The Moral Economists is a highly impressive but also very curious book. It is avowedly political in purpose, but this political endeavor leads to a highly theoretical text. The aim is to search for a theoretical foundation for a solidaristic politics and to do so by reexamining the work of the three historians of modern capitalism listed in the title. These three are seen as constituting a lineage of “moral economists” who grappled with finding an alternative to utilitarianism as an underpinning for understanding society. R. H. Tawney is identified as having been most successful in this endeavor, but, it is argued, his Christianity-based arguments have lost their purchase in our secular world; so what we need today is a nonreligious grounding for our anti-utilitarianism. For author Tim Rogan, this is best looked for in the social choice work of Kenneth Arrow and, building on Arrow's foundations, the work of Amartya Sen.

The book is, above all, an exceptionally rich intellectual history, where the work of the three “moral economists” is located in its historical context, but where what is most distinctive is a story of the interconnections between their work. For Tawney, the key text is seen as Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922), in which he sought to establish the key moments in the decline of moral constraints on self-seeking economic action in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Central to his story is the growth of a sharp divide between religious concerns and matters of everyday life in an increasingly marketized economy. For Karl Polanyi, in his Great Transformation (1944), a key moment in the loss of moral purpose in economic life was in the early nineteenth century, especially the renunciation of the limits on market wages previously embodied in the Speenhamland system of the 1790s. E. P. Thompson's key contribution was The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which he emphasized the moral economies at work in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century popular movements. These three are seen as having different understandings of the chronology and forces at work in the decline of the moral economy, but as united in drawing on their personal experiences of social solidarity to inform their critiques of utilitarian ideas.

Interwoven with the discussion of each of these three authors is a highly sophisticated account of the intellectual milieu of twentieth-century British left-leaning politics. Every reader will gain much from the fresh insights scattered through this book. While having little to say that directly addresses the interests of business historians, anyone interested in broad, theoretical debates about the nature of modern British capitalism will find much to interest (and perhaps puzzle) them here.

The major curiosity of this book is its mode of political argument. Its very first paragraph sets out the view that we (by which is clearly meant “we on the left”) are obsessed with issues of material inequality and that this obsession has crowded out what should be the much more important concern with combating utilitarianism and reviving social solidarity. What this assertion makes clear is the assumption that structures the whole book: that in politics what is needed is the “correct” theoretical position as a necessary precondition for a successful politics. The corollary of this approach is that undermining utilitarianism is the essential building block of the successful constraining of market capitalism by means of the revival of the kind of social solidarities that the three moral economists experienced and drew upon in their work.

This central claim is deeply problematic. Successful political action in democratic societies relies upon the cooperation of people with highly diverse abstract understandings of the world, and, in this example, treating attitudes to utilitarianism as the key to the possibilities of such action is surely extremely unhelpful. First of all, the idea that the world can sensibly be divided into devotees and opponents of utilitarianism gives that distinction a foundational and transhistorical status that it surely does not deserve. Indeed, there is something highly anachronistic about this distinction (essentially a nineteenth-century construction, built on eighteenth-century foundations), which, it is worth noting, is no longer used in philosophy, having given way to the analysis of various kinds of “consequentialism.” But leaving aside the historic specificity of this dichotomy to argue that theoretical differences are the key to political action is to undermine the possibilities of making alliances that may be able to deliver significant change around agreed objectives. Here, the political role of Tawney is illuminating. In the 1920s, in the early days of the Labour Party, of which he was a prominent member, he positioned himself as a vigorous (one might say violent) opponent of economics, because of the discipline's utilitarian heritage. This opposition arguably helped to obstruct a more intelligent engagement between the party and the evolving academic discipline. For Rogan (who generally presents Tawney in a wholly uncritical light), this opposition was correct because economics embodied the “Original Sin” of utilitarianism. But if one does not believe in this kind of “Original Sin” (or its secular equivalents), in which we are all to be judged by our (possible?) theoretical allegiances, we can have a much more open-minded (and likely more productive) politics.

A final curiosity of this book is its focus on “solidarity” as the key to a better future. This term is central to the argument here, but little discussed. It was apparently present in the pre-1914 potteries when Tawney taught there, in Yorkshire in the late 1940s and 1950s when Thompson lived there, and in interwar Vienna before Polanyi emigrated from Austria. It is seemingly accepted that it could exist outside such locations, but the general impression is of a lot of weight being put upon an underspecified, romanticized notion of the nature of “traditional” working-class life that is hard to justify as the key to a better future (p. 199).