Economic Sociology as Comparative Macrosociology: Exemplified by the Moral Economy of Debt

While new economic sociology is often associated with the micro- and meso-levels of sociological analysis, there is also a long tradition in economic sociology that is rather concerned with the macro- and meta-analytical levels. Instead of focusing on economic actors and their relations, or the structure of networks and organisations, economic sociology understood as comparative macrosociology is interested in studying the socio-economic regimes and cultural-cognitive rationalities that characterise societies as a whole and take different shapes at different times and places. In this chapter, this tradition in economic sociology, which considers interactions of economy and society, and their mutual constitution, in the most comprehensive sense, is first briefly introduced and related to the subject matter of political economy and socio-economics. It is then illustrated with the moral-economy approach, which comes close to Polanyi’s conception of social embeddedness and is here applied to transformations of the moral economy of debt in the context of modern capitalism. Using bankruptcy law as an indicator of the morality of market society in its development from commercial capitalism to industrial capitalism and consumer capitalism, this chapter exemplifies a historical-comparative approach to studying intersections of markets and morality focusing on debt relations.