The Moral Matrix of Capitalism: Insights from Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist central and eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of proper economy and practice amongst a broad range of actors—from landfill workers to business managers and the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyse the capitalist moral transformation and order in the region and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to (as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders—a topic sidelined in much of the existing moral economy scholarship. Exploring a broad range of moral economic phenomena, the contributors move beyond the conventional definition of morals as prosocial norms and action, approaching morals as a broader empirical phenomenon of economy and politics. They examine the actions, practices, and reasoning of different actors in relation to shifting notions of acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and praiseworthy and blameworthy behaviour. As such, this collection makes the case for widening the empirical object and analytical purchase of moral economy to include the study of not only moral critiques and resistance to capitalism but also the diverse moral agencies, milieus and orders of capitalism, and the ways in which the advancement and embedding of the capitalist moral order has shaped economic life in the region.