The Problem of Profit

Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Michael Genovese

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813942902
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Attacks againstthe pursuit of profitin eighteenth-century Britain have been largely read as reactions against market activity in general or as critiquesof financial innovation. In The Problem of Profit, however, Michael Genovese contends thatsuch rejections of profitderive not from a distaste for moneymaking itself but from a distaste for individualism.

In the aftermath of the late seventeenth-century Financial Revolution, literaturelinked theconcept of sympathy to the public-minded economic ideals of the past to resist the rising individualism of capitalism.This study places literary works at the center of eighteenth-century debates about how to harmonize exchanges of feeling and exchanges of finance, highlighting representations of communitarian, affective profit-makingingeorgic poetry as well as in the work of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Sarah Fielding, HenryFielding, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Laurence Sterne, among others. Investigating commercial treatises, novels, poetry, periodicals, and philosophy, Genovese argues that authors conjured alternatives to private accumulation that might counter the isolating tendencies of impersonal exchange.

However, even as emotional language and economic language arose together in the 1700s, the attendant aspiration to form a communitarian economy in Britain was not fulfilled. By recovering an approach to moneymaking that failed to thrive, The Problem of Profit argues for the relevance ofan unfamiliar narrative of capitalistic thought to today'sanxiety over the discord betweenpersonal ambition and public good.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction · The Problem of Profit
• 1 · People and Profits
• 2 · Organic Commerce, Georgic Sympathy
• 3 · Feeling Paper; or, Giving Credit to Periodicals
• 4 · The Character of Self-Interest in David Simple and Amelia
• 5 · Writing Off Sensibility in Hume, Johnson, and Sterne
• Coda · Finance without Feeling
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index