The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam
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| Author | Samuel L. Popkin |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Political Science |
| Published | 1979 |
| Publisher | University of California Press |
| Pages | 332 |
| ISBN | |
The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam is a non-fiction book by University of California, San Diego political scientist Samuel L. Popkin. Originally conceived to be a reflection on the Vietnam Revolution, the book introduces the term "political economy" as a new theory of peasant behavior. Popkin surveys the precolonial, colonial, and revolutionary history of Vietnam seeking to understand the impact of outside shocks on peasant communities, and ultimately what led them to rebel.
This book is a direct rebuttal of the moral economy school, led by Political Scientist James C. Scott and more particularly his book The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Popkin's political economy approach holds that peasants are rational, self-interested agents that act to maximize their own benefit. While the moral economy approach argues that emotions are the main drivers of peasant action, hence placing a great deal of importance on the norms and values of peasant communities, Popkin shows that peasants follow a rational investment logic when deciding to join a new political or religious movement or using state institutions. "What is rational for an individual", Popkin writes, "may be very different from what is rational for an entire village or collective".
The Rational Peasant is published three years after James C. Scott's Moral Economy of the Peasant and is articulated as a critique of Scott's arguments. Despite studying the same phenomenon, namely the impact of colonialism and capitalism of traditional agrarian societies of Southeast Asia, they both derive completely opposed theories of peasant behavior.
Moral economists, Popkin writes, see peasants as fundamentally "antimarket", and "interpret violence as a defensive reaction against capitalism", and as an attempt to restore the moral underpinnings of the pre-capitalist society. Commercial activities like trading or buying and selling are not liked by peasants according to moral economists, seeing as they derive their welfare from suprafamily institutions like the village and the patron-client relationship. For moral economists, the market invariably damages the welfare of peasants. Popkin quotes historian Eric Hobsbawm who sees rural protests in nineteenth century Spain as natural following "the introduction of capitalist legal and social relationships". Thus, according to the moral economy approach, the moral basis of agrarian social relations is destroyed by what Popkin calls "the cash nexus".
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