and came across this interesting fellow.
Hey it’s the 500th anniversary of the Reformation! I’ve been obsessed with learning about its history all year. This great episode of Missed in History is about three women who played very different but all prominent roles in the reformation.
