Moral economy as a site of conflict: debates on debt, money, and usury in the nineteenth and early twentieth century

This essay is a theoretical reflection on the concept of "moral economy," drawing mainly on sources concerned with the practices of debt enforcement in nineteenth-century Switzerland. I take conflict as the point of departure for moral economy and I propose a way to integrate historical-epistemological dimensions into the analysis. I further argue that colliding temporalities represented the categorial focal point of these conflicts. The last section briefly discusses debates on "usury" and "profiteering" (Wucher) between the nineteenth century and the Weimar inflation period. Here, moral economy appears as one contentious node among several in conflicts over monetary relations of exchange.