Moral economists, subalterns, new social movements, and the (re‐) emergence of a (post‐) modernized (middle) peasant

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Abstract
This article examines the way in which peasant movements in both India and Latin America have been reinterpreted by the postmodern and politically revisionist project of the subaltern studies series on India and the new social movements theory on Latin America. It is suggested that much of the conceptual analysis embodied in both these frameworks is prefigured in the earlier ‘moral economy’ approach, incorporating the middle peasant thesis of Wolf and Alavi, an epistemological lineage in which the work of J.C. Scott discharges a pivotal role. An additional claim made here is that such frameworks implicitly provide Chayanovian neo‐populist economic theory with its missing politico‐ideological dimension.