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I. Introduction: Beyond Universal Models
During the 1970s, two influential studies of Southeast Asian peasant communities
generated a debate that anticipated current controversies over culture, institutions, and
rationality. Scott’s “moral economy” perspective suggested that peasants behaved according to a
set of shared norms that placed a high value on minimizing individual risk and guaranteeing
collective subsistence, while Popkin’s “political economy” interpreted this same behavior as
following from a rational set of individual preferences within which investments in future
survival ranked high given the vagaries of agrarian life.
1
The opposition between the two
interpretations was essentially an epistemological one, not an empirical one. Generalizing from
similar peasant practices such as mutual aid and risk-sharing schemes, Scott and Popkin created
equally universal models of peasant behavior that were rooted in opposed a priori assumptions
about the relative significance of agency/structure and material/ideal factors as determinants of
social life (with Scott according primacy to collectively shared ideational structures, and Popkin
according primacy to agents’ calculated responses to material conditions). Such assumptions
reflect epistemological commitments that cannot be reconciled with one another and that prevent
a systematic evaluation of the substantive claims. Relaxing these prior commitments in favor of a
more pragmatic view on epistemological issues -- one that assumes a dialectical relationship
between agents and structures and views material and ideal factors as mutually constitutive --
allows us to pursue theoretically eclectic interpretations that are more responsive to concrete
problems and hence more attentive to the multiple pathways through which different material
and ideal structures influence, constrain or empower different categories of individuals.
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Such a
perspective enables us to move beyond recurrent debates over whether human behavior is guided
by a collective morality or individual rationality and to focus instead on how different
conceptions of “morality” and “rationality” are matched with one another to produce different
institutional structures in comparable social contexts.
1
James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976); and Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in
Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
2
Rudra Sil, “The Foundations of Eclecticism: The Epistemological Status of Agency, Culture, and Structure in
Social Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 12, 3 (July 2000): 353-387; and Sil, “Problems Chasing Methods
Or Methods Chasing Problems? Research Communities, Constrained Pluralism, and the Role of Eclecticism,” in
Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith, and Tarek Masoud, eds. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004).
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