There are two ways of presenting the book of Laurence Fontaine

THE MORAL ECONOMY

by Laurence Fontaine

Editions Gallimard, 438 pages,

21 euros.

There are two ways of presenting the book of Laurence Fontaine. The first is to be regarded as a history book, whose subtitle announces the theme: "poverty, credit and confidence in pre-industrial Europe." The author reconstituted with attention to detail the manner in which the poor of this time have massively used debt to ensure their survival and, in counterpoint, the terms and conditions by the granting of credit. This return is, alone, exciting insofar as it relies on a very lively Gallery of personal cases. It allows to collect the manner in which the solutions to the economic challenges of each family were related to social structures and the dominant value systems. The very opposite of a macroeconomic study, this approach based on the analysis of the behaviour of specific social groups highlights what distinguished the peasants of the urban economy of the aristocrats of the bourgeois or merchant. This extremely varied palette of practice emerges a clear contrast with the usual cautious visions: that of the plurality of economies.

But stick to this reading would undermine the words of one author who requests in the past to illuminate the present. Very specifically, this reminder of the history is Laurence Fontaine, the way to illuminate one of today's important debates, one between the followers of the gift economy and advocates of an economy purely market. Modern anti-globalization are thus seeking to revive an old economy that have integrated social values as the imperative of solidarity. They therefore oppose a modern economy which, according to the formula of Karl Polanyi, is would be "désencastrée" from its social context. The originality of Laurence Fontaine is to rely on history to challenge the validity of such opposition. She was not there, in the past, separation radical between these two types of economy but, on the contrary, coexistence and porosity.

Value systems

Starting from the analysis of concrete practices, it shows clear at what point, in the past, the concern of solidarity pervaded the behaviour of many actors, but also how, at the same time rational concern for the economic interest continued to weigh on such behaviour. It is probably now: there is indeed that the advent of a financial economy did not prevent the donation to continue to be practiced and finally to lover in the functioning of the economy. A recent book of MAUSS ("The company view of the gift", éditions discovery), stands an impressive inventory of these intrusions of the economy of the gift in the practice of economic actors that claim yet not only obey the law of economic interest.

It will be understood that Laurence Fontaine believes the ensauvagement resulting from a triumph of the market economy, or Salvation lay in the restoration of a universal gift economy. It reminds us that the coexistence of these two economies is merely a reflection of the moral and social tensions that drive a company. It is therefore not in changing economic systems but by acting at the level of systems of political and moral values that can cause evolution.