Wages and salaries in the Middle Ages: an economist's view.

Summary The temptation of the economist, when he has to analyze economic phenomena, is always to mobilize his "toolbox" based on two closely related conceptual instruments. The first is homo oeconomicus. In the field of economic activities (and even, for some economists such as Gary Becker, whatever the field of activity considered), behavior is assumed to be a priori rational and self-interested. More precisely, the individual is assumed to be aware of his interests, and to be willing to pursue them in the most efficient way given the means at his disposal and the constraints to which he is subject. The second key concept is the market. As the Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow ironically but fairly noted, economists are parroting "supply and demand" over and over again. The interplay of supply and demand determines the price, in the labor "market" as in all other markets. For more than a century, anthropologists and sociologists have been at liberty to denounce the reductive nature of this approach: economists tend to universalize and thus naturalize categories (homo oeconomicus and the market as a mechanism for coordinating behavior and allocating resources) that are merely historical and social constructs. By applying these categories to other times and/or other societies, economists risk committing the sins of anachronism and/or ethnocentrism. Max Weber showed how homo oeconomicus was only a recent bourgeois Western representation, the result of a long historical evolution. Karl Polanyi, and following him contemporary economic sociology, underlined how - even in our contemporary Western societies, and a fortiori in societies that are more distant in space or time - economic activities, even when they took the form of monetized exchanges, were embedded, or "encased" (according to the translation that we give to "embedded") in social relations. Two main forms of embedding can be distinguished. The first, which we shall refer to here as cognitive and cultural embedding, refers to what we might call the categories of understanding, or of representation. The economic behavior implied by the concept of homo oeconomicus presupposes a whole set of representations - starting with the notion of individual interest, a certain relationship to time, the concepts of investment, profit and return, risk, etc. - that we do not find, in the same way as in the case of homo oeconomicus. - The second form refers to the "economicus", which is a set of representations that are not found, or do not take on the same meaning, in other cultural systems. The second form refers to social embedding, which itself has two dimensions. Following Mark Granovetter, we will distinguish here between relational embedding and structural embedding. The first refers to the individual's personal relationships (of neighbors, relatives, etc.). The second, in a more encompassing way, inscribes the activities of the individual in the structure of social relations (master/servant, suzerain/vassal...). The evidence of these two forms of embedding - and more particularly of the second - seems to be obvious when we look at the "labor market" - if we can forgive this anachronism - in the Middle Ages, and more particularly at the wage, understood in a broad sense, and at wage-labor. Without fundamentally questioning it, it is this evidence that we would like to question, in the light of the very rich contributions to this book. More precisely, the following question will guide our analysis: to what extent do the practices observed deviate from what would follow from strict economic logic - i.e. that which stems from the rational practices of individuals establishing market relations? Are these practices as "embedded" as one might think a priori? Or what does the study of wages and salaries in the Middle Ages reveal about the ways in which social logic (in the broad sense) and economic logic (in the "strict" sense) are intertwined?