Volume 28,
Number 16 · October 22, 1981
Review
The Silent Majority
By Jonathan
Lieberson
The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and
Subsistence in Southeast
Asia
by James C. Scott
Yale University Press, 246 pp.,
$4.45 (paper)
The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural
Society in Vietnam
by Samuel L. Popkin
The "modernization" of peasant societies
is one of the great themes of contemporary history. No longer as acute an issue
in
But they are spokesmen for a largely silent class.
What do peasants themselves believe and value or deplore, and what reasons lie
behind their reactions to economic and political change? Why have
rural development programs for improved farming, small industry, and health
services failed so often? The answers to these questions are much disputed. All
that is certain is that peasants have throughout history been a potent
political force for both progress and reaction. Their actions have not always
met with the approval of either liberal reformers or the revolutionaries who
have led them into battle, whether in the sixteenth-century German peasant
wars, in the Vendée during the French Revolution, or
during the more recent revolutions in
James Scott and Samuel Popkin are both
Their common enterprise is a doubly risky one: the
peasants of a half-century ago may not be very similar to those in our own era
of "transitional societies" straddling the old and the new. Views
about what "peasants" are like are usually based on evidence from the
distant past and may overlook the teeming variety and constantly evolving
character of peasant societies and puzzling "borderline" cases like
the nomads of Africa, the production brigades of China, and the farmers of
Japan who are equipped with tractors, washing machines, and refrigerators. More
than this, the available information on the particular aspects of precolonial
James Scott's book is a particularly sophisticated
statement of a perspective on peasant institutions that has become something of
an orthodoxy. A political scientist and a Quaker,
Scott has done field research on peasant politics in
"Woven into the tissue of peasant
behavior," he writes, "whether in normal local routines or in the
violence of an uprising, is the structure of a moral
universe." The peasant "as a political actor is more than a statistical
abstract of available calories and outgoing rent and tax charges." Scott
is preoccupied above all with describing what this universe is like to those
who live inside it. Clifford Geertz, perhaps the most
distinguished contemporary specialist in this kind of research, has written
that Scott's work is "extraordinarily original and valuable" and that
he believes its "central thesis is correct and compelling."
Scott's thesis is that peasant
politics is shaped by the predicament most peasants share—the problem of
subsistence, of getting enough just to live—and by the
distinctive moral outlook that arises among them in response to this
predicament. This argument is illustrated in great detail in his study of
Before colonialism, he claims, peasants lived in
"closed villages," semi-autonomous agricultural communities where
social life revolved about the dinh, the
village meeting house where the effigy of the guardian spirit of the village
was kept. This was a kind of New Deal society, in which an ideology of the
survival of the weakest prevailed. A council of elders selected for their age
and wisdom periodically leased out communal lands to the more unfortunate
peasants who needed them—those whose crops had failed, the helpless and the
ill, the aged and the widowed. Tax charges assessed on the village by the local
authorities were distributed by the council so as to put the burden on those
who were better off; the council members also would give elaborate feasts to
spread their wealth among the less fortunate. Peasant landlords would adjust
their claims on their tenants according to the yield of the harvest. In bad
times, they would provide tenants with loans, food, medicine, assistance with
birth and burial ceremonies. In prosperous times they would demand much more,
but this did not strike the peasants as exploitative: they valued stability and
security above risk.
How did this mutual assistance network arise? Scott
believes the answer lies partly in the unstable agricultural and climatic
environment in which the peasants lived. The southern part of Vietnam has a
more benign climate than the north, where there are periodic droughts and
floods; but the position of the Vietnamese peasant in both regions was for the
most part, in the words of one author cited by Scott, "like that of a man
standing permanently up to his neck in water, so that even a ripple might drown
him." Peasants were pre-occupied with subsistence and so it was reasonable
for them to value safety and security above all; they were averse to taking
chances and hostile to any changes which interfered with their ways of assuring
themselves an adequate living. They had little room for the bourgeois calculus
of profit—they wanted to be insulated from risk. A common morality arose among
them—the "subsistence ethic," as Scott calls it—that legitimized this
desire and affirmed the right of every villager to a bare livelihood; and this
served to bring into existence a "moral economy" in which the weakest
were protected from ruin.
French colonialism brought improved communications,
transport, disease control, education, and roman script. But it also introduced
new legal and administrative systems, commercialized agriculture, and cash
crops. The peasant provinces, Scott argues, were forcibly transformed into
"capillaries of a network of financial arteries leading to the banks of
Not surprisingly, this judgment about
public finance seemed wholly capricious from the standpoint of the
"subsistence ethic." For in reality the profits of society were not
trickling down to the peasant. In the countryside, the richer and more powerful
villagers acquired new habits. Instead of honoring flexible and informal
agreements and displaying traditional paternalism, they started using the new
French courts to enforce what the peasants dreaded most: contracts specifying
both rigid terms of tenancy and fixed rents, without regard to the cycles of
good and bad harvests. Overnight, large numbers of small-holders fell into the
class of the dispossessed as a result of the deed juggling and corruption of
landowners and village elders, and huge inequalities in landholdings followed.
With the double calamity of the worldwide
depression and the famines of 1930, during which peasants were forced to eat waterbugs, crickets, ant eggs, and bees, and landowners
would sprinkle cinders into the edible fertilizer to prevent starving day
laborers from surreptitiously eating it,[1]
agrarian relations—the balance of exchange between landlords and tenants—fell
apart. The landlords installed grilles on their windows, collected rents
through agents, and surrounded themselves with toughs paid with alcohol and
opium. The peasants in turn finally exploded in rage, as in the Nghe-Tinh uprisings of 1930, when bands of peasants
carrying only sticks and amulets stormed mandarin residences and were in turn
bombarded by the French planes.
Scott believes that the particular local causes of
such insurrections are complicated, but a main cause is a moral one: the
peasants rebelled because their standards of justice and legitimacy were
violated by the new economic and political order, and they acted to restore a
moral agrarian regime. To do so was not self-deceptive or a
matter of "false consciousness," as some Marxists say. The
peasants lived, as they had for centuries, in a different world of meaning from
that of their conquerors—different but genuine all the same, intelligible,
rational, based not on some incapacity to see clearly, but on different values.
In Scott's view, those concerned with development
in the third world today must take pains to grasp the peasant's "moral
universe"; they must attend to experiences quite different from those that
economists usually look for. They must see that the life of the peasant takes
place within a distinctive moral pattern marking out a territory of conduct
over which its dictates have jurisdiction. For planners to provide
"incentives" for personal gain or higher incomes may be beside the
point. We will not get far, Scott concludes, by "treating the peasant
purely as a kind of marketplace individualist who amorally ransacks his
environment so as to reach his personal goal."
Samuel Popkin,
a political scientist who studied the Vietnamese peasantry at first hand while
doing research on "pacification programs" for the Simulmatics
Corporation and for this book from 1966 to 1970, follows the very approach
repudiated by Scott, while attacking Scott's findings. Peasants in his view are
not very different from small business people in Western countries. Like other
"economic actors," they "maximize expected value." Popkin believes the categories of economics can be helpful
in explaining human action outside the market as well as within it. His view of
peasant society emphasizes the "political economy" and contains many
references to "political capital," "selective incentives,"
"family firms," the "start-up costs" of religions. For Popkin, the more enterprising peasants are
"marketplace individualists," and such people do far more to shape
peasant institutions than do the moral norms of the group.
How, he asks, does a "moral economist"
like Scott know what "ethic" peasants espouse? How could absolute
moral standards overcome the everyday economic struggle for resources and
ensure them a minimum income? He argues, moreover, that the precolonial
Vietnamese villages were not the harmonious communities that Scott describes.
The peasants did indeed have subsistence problems and suffered extreme
uncertainty—but the result was neither the emergence of a policy of
"safety first" nor such mutual assistance schemes as communal
insurance and welfare. Instead the peasants distrusted one another and relied
on "private investments" such as breeding children—a form of old-age
insurance—and animals. He suggests that it is farfetched to suppose that the same
peasants who meticulously calculated the costs and benefits of their decisions
about agriculture would blithely surrender their hard-earned surplus products
to possibly untrustworthy village elders who might take them for themselves
rather than distribute them to the needy. And is it not just as unlikely that
the rich and powerful, the notables themselves, would give away their wealth to
other peasants, who might just be freeloaders?
Of course, Popkin
continues, the problem of the destitute was ever-present, but one common
procedure for dealing with those in trouble was to denominate them "nonvillagers" and throw them out. It is true that the
rich patrons in peasant villages were sometimes "paternalistic"—but
this was part of a "divide and conquer" strategy designed to keep the
poor down, to prevent "collective bargaining." The old men on the
councils of notables may have been wise, but they used their power and the
communal lands to enrich themselves. If the peaceful "collective
solidarity" of the moral economists existed at all in the villages, it was
imposed from above. The unstable village peace of deadlocked conflict and
oligarchic control merely disguised the Hobbesian
struggle beneath the surface. And when colonialism arrived, it was not the
commercializing of agriculture or the expansion of markets or new laws and
bureaucratic regulations that "eroded" or "penetrated" a
united, resistant, antimarket "peasant"
ideology or "little tradition." On the contrary, the cleverer
peasants themselves initiated alliances with the bureaucrats and manipulated
the colonial institutions to their own advantage.
An arresting chapter of Popkin's book tries to explain peasant rebellions such as
the "Red Terror" of 1930 by "peasant investment logic."
This applies, he claims, not just to agriculture and the village but to
"political and religious transformations of society" through
collective action. Peasants did not rebel to restore a golden past: they were
challenging the political and economic control exercised by elites in order to
create new rural institutions which would raise their standard of living. What
was needed was someone to organize them. Popkin shows
that by the end of the Thirties there was no scarcity of what he calls
"political entrepreneurs" who would satisfy this demand by delivering
improved institutions in exchange for peasant support.
He gives a fascinating account of some of the
groups that competed with one another—and apparently still do, notwithstanding
the domination of the Hanoi government[2]
—for control of the peasantry. There was, for example, the Catholic Church,
whose priests he calls "quintessential" political entrepreneurs who
succeeded in converting many among the countryside "not only because of
the appeal of the religion itself, but because of tangible, material
benefits—science, cannon, European education—that the priest could offer as
proof of the religion's validity." There was also the Cao
Dai, a syncretic sect with hundreds of thousands of
adherents, many of whom were administrative employees of the French. The Cao Dai were organized on the model of the Catholic
Church—they had a pope and a Holy See, a hierarchy of over eleven thousand
offices, an armed forces, a welfare branch, together
with a pantheon of saints with a "common radical-political streak,"
including Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, and Charlie Chaplin. The Cao Dai, as Popkin sees them,
sought to revive indigenous pride and political influence in order to have a
larger share in
So did the Hoa Hao, an anticolonial and
millenarian religious movement based upon the teachings of the "mad
bonze," Huynh Phu So, a charismatic monk who
"differed from other prophets because he knew how to 'mass merchandise'
his message" of simplicity, prayer, family obligation, authenticity, and
liberation. Huynh Phu So was assassinated at the age
of twenty-eight by jealous communists who subsequently hacked his corpse into
three pieces and buried them in separate graves to ensure against his return to
life.
Lastly, of course, there was the Communist Party,
which alone was sufficiently expert, according to Popkin,
in the sophisticated techniques of leadership and organization to provide a
blend of "selective incentives" that could unify the diverse
religious, ethnic, ideological, and political groups within the country.
Popkin, however, does not
express an unqualified judgment on the success of the Communist Party. He notes
that up to the mid-1950s and the renewal of the French presence after the
Second World War, the party enjoyed considerable success in mobilizing peasants
to cooperate and get what they wanted, namely raised levels of production and
an improved standard of life. This was especially so, he says, in the North,
where the communists could win political control over the tightly integrated
villages more easily than in the South, which was prosperous and where the
social structure of the peasant communities was looser and less responsive to
efforts to reorganize their economy and influence them ideologically. Even in
the South, "given the obstacles, the Communists succeeded to an impressive
extent." But Popkin also notes that there was
frequently serious tension between the Viet Minh and
peasants who sought to enter the market on their own by resuming trade with the
French and who bitterly resented efforts by the communists to curtail their
market activities for political purposes. Moreover, he does not deal with the
acute problems of political control and economic stability that were
encountered by the communists before and after the war with the
All of the movements Popkin describes attracted peasants and increased their
resources by using "political skills and bureaucratic connections to give
the peasants access to (and leverage against) the institutions that had
previously kept them at a disadvantage." In no case, Popkin
writes, did they seek to restore "traditional" patterns of life. The
moral economist errs in thinking that the uprisings were "defensive"
or "reactionary": to suppose so is to suppose that there actually was
a golden past before the French arrived. Anyone who believes this has been
bamboozled, in Popkin's view, by the less than candid
reminiscences of landlords, or by the reconstructions of the French
anthropologist Paul Mus and his students,[4] whose
sentimental vision of Vietnamese life has thrown dust in our eyes by smoothing
over the fierce conflicts that must have been endemic in precolonial
villages.
Popkin thinks that
peasants are "not hostile to innovations from which they expect personal
gain." Many attempts to "modernize" the
villages "fail (or are not adopted) not because of a positive regard for
tradition or aversion to risk, but because low-quality leadership and mutual
distrust preclude the requisite cost-sharing or coordination among
peasants." Contemporary planners must help to build rural
institutions that will encourage peasants to cooperate and believe that
"they, rather than someone else, will enjoy the fruits of their
labor."
The charge that peasants have been
idealized is not a new one. Indeed, it seems fair to say that no class or group
in society has ever received such strikingly mixed notices from
anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. Romantic German scholars held,
as did Rousseau, that the ancient peasant villages were centers of primitive
communism, where, in contrast to the wicked ways of the town, the fruits of the
social product went to all, and where liberty, fraternity, equality were truly
exemplified—perhaps for the last time. Many other writers have since depicted
the "peasant mind" as "childlike," "uncontaminated,"
"nonlinear," "pre-Socratic." Peasants have been said to be
disdainful of buying and selling, acquisition, ambition; the social structure
of peasant societies has been described as solidly grounded in the bonds of
blood relations, in immemorial and "natural" patterns of marriage and
family obligations.
Many Russian populists and Slavophiles—as
well as the famous Baron Haxthausen—saw the Russian
village, the mir, as a self-sustaining
economic unit that would be the salvation of the country. Recalling that Marx
and others had taught that there are inevitable stages of economic change in
society, some of them said that owing to the already existing communistic mir, a direct transition to sophisticated communism,
without an intermediate stage of industrialization, was possible; the grasping
individualism and "atomization" of bourgeois society could never
arise in the mir.
Nineteenth-century travelers to the great British
and Dutch colonies—or to the Indian societies of the
On the other side stand all those who have found
such images unrealistic. Marx and Engels spoke bluntly
of rural "idiocy"; in their own time, they said, the peasantry as a
class was suffering from the "hallucinations of its death struggle";
peasants were relies, bound to disappear with the growth of capitalism, and
they did not mourn the loss. Lenin and Plekhanov
attacked the narodniki with similar violence
for believing in myths about the mir. Maxim
Gorky asked himself, "but where is the good-natured, thoughtful Russian
peasant, indefatigable searcher after truth and justice, who was so
convincingly and beautifully depicted in the world of nineteenth-century
Russian literature?" He answered that he could not, after much inquiry,
find such a man, discovering instead a man "half-savage, stupid, heavy,…lazily, carelessly, incapably slumped" across the
land. He added that "those who took on themselves the bitter Herculean
work of cleaning the Augean stables of Russian life I cannot consider
'tormentors of the people'; from my point of view they are rather
victims." Oscar Lewis, Edward Banfield, and
other social scientists have challenged many of the assumptions of Redfield and
his followers. They came away from peasant communities with impressions of
peasants as often fatalistic and supine, ignorant, dishonest, malicious,
rancorous, sunk in apathy and meanness.
The clash between Scott and Popkin is narrower and less extreme than some of these
earlier skirmishes. Popkin sees peasants not as
savages but as tough-minded competitors. But what exactly does the controversy
amount to in the case of
But much of his attack on the moral economy view
overlooks the subtlety of Scott's position: a careful reader will note that
Scott never says that the villages of
As for the disagreement whether peasant rebellions
in
Indeed, Popkin's own work
would have been stronger had he made some use of the moral-economy perspective.
He describes peasants so suspicious and distrustful of one another that they
could not even agree to create collective irrigation facilities; yet why were
they still able to join together to take up the unworldly
"incentives" of religious sects like the Hoa
Hao? Popkin's repeated
appeal to such factors as the "mass merchandising" and
"sociopolitical competence" of the sects to explain such behavior
needs amplification; but when he provides it, he often refers to precisely the
same factors—"reasons of duty," "ethic," "moral
codes"—stressed by the moral economists.
To take another example, if peasants were indeed
eager to sell in the market when they saw the opportunity for personal gain,
and were not appreciably constrained by moral beliefs, why then did they—as
Scott documents—sometimes hand back to the notables and mandarins the portion
of seized resources that was left over after they subtracted what they needed
for their own subsistence? After one prunes excesses and misinterpretations in
this way—and recalls the lack of decisive historical evidence for the central
claims at issue—the sides of the "debate" seem far less sharply
defined.
Perhaps what animates and sustains
the controversy is, finally, a philosophical conflict between the different
models or pictures of human nature that are presupposed by the "political
economy" and "moral economy" approaches. This is a conflict about
which factors—personal gain or moral obligation, economic conditions or
cultural traditions—are "more important" in analyzing and explaining
human behavior, whether we discuss the agricultural decisions of a peasant or
the conduct of a statesman. On this abstract plane, if Scott at times goes too
far in emphasizing the peasant's "moral universe," Popkin makes a comparable error: his peasant "economic
actors" are too skeletal and predictable. His theory is that since
peasants everywhere are latent profit maximizers,
some tidy social computation by development planners will bring about a proper
organization of self-interest and unleash hitherto subterranean psychological
forces. But this is too simple and leaves too much unsaid.
Perhaps "personal gain" lies at the base
of all decisions made by "rational economic actors"; but to say so
comes close to being a tautology. Popkin provides
much useful information when he argues that organizations offering
opportunities for self-advancement can be critical factors in economic
development. But the Guatemalan cultivator or the Indian untouchable who
resists vitamins, vaccinations, or contraceptives, or who does not
"cooperate" with other peasants in promoting a green revolution,
might not be a rational actor. Even if we stipulate that he is, he has a
definite set of opinions on what are "gains" and "losses,"
opinions which are bound up in complicated ways with the rest of his
attitudes—say, those concerning worldly ambition, or the value of
contemplation, or the afterlife—and these might clash irrevocably with the
opinions of other members of his community, let alone with the aims of
development planners. Popkin's view is very clear but
unconvincing: it does not really provide an explanation of "peasant goals
and attitudes"; what he does is spell out the categories and concepts in
which an explanation might be couched. The concept of the moral economy, for
all its methodological pitfalls and lack of clarity, still offers a more
convincing approach to understanding peasant societies.
Social change itself will not stand still for the
debate between these views to be settled; and for many contemporary problems it
may not even be necessary to attempt to resolve them at all. But every strategy
for development presupposes certain assumptions about the motives and
characters of those who are affected by it. What remains to be done in the case
of "peasants," perhaps, is more detailed work designed to bring to
light and support such assumptions as they figure in specific cases of
contemporary "rural development" and "modernization."
Understanding the acutely important problems, moral and economic alike,
addressed by our authors might be advanced in this way as surely as by the more
ambitious and systematic schemes they have constructed.
Notes
[1] This
information is to be found in Martin J. Murray, The
Development of Capitalism in Colonial
[2]
"Who Will Back
[3] The
recent situation in the country has been summarized in a comprehensive internal
report circulated for "official use" by the World Bank: Viet Nam: A Socialist Economy in Transition, Report No. 2503a-VN,
[4] John
T. McAlister, Jr., and Paul Mus, The
Vietnamese and Their Revolution (Harper and Row, 1970). Frances Fitz-Gerald, Fire in the
[5] Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, in
[6] See,
for example, Terry Rambo, "A Comparison of Peasant Social Systems of
Northern and
[7] James
C. Scott, "Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars," Theory
and Society, vol. 7, nos. 1-2 (March 1979), pp. 97-134.