How to Reconnect Economics and Ethics

The old tradition of 'moral economy' could teach us a lot about economic reform. As Adam Smith knew all too well.

At the core of my book, the Inequality of Wealth, is an argument that the market supremacism unleashed since the 1980’s has produced inequalities that now imperil the politics of coooperation that we all need to live a good life. And that is why it is important to rediscover an older tradition. A tradition that inspired Adam Smith. And a tradition we can trace back to the very first markets. Because: moral economics begins not with an equation but an invocation.

It is not penned in text-books. It is punched onto crumbling sun-baked bricks rescued from the ancient marketplace of Susa in south west Iran.  Stencilled into ancient clay in neat Akkadian cuneiform runs a warning to hot-headed traders of some cold ethical truths;

‘Let he who understandeth not just price, be enlightened by the Sun God’.

Today, these little bricks sit in a vault in the Louvre. But four thousand years ago, the words formed part of a code that Adam Smith understood perfectly.

For a long time, Smith, the father of modern economics has been revered by market supremacists as a founding prophet. In fact, his work is the key to escaping our road to dystopia and re-building an economics that is less unstable, less unequal and definitely less unsustainable.

Because what Smith understood is that, like a soul from the body, economics should never ever be separated from ethics, and in this, he was both a child of his time and heir to an extraordinary tradition.

The ethics of Adam Smith

Adam Smith was the leading light of a British Enlightenment animated by a quite different spirits to the Continent.  The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has explained why.

Because the established Church had long since been dethroned in British intellectual life, British philosophers never felt the need to defend ‘reason, rights, nature, liberty, equality, tolerance, science and progress’ quite so aggressively as their European cousins, and by contrast,

‘it was virtue, rather than reason, that took precedence…not personal virtue but the ‘social virtues’ - compassion, benevolence, sympathy - which the British philosophers believed, naturally, instinctively, habitually bound people to each other’.

Today it is exactly these ‘social virtues’ which being destroyed by the ‘race to the bottom’ free market that we have somehow permitted; in behaviour despised by thinkers from Ancient Greece to Adam Smith. And Adam Smith knew his Greek.

The Greeks wrote more than edicts on bricks, though their instincts for what made for stable society would have met with Babylonian approval.

In Book V of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle first set out the story with the his theory of ‘just reciprocation’ in the exchange of goods. Since goods exchanged will be of different values, he explained, societies must arrive at a certain equalisation of value, an exchange rate of one good for another. And unless this exchange rate was just, it was very hard for a society to continue in  a way that allows every citizen to specialise in that where their vocation lay. As Aristotle put it:

‘In associations based on mutual exchange the bond of union is this sort of justice, namely reciprocity in accordance with a proportion rather than with arithmetic equality. In fact it is by proportional requital that the city holds together’.

While Adam Smith may have been the first to describe the benefit of the division of labour to an economy, it was Plato who first described its benefit for a society: the division of labour allowed specialisation which in turn allowed men to live true to his nature. Plato put it like this:

‘I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations’.

But justice in exchange was the key to sustaining the advantage. Without reciprocal justice of exchange, arts and crafts would be destroyed because craftsmen would lack the means to support themselves and the city, the basic unit of economic life based on a division of labour, could no longer flourish.

So, without just compensation a city would soon become enslaved - because a slave is one who is not rightly rewarded for his work. Thus, 'commutative justice’ - the fairness or otherwise in the exchange of things - was there in the very crib of economic thought. And it fell to Adam Smith, nearly two and half thousand years later to bring the theory into the modern age.

Most market supremacists like to put much weight on Smith’s beautiful description of the ‘invisible hand’ happily, magically reconciling the plethora of interests in the marketplace, famously noting;

'it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest.’

But, Smith was thoroughly Grecian. He understood that bargains struck were not exchanges between self-maximising players but a bargain between beneficent people who each cared about the well-being of their counter-party.

As Smith put it in the Moral Sentiments;

'there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the future, and render the happiness necessary to him so he drives nothing except the pleasure of seeing it’.

Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson have unpacked this rather well. They helpfully point out, the word Adam Smith chose here was ‘pleasure'; not ‘utility' and not ‘self-interest’.

Smith does not counsel 'let me take that which I want from you, and you may take this which you want from me.’ Smith's ideal exchange is a transaction that was both ‘just’ and ‘beneficent,' in the sense of an exchange of gifts that each gives in order to receive.

Smith does not extol a narrow selfish 'self interest' but 'own interest' which he qualifies as

'allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the Liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice'...'every man,’ he writes ‘as long as he does not violate the laws of justice is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest'.

Adam Smith describes the dynamics like this 

'Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want,….And it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.”

In other words, the rails of justice should keep us on the straight and narrow in all exchanges, as the grand edict of Wealth of Nations makes clear:

'Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way.’

This instinct for justice, thought Smith arose from our desire for praise and praiseworthiness, and to avoid blame and blameworthiness.  So, as Smith and Wilson concludes; 

'if the modern economist espouse naked self interest as the foundation for economic decision making, she does so incompatibly with the founder of the discipline...there are moral rules, just rules, that govern our conduct in impersonal markets'.

And as it happens, this basic sense of ethics provides a golden thread in the economics that was passed from the Greeks to the Romans, and from the Romans to the Christians. No wonder it was the framework within which Adam Smith thought and wrote.

The ancient roots of the moral economy

The Greeks bequeathed to the Romans the tradition of recta ratio on which much European thought was built; the notion that a good exchange was both ‘free and fair’.

This was the tradition enshrined in Justinian's magnificent 6th century legal code, the Corpus Juris Civilis which solved the ‘problem of price determination…[with] the broad principle of freedom of bargaining,’ which was factored with Cicero’s ideal of justice, that;

'justice is a habit of mind which gives every man his desert while preserving the common advantage.’

Fraud, naturally, was never permitted but nor were the boundaries always clear. In the early days of the Roman empire, fraud might include any attempt to exploit the innocent abroad in the medieval marketplace as any sale was unjust if consent was lacking and in a fraudulent exchange, none could be said to consent. Nevertheless buyers and sellers were allowed to outwit each other; the guiding principle, was Cicero’s, that

‘whatever was given or done must be done in good faith’.

Around this simple ancient ideal of justice in exchange, grew a catena of economic ethics that weighed against the moral hazards of wealth:

• greed and the temptation to fraud,

• the risks of monopoly and the threat to just price;

• a threat to just price that in turn threatened just wage; and

• usury

In other words, all the sins that have multiplied first in the 19th century and then once again in the years since 1980.  

Greed

The injunctions against greed of course bit the dust some time ago. But once upon a time they were very important and reproach of avarice is truly ancient. Aristotle distinguished between the virtues of oeconomia - literally 'household management' - an essential dimension of life and the ignoble chrematistike driven by unlimited desire, observing;

‘natural wealth and the natural art of money-making are a different thing’

The Church pointed to Christ’s teaching on the priority of spiritual aims over material goods and His advice that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,’ a risk Saint Paul underlined for Timothy:

“Having food and raiment, let us therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil”.

As such, the Church was understandably sceptical about the possibilities for merchants to hold onto to their virtue. There were a few optimists. San Bernardino in his Eternal Gospel (1484) felt that good entrepreneurs and management talent were rare and so had no objection to good skills being rewarded. But most reflected the scepticism of Tertullian, the Cathargian Christian Father, who in the second century AD, pondered;

‘Is trading fit for the service of God? Certainly if greed is absent, which is the cause of acquisition. But if acquisition ceases, there will be no longer the Necessity of trading.” 

Martin Luther, too, though credited by some as an un-leasher of capitalist spirit, was highly suspicious of profit-makers, and condemned the practice of selling goods as dear as possible, once thundering;

"On such a basis trade can be nothing but robbing and stealing the property of others.”

Many Puritans who followed in Luther’s wake, shared the ethics of the old moral economy. As Tawney noted there was;

'no intention among either the the Lutherans or Calvinists or Anglicans of relaxing the rules of good conscience which was supposed to control economic transactions and social relations.”

Like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, the right disposition was to be

“angry and ill at ease in the town of Vanity, [and] disdainful of such companions as Mr Money-love and Mr Save-all”. 

Even while while Puritans celebrated commercial success, greed was never good. So we can read in books like Henry Crosse’s ‘Virtues Commonwealth’ of 1603, a dissertation on the dangers of wealth in which he wrote:

“Honour and worship resteth not in keeping many servants or in riding with grest troop’.

Or in Ames’ De Conscientia, an influential self-help guide for the Puritan pious, believers were reminded

‘To wish to buy cheap and sell dear is common (as Augustine observes), but it is a common vice’.

Where there were no maximum prices, Puritans were instructed to follow market price and ‘the judgement of prudent and good men’. Richard Baxter in his Christian Directory noted;

‘It is not lawful to take up or keep up any oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends to enrich you by the loss of the Commonwealth or of many.’

Nor must he desire ‘to get another’s goods or labour for less than it is worth’. Even the pragmatists like Francis Bacon were moved to argue "Treasure doth then advance greatness when the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few”.

The British Enlightenment did not depart from any of these views. The unsentimental David Hume believed that ‘moral taste’ was common to all men, and criticised the ‘selfish system of morals’ championed by Hobbes and Locke. Smith himself, towards the end of his life, rounded out the final edition of Moral Sentiments with a chapter entitled ‘Of the Corruption of Our Moral Sentiments Which Is Occaisioned by This Disposition to Admire the Rich and Great, and to Despise or Neglect Persons of Poor and Mean Condition.’

Monopoly

The greedy often sought monopolies, and injunctions against monopoly were almost as old as the homilies on avarice; monopoly was always absolutely condemned as an offence against liberty which rested on collusion or conspiracy.

This produced an ‘unjust price,’ a profit from another’s disadvantage, the pretium affectionis which offended all notions of free and fair bargaining. Such profits were deemed monopoly profits, turpe lucrum and subject to restitution or indeed straight-forward price-capping.  Prices could not arise from the whims of a single individual. Yet this was precisely the power of a private monopolist who was the sole producer.

The long legal tradition of safeguards against this evil stretched deep back into history.

The Roman Emperor Gratian spelt out in the 3rd century AD:

'Whoever buys grain and wine in the time of harvest or vintage not out of necessity but for the sake of avarice... that one we say acquires shameful profit.’

In 806 AD the Caroligians published laws to protect the market from those who sought to sell in times of famine, and thereafter the medieval statute books multiplied provisions against engrossers, forestallers, regraters, and rings which aimed to keep prices below or above competing norms.

Later thought (for example, Lessius, 1554-1623) did allow Princes to grant monopolies - but only with price control. Huguccio (d. 1210) argued that laymen may buy cheap and seek dear if they were adding value and using the profits to maintain an honest living as opposed to satisfying an insatiable greed for wealth.

The concept of a moderate income - lucrum moderstum - on the other hand, was permissible, but, clear ideas about the freedom of bargaining remained, and as such, the defence of free bargaining stopped a very long way short of any modern notion of laissez faire.

Monopoly could not be allowed because unjust prices could not be allowed. Like the Romans, the Christians saw ‘just price’ as the 'normal and customary' price that prevailed in a competitive marketplace - in the absence of fraud and coercion.

St Bernadino argued this was determined by the collective estimation, that is market valuation, while Albert de Magnus opined that just price was 'what goods are worth according to the estimation of the market at the time of sale'. But this always required an exchange that was truly voluntary; the freedom of both parties was absolutely key.

And so, Aquinas and others used the concept of commutative justice to evaluate the ethics of just exchange; the willing entry of two parties to a transaction. Only once these conditions were met could true price emerge in the market.

Others thought useful constraints were needed. So in the 15th century, St Antonio argued price could only be a matter of probability and conjecture since it would vary between places and time, but believed that there were were limits to excess. So a seller who exceeded the price fixed by more than 50% was bound to make restitution. Heinrich von Langenstein (1327-1397) - in what was admittedly a minority view - argued producers should not charge more than required to preserve their position in the social hierarchy of the time.

These heaven-sent notions inspired hard law for centuries.

• In times of crisis Romans well understood the need for the state to step in and fix the price of grain, like Diocletian’s edict of maximum prices in 301AD.

• From the Dark Ages, most courts retained similar powers until well into the modern era.

• The English Assize of Bread fixed the size of a loaf of bread according to the price of corn could trace its roots back to the Frankfurt Capitulare of 794AD. 

• Well into modern times, old laws allowed the poor to buy first in the corn markets on supervised scales before the larger dealers could step in.

• Statues dating back to Edward VI prohibiting stalling, regrating and engrossing

• The Elizabethan Book of Orders from 1630, which governed corn prices in times of dearth was very clear that magistrates were to use ‘all good means and persuasions' to ensure 'the poor may be served of corn at convenient and charitable prices.' Hoarders of corn were attacked from pulpit as 'man-haters, opposite to the common good’ while millers were considered 'servants of the community, working not for a profit but for a fair allowance.’

The influence of these ideals was truly long-lasting. Throughout the 18th century one could read protest pamphlets against new imbalances of power that threw in jeopardy the fair bargaining ideals of Greek, Romans and Christian justice.

By 1768, pamphleteers were raging against the supposed liberty of a farmer to do whatever he pleased;

"it cannot then be said to be the liberty of a citizen, or one [who] lives under the protection of any community; it is rather than liberty of the savage; therefore he who avails in self thereof, deserves not the protection, the power of society affords’. 

In Georgian Bristol for instance, 'True Blue and No Sycophant' urged Bristol trademans to avoid becoming 'the slaves of great men...who...brow beat and despise...poor tradesmen'. Tribunus railed against Burke's 'intended Aristocratic government' formed by a 'a combination of great men'. 

Even free traders like Charles Smith argued that in large towns and cities it will always be necessary to set the assize, in order to satisfy the people that the price which the bakers demand is no more than what is thought reasonable by the magistrates”.

Just wages

Crucially, because economic exchange was a moral act and therefore subject to the demands of justice and charity, the ideals of just price for products entailed just wages for those who produced them. 

For much of European history this was a second order issue for the simple reason that nine-tenths of the population worked by agriculture; outside the great industrial centres of Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class was small.

But, the worker must be paid, and paid fairly.

Roman lawyers viewed the law of wages as a division of the law of rents; a payment in exchange for an agreed service.  Parties were supposed to negotiate in good faith, reaching a middle ground 'between the extremes of hope on both sides'. Just wage was therefore 'the natural result of bargaining, supported where necessary by the common opinion of fair-minded people’ (my italics). 

For Christians, the guiding idea was the Biblical injunction of Matthew - that 'a labourer is worthy of his hire’ - and Luke; ‘for the labourer is worthy of his meat.’ So, Abelard argued "justice is that through which the harmony of the community is held together, and which does not deny to each his merits’ while St Thomas Aquinas spelt out that fair compensation for labour was 'one of the positive acts of justice'.

Economic goods were exchanged in proportion to two sets of standards; human need and productive factors of labour and expenses.  As such, ‘just wage’ had to be more than merely the prevailing price of labour because injustice would arise if wage prices fell so low that some might starve while others wallow in opulence.

Thus, John Duns Scotus (d 1308) considered that whatever bargain between extremes was just; but one of those extremes was set by the need for subsistence - a moral benchmark - and given that industry, skill and risk produced value that benefited society, it deserved it’s premium.

On the one hand, it was quite wrong to seek a life of luxury free of work.

As one 14th century Schoolman wrote;

"Who has enough to satisfy his wants and nevertheless ceaselessly labours to acquire Riches in order to obtain a higher social position but subsequently he might have enough to live without labour all such are invited by a damnable avarice, sensuality or pride’.

But on the other, it was quite unjust for any party to take advantage of the needs of others because theologians saw the exploitation of one’s strong bargaining position as a sin against justice. That could apply as much to a craftsmen exploiting a rare skill as it did to a powerful merchant.

So on the one hand there were injunctions against slavery. But on the other, a right for rulers to step in fix ceilings on wages as they did in the wake of the Black Death, to address what Pedro of Aragon condemned as 'excessive and immoderate wages' demanded 'against equality and right reason' and which threatened the common good of the kingdom.

Again, these ideals were influential for centuries.

England’s Tudor state developed a Council-led machinery for ‘Wages, the movement of labour, the entry into a trade, dealing in grain and wool, methods of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign-exchange business, rate of interest’.

Even through the industrial revolution and especially amongst communities like the Quakers, who were to furnish many of the Industrial Revolution’s most important entrepreneurs, the requirements to pay fair and square was both preached and practiced.

‘It is a thing monstrous and strange’, bellowed one Puritan preacher, ‘that any should be so void of religion and humanity as to defraud the poor of their wages’.

Indeed, employers who drew profits from low wages, engaged in activity tantamount to usury; ‘which is miserable gain, as if a man should rob the spittle house’.

Usury

The final piece of the ethical economics puzzle is of course the strict controls on financial services, otherwise known as the prohibitions on usury. They existed even in Florence, the financial capital of mediaeval Europe and in Coventry, the crime was on a par with adultery and fornication. It was Luther himself who sought to ‘to put a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fuggers’.

Pressure to remove the authority of Church courts from this bit of the economy had begun under Elizabeth. In the debates on abolishing the prohibitions on usury in 1545 for instance, the authority of canon law was challenged as never before as Calvinist ethics revised old Christian nostrums.

Calvin set profits from trade and finance on the same level as earnings of labour or landlord, writing;

“What reason is there why the income from business should not be larger than that from landowning? Whence do the merchants profits come from except from his own diligence in industry?”

Yet even Calvin retained the key test: that profit could not exceed the amount dictated by natural Justice and the golden rule. Capital and credit were finally admitted to the moral economy as indispensable - as long as interest was reasonable and free loans were made to the poor.

The moral economy vs the market economy

After a long and painful illness, Adam Smith breathed his last at home in Panmore House in the heart of Edinburgh's Canongate on 17 July, 1790. The battle between the two traditions of the moral economy and the market economy has helped shape the sturm and drang of politics ever since, as E.P. Thompson memorably put it;

‘the breakthrough of the new political economy of the free market was also the breakdown of the old moral economy of provision’.

By the 18th century the old ethics of the moral economy were colliding with the new ‘science’ of the market economy and the political force of the Pitt the Younger together with his ‘Friends’; the succession of prime ministers - Pitt himself, whose divinities were said to be the ‘the ledger and the cashbox’ - the Duke of Portland, Spencer Perceval, Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington - who dominated the British political scene from 1783 until the re-emergence of the Whigs under Viscount Melbourne in 1834.

In the face of the French revolutionary war, Mr Pitt and his Friends inaugurated not just a new security state and the suspension of Habeus Corpus to 'safeguard' the kingdom (May 1794), but a determined programme to sweep away ‘the old Tudor paternalism’ in the name of utilitarian ‘progress.’

Over forty years, the Combination Acts of 1799-1800 prohibited workers from combining to protest, new laws swept away old economic defences, old notions of ‘just wage’ were surgically removed from the statute books, while between 1750 and 1820, enclosure dispossessed largely poorer agriculture workers of some 30 percent of the England’s agricultural land.

Driven from the countryside to the burgeoning towns and cities, new workers could no longer rely on old protections. Rather, they found themselves in the words of one report, amongst a ‘pestilential heaping of human beings,’ in the nightmares of Dicken’s Coketown and Engel’s Manchester, the first capital of the factory system where old rights were lost.

The silk workers of Spitalfields lost their minimum wage protections in 1773. The protections for workers in the woollen trade went in 1809, followed by the end of the wage protections of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers in 1813, along with magistrates’ powers to enforce minimum wages a year later. Not long later, the Corn Laws, passed in 1815, ended the fair bargaining for bread and fixed the price of corn to profit the landowners.

Finally, the ‘Speenhamland system’, created by the justices of Berkshire to enshrine a ‘right to live’ and which subsidised low wages to ensure a minimum income was wound down and then abolished.

The value of the Speenhamland scale, which linked wage subsidies to bread prices had sunk by around a third between 1815 and 1830 and was finally swept away by the Poor Law Act of 1834. 

‘Never perhaps in all modern history’ wrote Polanyi, ‘has a more ruthless act of social reform been perpetrated; it crushed multitudes of lives while merely pretending to provide a criterion of genuine destitution in the workhouse test’.

The ‘right to live’ was abolished. Aid-in-wages were discontinued and a workhouse test reintroduced while the following year, John Maxwell's 1835 bill for a minimum wage for weavers - designed ‘to withdraw from the worst-paying masters the power which they now possess of regulating wages’ - was approved by successive select committees in Parliament only to fall defeated on the floor of the Commons.

Yet the ideals of the moral economy never died.

Artists, politicians, Christians, Chartists, Cooperators, even industrialists like Robert Owen, kept the flame alive. Critics like George Bernard Shaw railed against, ‘Bentham’s destructive criticism of all the venerable relics of the past’ and lamented how the Industrial Revolution brought ‘its dissolution of medievalism…[leaving] all the new elements of society in a state of unrestrained licence.’

‘Few of the laws and customs - little, indeed, of the social organisation of that time could stand this test’, and so ‘devil-take-the-hindmost became the accepted social creed of what was still perceived to be a Christian nation’.

Few were as influential as John Ruskin. In a survey of the intellectual influences on the first Labour members of Parliament, one book and one author stood out: John Ruskin's Unto This Last.  

Ruskin was the son of an evangelical protestant mother and a high Tory father, and blazed a trail as an art critic who transformed the discipline. But, writing twenty years after Carlisle, he crafted some of the beautiful expressions of the moralism of ethical socialism with a passion and poetry that influenced millions.

At the absolute core of Ruskin's violent reaction to the entreaties of utilititarians and 'political economists' was a paean to the virtues of moral economy, which he dated back to 'the first commercial words' written in 1090, words he claimed to have be the first to rediscover, in the church of San Giacomo Di Rialto in Venice, the first great commercial emporium of Europe;

‘Around this temple, let the the Merchant's Law be just, his weights true and his contracts guileless'.

Ruskin saw man as a fundamentally moral creature and the path to happiness and fulfilment of one's moral nature as through work. He saw the economist's notion of man as 'homo economius', an organism constantly hunting the way to maximise it's own benefit, as nonsense.

Unto This Last, which takes its title from the the parable of the vineyard in Matthew (xx.1-14), has a simple notion of justice centre stage; that

'the economic relationship between employer and employee is not one of profit and advantage, but of justice'

rooted in both a recognition that all men have equal needs and reciprocal responsibilities.  Any exchange, argued Ruskin might risk the profit of one at the expense of another, but this risked sin, for;

'no human actions ever were intended by the maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice.’ 

This, argued Ruskin was to rip man from the society in which he truly flourished. And this social existence inculcated in all a sense of justice which everyone brought to transactions and exchanges, for ‘everyman may know, and most of us do know, what is a just and Unjust act’.  An unjust wage, he counselled, was therefore a form of theft.

Shattered as it was by the utilitarian’s 19th century whirlwind, it was idealists like Ruskin who helped ensure that the tradition of the moral economy never lost its life-sap. And in time, progress was made.

After the extraordinary surge of inequality unleashed by early industrialisation, by 1867 inequality began to fall, as an extraordinary concert of Chartists, Christians and co-operators battle to re-set capitalism within within borders set socially; parameters that were rooted in ethical traditions of fair conduct that could trace its roots back to Babylon.

This was the tradition, not of market supremacy but the supremacy of society. As the historian Karl Polyani put it;

‘Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.’

It was almost an ethical memory that working people sought to defend in the face of an entirely new balance of power, created by industrialisation,  'consolidated old corruption [created] by uniting landowners and manufacturers in a common panic.’

But as Polyanyi perceptively noticed a ‘double movement’ could now be observed; the expansion of the market on the one, only to provoke a counter-movement in response as working people sought to defend old ethics.

This was the tradition renewed for new times by Roosevelt's new dealers and European revisionists and in the fifty years between the death of Engels in 1895 and Clement Attlee's Labour landslide in 1945, the Radical tradition was reshaped, enlarged and battered into a programme for government, by progressives of many stripes. In his review of socialist history, Tony Crossland pin-pointed five predominant strands of which four out of five - appropriation of property incomes, cooperation, workers control, and full employment - touch on the basic balance of power required to sustain the moral economy of fair bargaining.

For the last 50 years, the radical tradition of the moral economy tradition has hard to see through the smoke of the stake as it was burned across the West.

But the market supremacism that has taken its place has delivered us inequality which is rising so fast that it threatens the politics of cooperation today. Which is why it is time once more for the radical tradition, the moral economics that Adam Smith understood, extolled and preached, to enjoy a renaissance.