For decades, scholars seeking to explain the behavior of peasant cultivators in agrarian societies have divided into two broadly opposed camps. The first, often labeled the "moral economy" school, contends that the peasant household is governed less by a drive to maximize returns than by an overriding concern to secure subsistence. On this view, villagers facing the perennial threat of a failed harvest arrange their affairs to minimize the risk of catastrophe rather than to raise average yield. Institutions that appear economically irrational to an outside observer - the sharing of communal land, patron-client obligations, elaborate norms of reciprocity - are, on closer inspection, mechanisms of collective insurance. A landlord who guarantees his tenants a floor below which their consumption will not fall may extract a large surplus in good years, yet the arrangement endures because it answers the cultivators' deepest need: predictability. Against this account stands what may be called the political-economy school, which insists that peasants are, at bottom, rational individuals responsive to incentives. Its proponents argue that the moral-economy portrait romanticizes village solidarity and obscures the pervasive bargaining, defection, and free-riding that in fact characterize agrarian life. If reciprocal institutions persist, they do so not because villagers prize the collective good but because each participant calculates that cooperation serves his private interest more reliably than its alternatives. Where that calculation changes - when, say, a new market for cash crops raises the return to individual enterprise - the supposedly sacred norms dissolve with striking speed. It would be tempting to treat these positions as flatly incompatible, but the opposition is less complete than their partisans suggest. Both schools, after all, explain peasant conduct by reference to the cultivator's interests; they disagree chiefly about which interest predominates and over what time horizon it is pursued. The moral economist's "subsistence ethic" is not a rejection of self-interest but a particular form of it, adapted to conditions in which a single bad year can mean starvation. The rational-peasant theorist, for his part, must concede that where the risk of ruin is severe, a prudent maximizer will behave exactly as the subsistence ethic prescribes - accepting lower expected returns in exchange for a narrower range of outcomes. The apparent clash between altruistic solidarity and calculating egoism dissolves, in part, into a quarrel about how much weight to assign to risk. What the debate too rarely acknowledges is that neither model is easily falsified by the historical record, precisely because each can absorb the same evidence. The collapse of a village institution under market pressure confirms the rationalist's claim that norms were never more than convenient; the same collapse confirms the moral economist's claim that the market destroys the conditions under which solidarity was possible. An observation consistent with both explanations discriminates between neither. Progress, if it is to come, will require not louder assertion of first principles but the patient specification of conditions under which the two accounts yield genuinely divergent predictions - a task that has, thus far, attracted far less effort than the polemics it would render obsolete.