Much has been lost in the transition from the moral economy, based instinctively on custom, to the market economy, protected legally by contract. What has been lost is the idea of the inviolable economic integrity of the human personality and the social completeness of human existence that results from recognising an individual's fundamental right to physical sustenance.

Thinkers from Aristotle, Confucius and Adam Smith to E.P. Thompson and James C. Scott have pondered the issue from the points of view of their time and circumstance. Various social movements, both secular and religious, particularly in Latin America, have tried to implement policies that advance the cause of the moral economy against that of the market economy. The advent of neoliberal economics has accelerated the divergence between the two forms of economy. Today, the concept of the moral economy belongs firmly in the sphere of the Left whereas, once, it was a mainstream heritage. The centre has moved to the right.

Even so, there are vestiges of the moral economy that preserve life in Bengal. A small example is a recently-videographed story of a Bengali girl, effectively an economic orphan who was cared for by her grandmother till that guardian passed away. The girl, who looks like 11 or 12, took it upon herself to nurture her four-year-old brother. She goes around the homes in her village asking for grain. The video shows the child carrying a bag with about one kilogram of chal gathered from about 10 homes.

She is resourceful. She has stacked a pile of wood for the oven fire, and there is at least leftover rice - panta bhat - and onions for her brother and herself in the morning. She has also bought - I do not know how - a number of chicks that she has kept in a coop outside their thatched hut, to cook and eat when they are full-fledged chickens.

Her village in West Bengal is not a rich one. Yet, there are at least 10 households that give her enough grain to sustain her and the little brother whom she mothers. Why do the villagers do this? Charity, yes, but charity falls by the wayside when people ignore beseeching beggars in the metropolis or in the suburbs.

I think that the girl and her brother get to eat because they live in a village. A village is not only an inhabited space but a face-to-face society: People recognise themselves in the eyes of those whom they know. (There is an excellent African greeting: "You see me. I exist.") A village is an instinctive agrarian habitat where people define themselves by their proximity to others.

Behind that proximity lies a shared understanding of land as social inheritance, a defence against historical anonymity. In a city, people come and go. In a village, people come once to go away forever. A city is a house at best: A village is a home at least. No matter how many people migrate to the cities or abroad, for most, the village anchors their geographical sense of being. No one is anonymous in a village. No one is allowed to live unknown or die unmourned. The village was created by the moral economy. Everyone has a place in it.

Peasants are the backbone of the rural economy. The historical movement to an industrial society and now a service economy has produced newer and more productive economic species (although people tend to forget that no economy would survive for long if farmers were unable or unwilling to grow food).

However, the economics of time is unstoppable. Much has been achieved because of the transition to the market economy. From high rises to highways, from supermarkets to supercomputers, what many consider to be the minimally normal definition of life today would have been impossible without the creative destruction wrought by the market economy.

What stands before us is a world that has to unite the sustaining potential of the moral economy with the creative potential of the market economy.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh could be a global leader in this regard. One very good reason is the most illustrious person living in Bangladesh today: Professor Muhammad Yunus. The Nobel laureate, who earned global fame before returning to Bangladesh to lead the Interim Government, proves that although capitalism is the epitome of the market economy, it does not have to be anti-poor. Testimony to that principle is paid by thousands who, although they are intellectual products of neoclassical economics, understand that the moral economy has a crucial place in the organisation of social life.

One such intellectual, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, wrote recently about why he was excited about the possibilities of the new Bangladesh under its new leader. "Yunus, through endless experimentation and tinkering, has developed a series of institutional success models for reducing poverty, improving health care and education outcomes, and combating climate change."

Khosla celebrates Grameen Bank, which has "cumulatively made US$39 billion in small, mostly income-generating loans to more than 10 million poor women that became a model for similar efforts in India and many other countries".

Now, Grameen Bank is very much a part of Bangladesh's market economy and would not survive otherwise in a capitalist banking system. However, by empowering rural women, who form the geographical and maternal core of Bangladesh's moral economy, Grameen has carved out a viable space for that economy within the ambit of the market economy.

That is the true achievement of Professor Yunus, whose concept of social business has helped to turn Bangladesh from a nation of haves and have-nots to at least a nation of have-somethings. Social business, financed by micro-credit, comes as close as anything else can today to the idea of a moral economy, in which the individual is respected and protected for being a member of a community and not to the extent that she is a consumer.

Hence, those who believe in the imperative of the moral economy have no reason to despair. Look only at Bangladesh.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He may be contacted at epaaropaar@gmail.com