For much of the twentieth century, scholars explained peasant rebellion as a reflexive response to material deprivation: hungry cultivators, pushed below subsistence, rose against those who took their grain. Two influential frameworks complicated this picture, and their quarrel still structures the field. The first, associated with the moral-economy school, holds that peasant communities are governed less by calculations of income than by a shared ethic of subsistence security. On this view, villagers tolerate considerable inequality so long as elites honor an implicit guarantee - that patrons will provision clients in lean years. Rebellion erupts not when peasants are poorest but when this guarantee is violated, typically by the intrusion of impersonal markets and colonial taxation that convert flexible customary obligations into fixed, unforgiving demands. Anger, on this account, tracks the breach of a norm, not the depth of hardship. The rival political-economy, or rational-choice, account rejects the premise that villages are bound by a collective ethic. Peasants, it argues, are individual maximizers who weigh the private costs and benefits of any action, including revolt. What looks like moral outrage is better read as a response to shifting incentives: when landlords or the state alter the terms on which land, credit, and protection are offered, cultivators recalculate. The apparent solidarity of the village dissolves under scrutiny into a fragile coalition perpetually threatened by defection, since each household gains most by letting its neighbors bear the risks of resistance. Collective action, far from being the natural expression of communal values, is precisely what such societies find hardest to sustain. The two schools are often presented as irreconcilable, and on their strongest claims they are. Yet each purchases its coherence at a cost. The moral-economy account, by treating the subsistence ethic as a settled fact, struggles to explain why some violations provoke revolt while others, equally severe, are absorbed in silence; it tends to read acquiescence as either contentment or repression, leaving little room for the ordinary calculation its rivals emphasize. The rational-choice account, conversely, must smuggle in shared understandings to explain how atomized maximizers ever coordinate at all: the very norms it dismisses reappear, unacknowledged, as the solution to its own collective-action problem. It is tempting to conclude that the frameworks are less opposed than differently incomplete. A peasant may calculate within a moral horizon and moralize within material constraints, and the analytically interesting question is not which impulse is primary but under what conditions one becomes visible while the other recedes. That the debate has proven so durable suggests not that one side has simply erred but that each has fastened onto a real feature of agrarian life the other cannot comfortably absorb.