Thymology as Method for the Moral Economy: An Empirical Application of Misesian Motivational Analysis to Indigenous African Economic Systems

Abstract This paper operationalizes Misesian thymology as an empirical method for studying informal institutions. While Austrian economics distinguishes praxeology as the universal logic of action from thymology as the historical understanding of motivation, thymology has rarely been applied systematically. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with the pre-colonial Ugondo people of Tiv in central Nigeria, we analyse fifteen independently verified proverbs that convey expectations about productive effort, cooperation, reciprocity, trust, prudence, and knowledge transmission. We argue that these proverbs function as culturally transmitted repositories of motivational knowledge that sustained informal economic coordination in the absence of formal legal enforcement. The findings suggest that institutional stability depends not only on behavioural regularities but on shared meanings that make conduct appear legitimate and obligatory. The paper contributes to Austrian economics by demonstrating a replicable thymological method, to institutional economics by examining the motivational content of informal institutions, and to indigenous knowledge studies by treating oral tradition as institutional reasoning. JEL Classification: B53, O17, Z10, D02