The work of Edward Palmer Thompson had a decisive impact in reviving and redirecting social history through much of the world in the late 1960s and 1970s. His account of how the working class emerged during the industrial transformation in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, emphasizing workers’ agency, their use of their existing cultural resources in their political responses, and the importance of “experience” provided scholars with a powerful new approach. Among the most influential of Thompson's contributions was his coining of the term “moral economy.” For Thompson, popular culture contained a strong sense of what constituted social reciprocity, the violation of which could spark revolt. In his original example, for instance, grain prices were expected to be arrived at through open markets, and breaches of this notion of fair trading provoked riots. Tim Rogan's The Moral Economists convincingly, and sometimes brilliantly, constructs a lineage for this concept. He places Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) in an intellectual succession stretching back to R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) and running through Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944). All three writers sought to show how capitalist development breached preexisting notions of just dealing and how people came together in the face of dramatic change to assert their own sense of morality. Tawney examined the disintegration of the previous social order in the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and Polanyi focused on how the marketization of society in the 1830s and 1840s ripped England apart. But these scholars saw their specific historical inquiries as speaking to much larger questions about the relationship between capitalism and forms of social solidarity. Rogan makes a powerful case that their work has a special relevance to our current economic order. He observes that contemporary critiques of capitalism focus almost exclusively on the question of inequality. The Moral Economists, however, identified not inequality in itself, but the degradation of human relationships, as the major failure of capitalism. Rogan also sees in their work a common concern with how to reconcile liberty and collectivism, which accepted neither liberal nor conventional Marxist solutions to this problem.

Rogan is at his best in tracing the historical circumstances and intellectual influences that molded his protagonists. Each writer was shaped by experiences of contact with working-class people that gave them a sense of the possibilities of solidarity: Tawney and Thompson as adult-education tutors in industrial northern England, and Polanyi in the social-democratic experiment of the urban reconstruction in interwar “Red Vienna.” Particularly impressive is Rogan's exploration of the relationship between religion and politics in the intellectual lives of Tawney and Polanyi. Tawney was active in the Christian Social Union and influenced by the socialist theology of Charles Gore. Gore placed the doctrine of the incarnation at the center of his thought, allowing Tawney to see the humanity of Christ as the basis for a claim that each human being was of “infinite value” (16–50). Polanyi's years in England were marked by connections with politically engaged religion, especially in the form of the adult auxiliary of the Student Christian Movement. The book is also fascinating on the role of Guild Socialism in the lives of these two thinkers. Rogan is perhaps a little less convincing in dealing with E. P. Thompson's formation. He sets up the young Thompson as a rather austere orthodox Communist, as compared to his brother Frank, whom Rogan portrays as a romantic leftist. Yet the internal evidence of Thompson's biography of William Morris, written while still a party member, betrays a deep conflict: Thompson shows a strong sympathy with Morris's romanticism but struggles to reconcile this with the mechanistic Marxism of the Stalinist era. Rogan's tendency to stress Thompson's earlier conformism makes the radical break of the young historian with the party in 1956–57 difficult to account for. Rogan gives insufficient attention to the debates of the New Reasoner circle, through which Thompson formulated his dissent from the party. Overall, though, The Moral Economists enriches the reader's understanding of all three thinkers; Rogan successfully shows that they represent a linked tradition and convinces us of its significance.

In his concluding chapter, Rogan links that moral economic tradition, via a discussion of the social choice theory of Kenneth Arrow, to the work of Amartya Sen. The connection to the great Bengali economist is well made—certainly, like the three central figures, Sen has built a powerful alternative to instrumental economic thinking. Indeed, given Sen's long and distinguished Oxbridge career and deep English intellectual influences (some, like Maurice Dobb, overlapping with those of Rogan's main figures), perhaps Sen deserved a full chapter of his own.

As that criticism suggests, the book has various architectural problems. Rogan's three chapters on the main figures are well constructed, but between the chapters on Tawney and Polanyi and that on Thompson, he introduces a chapter on the political thought of the post-1945 period. This disrupts what would otherwise have been an elegant structure. Some of the inserted material is superfluous, and some could have been folded into the chapter on Thompson. Moreover, Rogan has a tendency to repeat himself throughout. A shorter, more tightly edited book might have made Rogan's points more effectively.

A more important problem is Rogan's manner of reacting to positions that are skeptical toward the Moral Economists. In Rogan's view, the reputation of the Moral Economists has fared poorly because their humanism goes against the grain of current academic thought: Tawney's theologically grounded humanism, rooted in High Church incarnationalism, has little contemporary appeal, while Thompson's early Marx-derived socialist humanism relies on an essentialist view of the value of humanity. Polanyi, Rogan suggests, did not receive the attention he deserved at the time he published Transformation because of what the British academic establishment perceived as its weaknesses as a piece of historical research. But, for Rogan, Polanyi provides a more robust and relevant intellectual foundation for the tradition than the other two. Polanyi, as read by Rogan, emphasizes the distinction between the human and animal as the keystone of his thought. Rogan sees this as a nonessential, nontranscendent distinction that is defensible in a way in which the “higher” conceptions of humanity derived from Christianity or Marxism are not. This position, however, has its own essentialist problem. The “bright line” that Rogan advocates between the animal and human worlds is not clearly self-evident. Not only does much contemporary science and philosophy question where human-animal boundaries lie, but so does moral discourse, which is increasingly raising the question of whether animals ought not to be regarded as rights-bearing creatures. And it is disputable whether the young Marx did have an essentialist view of humanity; he saw people as differentiated from animals through their active labor, rather than through any other characteristic. Thompson's later thought, though no longer steeped in classical Marxism, continued this emphasis on human self-definition in the natural world. To the humanly constructed nuclear apparatus of self-destruction (“exterminism”), he counterposed a project of struggle for human survival located in the preservation of the planet. The solidarity of the peace movement he led in the early 1980s was based not in an abstract humanism but in a very material relationship of human beings to the natural world. Arguably, then, it is Thompson's sense of solidarity, founded in seeing humans in relation to nature, rather than a position perceiving them as differentiated from it, that might make the moral economist tradition relevant for our apparent immediate future, in which capitalism is imbricated in military and ecological catastrophe.

In sum, this is an important book. It might have been better assembled, and it draws some debatable conclusions. But in providing a rich historiographical account of the Moral Economists, while at the same time arguing for their continued relevance, Rogan makes an important contribution not only to historiography, but also to contemporary ethical and political debate.