From “moral Economy” to “popular political economy”: The fruitful intuition of E.P. Thompson

Abstract

The article takes a look at the history of freedom trying to overcome the assumptions of classical political economy through the concept of popular political economy, very inspired by the idea of Thompson of the moral economy of the crowd. In order to challenge the "Marxist / Stalinist" version of the French Revolution, according to which it was the necessary prelude to the Russian Revolution, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in order to challenge the neoliberal version according to which the Revolution French anticipated all the so-called "Marxists" revolutions and the social policies of the twentieth century and that it could be considered as the "matrix of all the totalitarianisms", the article intends to make a quick inventory of the history of free trade in cereals and their critics before and during the French Revolution, from the point of view of the Rights of Men and Citizen.