âIt is possible,â Gayatri Spivak argues, âto put the economic text âunder erasure,â to see, that is, the unavoidable and pervasive importance of its operation and yet to question it as a concept of the last resortâ (85). This book seeks to realize just this possibility.
In George Eliotâs The Mill on the Floss ([1860] 1914), a double Bildungsroman about the troubled growth into adulthood of two siblings, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, their progress into maturity is constrained by their fatherâs bankruptcy. Business success and failure, and their determinative impacts on families, are a central thread in this tragic narrative. George Eliot, despite being a famously adept writer of free indirect discourse as a representation of her charactersâ thoughts, largely demonstrates economic thought through dialogue. When Tom seeks financial support from his uncle, Mr. Glegg, so that he might invest in some export goods that his old friend, the canny trader Bob Jakins, mentions, this is how Eliot portrays business:
In the larger scene from which this passage comes, Eliot wishes to emphasize the way in which social relations infuse business relations, the sort of social relations where seeing, meeting, and knowing people are paramount. Tom assures his uncle that this deal is to be trusted precisely because he knows and trusts Bob who knows and trusts Salt, the shipman. And this might be, as well, one of the reasons why Eliot tends to prefer dialogue, the print instantiation of sociality, to make her point about the social nature of the economic relation.âAy-Ay,â said Mr. Glegg, in an approving tone; âthatâs not a bad notion, and I wonât say as I wouldnât be your man. But it âull be as well for me to see this Salt, as you talk on. And thenâhereâs this friend oâ yours offers to buy the goods for you. Perhaps youâve got somebody to stand surety for you if the moneyâs put into your hands?â added the cautious old gentleman, looking over his spectacles at Bob.âI donât think thatâs necessary, uncle,â said Tom. âAt least, I mean it would not be necessary for me, because I know Bob well; but perhaps it would be right for you to have some security.ââYou get your percentage out oâ the purchase, I suppose?â said Mr. Glegg, looking at Bob. (319)
Not long after this passage was written, the subdiscipline of neoclassical economics emerged from the classical economics of Eliotâs own childhood, codifying axioms about the market that increasingly replaced this social exchange among known and knowable people with a market of pricing mechanisms only joined by people as isolated consumers. This book aims to think about the gains and losses of this story about the changing rules and outcomes of economics.
Economics has become one of the most dominant disciplines in the modern academy and, arguably, one of the most dominant discourses in political debate. Its consolidation over the past two and half centuries as one of the sciencesâwith all the authority that designation conveysâas well as its near-monopoly as the explanatory rubric for a wide range of policy debates in the social domain registers this dominance. The expanding authority of economics coincides, however, with what seems like a parallel contraction in the authority of humanistic inquiry. In using the tools of literary analysis and cultural criticism to reconnect economics to its historical context and roots in humanistic questions and concerns, we seek in this volume to recover the underlying assumptions of many ideas often accepted as givens: the result of what neoclassical economics, in its concerted efforts to be recognized as a science, presents as natural or normative laws. This context has often been neglected, forgotten, or simply overwritten by the impersonal assumptions that accompany mathematical models, which study markets and economic transactions as abstracted from the social domain in which they occur. Of course, this collection on its own cannot reverse this trend. We believe it shows, however, the crucial insights humanistic methods of analysis can add to the continuing debate about what constitutes economics, and suggests how that discipline might incorporate them. By looking both backward and forward, we hope to contribute to recent efforts within economics and in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to open economics once more to other disciplinary methods and insights, to alternative figurations of the human and its social environment. In so doing we also seek to reanimate the multiple motivations of societyâbeyond transactional self-interestâin order to ask questions about inequality, social justice, and environmental well-being.
Because of these goals, this book differs in several ways from previous collections and studies about economics and literature. First, it aims to demonstrate how humanistic inquiry can open up economic debates increasingly cast as specialist, taking advantage in particular of literary criticsâ ability to perceive narrative and rhetorical structures within economic theorizing. Second, the volume highlights dimensions of economics that the âscienceâ of economics tends to ignoreâputting a human face on discussions of (for example) labor, human capital, income inequality, and questions about the rationality or irrationality of economic behavior. Finally, in a deliberate effort to construct a narrative linking the present with its nineteenth-century assumptions and causes, our contributors look to the past, tracing a current concern to its nineteenth-century (or earlier) origins, and back to the present and future, exploring the development or persistence of nineteenth-century issues in the present day. In this way, the volume considers both the gains and losses in explanatory power, and the epistemological and moral blindness, which we see occasioned by the trend of economics toward abstraction and mathematical explanation. The book thus models a mode of historical inquiry that avoids both the strict constructionist version of new historicism, asserting radical differences between eras, and an ahistorical political philosophy that overlooks nuances in the development of concepts assigned to particular disciplines.
Our contributors seek to rediscover the social within the economic and thus create a more open encounter among disciplines. To this end, the volume is organized around a keyword format. Rather than short entries such as those in Raymond Williamsâs seminal volume Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society ([1976] 1983), our terms introduce full-length chapters oriented around a central concept that connects nineteenth-century political economy and economics to present-day issues. The chapters often analyze a case study or conceptual history, and frequently draw upon one or more literary texts as a way of illustrating and modeling the issues at stake. We use âkeywordsâ as a clarifying element: not as mere definition, but rather as a way of formulating the humanitiesâ ability to take the idea of economics in new directions by illuminating the concepts and values that have been associated with, and used to contest, the disciplineâs historical development.1 The chapters in this volume show how the central categories of literary criticismâgenre, narrative, character, plot, motivation, and settingâplay an often unexamined role in economic theorization. They also, together, constitute an argument that humanistic inquiry can redefine the market as a field of social relations, reintegrating economics with the social sciences and exerting pressure on abstract economic articulations so that the social effects and histories of central âeconomicâ concepts can become part of broadly shared discussions about the kinds of societies we desire for the future.
In defining the Keywords project, Williams explains that âthe most active problems of meaning are always primarily embedded in actual relationshipsâ that âare typically diverse and variable, within the structures of particular social orders and the processes of social and historical changeâ (1983, 22). Reflecting our similar concern with economic thinking as formed within and shaping specific social relations over time, our subtitle, Reclaiming the Social, draws on the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyiâs influential critique in The Great Transformation ([1944] 2001) of the liberal ideology of self-regulating markets developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, based on an historical account of the social embeddedness of economic relationships. For Polanyi, industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to a new theory of the relationship between the economy and society as entailing a liberal âmarket economy,â that is, âan economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by market prices,â and derived from âthe expectation that human beings behave in such a way as to achieve maximum money gainsâ (2001, 71). For such a market to be self-regulating, Polanyi explains, âdemands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and a political sphere,â through which society becomes subordinated to market requirements (74â75). Because the negations of the social relations of law and custom entailed in such a separation appeared unacceptable to many observers, however, a series of political reactions ensued to attempt to constrain and regulate market forces, giving rise to the oft-cited, dialectical âdouble movementâ theorized by Polanyi between market forces and society.
Critics have called humanistsâ and social scientistsâ reliance on Polanyiâs theory a kind of âfetishismâ that treats the economy and markets as mere fictions, thus negating their materiality and complexity (Konings 2015). Howev...