Economics and Literature

A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach

Ҫınla Akdere, Christine Baron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351865586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Since the Middle Ages, literature has portrayed the economic world in poetry, drama, stories and novels. The complexity of human realities highlights crucial aspects of the economy. The nexus linking characters to their economic environment is central in a new genre, the "economic novel", that puts forth economic choices and events to narrate social behavior, individual desires, and even non-economic decisions. For many authors, literary narration also offers a means to express critical viewpoints about economic development, for example in regards to its ecological or social ramifications.

Conflicts of economic interest have social, political and moral causes and consequences. This book shows how economic and literary texts deal with similar subjects, and explores the ways in which economic ideas and metaphors shape literary texts, focusing on the analogies between economic theories and narrative structure in literature and drama. This volume also suggests that connecting literature and economics can help us find a common language to voice new, critical perspectives on crises and social change.

Written by an impressive array of experts in their fields, Economics and Literature is an important read for those who study history of economic thought, economic theory and philosophy, as well as literary and critical theory.

1 Introduction and overview

Çinla Akdere, Christine Baron and Bruna Ingrao

Money, trade, exchanges; goods, consumption, necessities and luxuries; hard work or rent, investment or speculation, poverty and wealth … Since the Middle Ages, literature has portrayed the economic world, in poetry, drama, stories, novels. The diffusion of novels since the 18th century, and their success in the 19th and 20th centuries, offered the opportunity for new plots around economic events, choices or conflicts. Characters could move on new sceneries: polluted manufacturing cities, factories, the obscure financial world or the volatile stock exchange. They could go bankrupt in failed speculations or incurring debt; or they could gain fortunes and status in the market economy, making money by hard work or by investment. They could suffer the conflicts of insatiable desires in the new world of multiplied consumer goods. They could be oppressed by exploitation or unemployment. They had to face the need for money to earn their life. In so many novels, characters meet their destiny in life paths, where they have to face economic choices, and confront the turbulent world of markets.

In his correspondence, Friedrich Engels said that one could learn much more about the economy by reading Balzac than by reading the work of 19th-century economists. He wrote:

He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar monied upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoise, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.

(Engels 1888)¹

In his book, Le Capital au XXIe Siecle (Capital in the Twenty-First Century), Thomas Piketty effectively took Engels at his word, and discussed how Balzac’s novels, or those of other novelists like Jane Austen, Lev Tolstoy or Henry James, provide trustworthy information on the distribution of wealth and the standards of life for various social ranks. He quoted a few novels to offer his readers a better understanding of economic inequalities in wealth and incomes, transactions on landed property, inheritance, properties and rents (e.g. Piketty 2014: 174 ff. 377 ff., 381, 653 ff., 658). Breaking away from a strictly European focus, Piketty mentioned literary texts by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz and the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, to underline how reference monetary values mould the perception by characters of opportunities and standard of lives, or on the contrary how they become irrelevant in societies deeply affected by monetary instability.

In the more immediate and straightforward reading of the encounter between literature and economics, literary texts provide pictures of economic life, which may be read as testimony, or even evidence, on the historical societies they portray; or, with a more sophisticated eye and in critical distance, they may be deciphered as reflecting the values, opinions and conflicts about economic life which writers perceive in contemporary societies and bring to light in their writings. Feelings and thoughts, as embodied in the stories writers tell, give life to the meditations, conversations or controversies by past or contemporary characters about how the hard world of markets intrudes into the deeper, wider world of human destinies, asking for choices, offering opportunities, or imposing heavy constraints. Money and markets, speculation or bankruptcy, hard work, poverty or wealth, when looked at from a broader, cultural perspective, may be recognized as being part of wider metaphors for human parables and existential conflicts or crises. The literary text offers all of these perspectives to its readers, and literary studies have addressed them all in ample critical reflection dealing with economic life and literature.

It has been suggested that a new literary genre stemmed from writers devoting their attention to economic phenomena, the “economic novel”, whose main plot centres on economic events. The nexus linking characters to their economic environment is central in these novels, which put forth economic choices and events to narrate social behaviour and individual desires, exploring even non-economic decisions in the market context. “Economic” novels, which simultaneously stand as literary works and contain references to economic concepts, or even to specialized economic information, have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars in what is now a well-developed subfield of literary criticism explicitly devoted to the economic aspects of literary narration. In the narratives of contemporary societies, economic concepts such as wealth, money, finance, investment, inflation and profits are recurring more and more in literary texts; the way writers portray their characters, and the complexity of human realities, focuses on crucial aspects of the economy.

Since the 19th century, to many authors literary narration offered a way to express critical viewpoints about the social atmosphere in market economies, or the deep social change due to economic development (e.g. as regards negative externalities, or the impact on custom and social structure). The reversal of the balance between the status established by ancestry and the status acquired by fortune, even brutally, by making money in deceitful speculative affairs, is a recurring, disturbing theme in 19th-century literature. The world of the stock exchange, with its speculative business, offers powerful metaphors for the rise and fall of ambitious social climbers, and the parallel decline, or the difficult resilience, of people in social classes whose lives are rooted in agriculture and landed property. Migration, unemployment, the hardness of working conditions, living in poverty and the sufferings during the Great Depression have been the subjects of many literary narrations, side by side with speculation, the banking world, or even competition among multinational firms. Since the beginning of the 21st century, and especially after 2006, in contemporary literature appeared new references to the economic crisis and its financial disasters, or to workers’ welfare and the organization of work. New literary movements or single writers protesting against neoliberalism have appeared.²

To economists, literary texts provided a variety of suggestions, the most well known of which entered into the history of economic thought with the despising expression of “18th century robinsonades” used by Marx in the pages of his unfinished Grundrisse (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). The novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), at the origin of the “robinsonade” literary genre, fascinated economists of various generations. In the 19th century, the lost Robinson, who tried to survive on an island cut off from the rest of the world, provided the paradigm of the homo oeconomicus enjoying the virtues of autarchy, and exploring production possibilities, being both producer and consumer. His fictional encounter with Friday offered to Francis Ysidro Edgeworth the metaphor to explore the voluntary barter between two traders in bilateral monopoly, in his book Mathematical Psychics published in 1881. In economics, the island metaphor has a long life. It appeared in the unfinished text Valeurs et monnaie (Value and Money) written by Turgot around 1769, where two savages meet on a desert island and trade fish against furs. In the 1970s, it came back as a metaphor for imperfect information in local economies, in the macro models built by Edmund Phelps and Robert Lucas. In a book published in 1928, Oscar Morgenstern illustrated the chain of conjectures about what a rival will choose by quoting one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, where the detective, pursues his enemy Moriarty, and has to guess what his next moves will be, while in turn the criminal is trying to anticipate what Sherlock will guess and choose. Strategic conjectures about other agents’ rational choices are at the core of game theory, to which John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern contributed in 1944 their innovative book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, setting up game theory in economics.

Today, captured by the fascination of stories and plots, some professors of economics enrich their academic reading lists with passages from literary classics to exemplify the ways in which writers have been grappling with economic ideas for centuries, or to graphically express by reference to exemplary episodes unpalatable economic ideas which their students have difficulty grasping. The didactic value of literary texts has been argued as a way to achieve better economic literacy, and a whole book was devoted to the use of literary passages to illustrate economic ideas (Watts ed. 2003).

The dialogue is not, however, plain and easy. Since the so-called marginalist revolution in the 1870s, economic theory was mainly focused on the study of maximizing rational choice. Although economic ideas had, and have, their conceptual roots in moral philosophy, history and the humanities at large, authoritative scholars in economics predicated that economic theory should be considered hard science, and as such close to physics or biology. Notably, since the mid-20th century, the theoretical language of economics has been dominated by the imprinting of mathematics and physics, and marked by the use of mathematical models. The discipline evolved being largely divorced from studies in the humanities, not to speak of literature or the arts. In theory and in research practice, the economists aiming at providing comprehensive insights into forward-looking, rational choices relied on mathematical modeling and econometric techniques. On the contrary, the stories told in literature propose another scale of vision of the economic world, approaching economic behaviour within the context of conflictual choices, and thorn paths in life, as experienced by the single, fictional characters. Literary texts provide plenty of opportunities to challenge the simplified representation of rational behaviour proposed in so many economic models. Thus, when looked at from the perspective of economic studies, the conversation with literary masterpieces might offer to professional economists a salutary escape from being trapped in the strict conceptualization of rational behaviour as dictated by prevailing theories in both microeconomics and macroeconomics. The comparisons between economic tales and literary tales, inviting scholars to the trespassing of disciplinary borders, are fruitful and productive, even if the richer, complex reflections they tell cannot be immediately, or precisely, translated into new sets of scientific ideas to understand economic phenomena. Meanwhile, mainstream economics is evolving into a complex research field, and innovative studies in experimental economics go beyond the strict dictates of the rationality assumption. New research currents explore bounded rationality, or even non-rational behaviour, going beyond what H. Simon critically named “Olympian rationality”. In forecasting success, economics appears to be less of an exact science than economists would like, as the recent historical experience in the “Great Recession” unfortunately proves.

From the perspective of the history of ideas, the dialogue of economic studies with literature and literary studies helps discover the underlying cultural currents which run parallel in literary works and economic texts. In the various stages of its rather short history (short as compared to the millennial life of literature), political economy, only named economics since the end of the 19th century, was a field of study participating in larger cultural life. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, outstanding scholars in economics were moral philosophers such as Hume and Smith, or accomplished social scientists and political philosophers, such as J.S. Mill, Cournot, Walras and Marshall. In the 20th century, suffice it to mention, among others, Pareto, Hayek, Schumpeter, Keynes, Friedman, or today Sen, all political philosophers who explored economic ideas, building the conceptual language of the discipline. As moral and political philosophers, economists traced the disciplinary borders of their research in dialogue with wide currents in culture, including both the humanities and scientific thought. In this perspective, the encounter of literature and economics offers plenty of suggestions to historians of economic thought for crossing fixed disciplinary borders, to explore the evolution of ideas in our cultural heritage. In turn, studies in the history of economic thought shed critical light on the way writers reacted to controversial ideas about the economy and society at the time they were writing. Since the 18th century, whether they were more or less conscious of it (and most often they were), writers of economic texts and literary authors maintained relationships of reciprocal influence, by sharing controversies, historical environment and cultural roots. Today, as ever in history, conflicts of interest have social, political and moral causes and consequences. Economics cannot escape its birth as a “moral science” back in the 18th century, and it is crucial that it should keep the dialogue with the humanities going on.

The interdisciplinary exchanges between economics and literature are creating a promising new area of research, which is broadening thanks to the joint efforts of scholars in economics, history of economic thought and literary studies (Ingrao 2009). New books on economics and literature have been published, which are relevant for both fields of research, notably so in Victorian studies and in studies on French novels in the 19th century, much as in studies on specific subjects treated by both disciplines.³ We cannot aim at reviewing the various contributions to this expanding field of research in this introductory presentation. Detailed references on specific subjects will be found in the chapters which follow in this book. Let us just briefly review a few scholars who promoted the opening of studies in economics and literature.

In literary criticism, the specialized body of research that explores characters placed in an economic environment, or sequences of economic events, or economic ideas and controversies as they are narrated in literary texts, emerged as a novel part of literary studies, bringing fresh insight from a new perspective into texts, writers, genres and styles. In the second half of the 20th century, innovative scholars addressed the theoretical relationship between economics and literature from wide, cultural perspectives, exploring a variety of possible exchanges, correspondences and analogies. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who had probably read Pareto’s Manuale di economia politica, laid the groundwork for comparing linguistics and economics when he proposed the distinction between the diachronic and the synchronic approaches, showing language as a system (Saussure 1916 [1969], McCloskey 1998: 29 ff.). In 1978, in The Economy of Literature, Marc Shell discussed the analogies between economic and verbal symbolization (Shell 1978). Other scholars, notably French philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux, argued that economic phenomena lend themselves to literary rendition, while literature, in turn, provides us with stories about the value of art or the fetishization of material goods (Goux 1984).⁴ During the 1980s, the study of metaphors, and the link between symbolic forms and economic values, was enlightened both in the literary field and in sociology, notably by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who introduced the idea of “linguistic market”, in polemical comparison with the controversial idea of perfectly competitive markets in economics (Bourdieu 1982). Bourdieu’s later work on languages again put into contact concepts of symbolic values in linguistics with notions of value in economics (Bourdieu 2001). Economic theories were appropriated by theoretical literary studies to explore concepts such as desire and verbal value, or economic and cultural domination. In 1991, Fredric Jameson characterized postmodernism as the “cultural logic” of a late phase of the capitalist economy (Jameson 1991). Various scholars suggested that studying the connection between economics and literature helps reframe the distinction between exchange value and use value in a linguistic and literary perspective, or to explore the link between economic thought and new ways of shaping subjective identity in the novel (Shell 1978; Kaufman 2011).

At the end of the 20th century, “new economic criticism” emerged as a current in literary studies. The movement began in the United States in the early 1990s. In the introduction to the book New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, published in 1999, the editors Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee explained that in literary criticism the rise of cultural studies opened the way to the critical reading through economic lenses of many literary works; but they also warned against the risk, by adopting the economic lenses, of easily falling into crude economicism. Notwithstanding common inspiration and interests, the variety of approaches by the contributors doesn’t allow us to describe this new current as a unified, coherent field in literary criticism. In its variety, new research in cultural studies contributed to promoting a pluridisciplinary perspective in literary criticism, and in the reading of literary texts, notwithstanding the risks mentioned above. The phenomenon can be explained also by the parallel decline of structuralist approaches to literature and formalism in literary studies.

Simultaneously, some scholars in economics, who were unsatisfied with the neoclassical paradigm, found in literature inspiration for the richer description of behaviour, not reducible to the maximization of profit or utility. In 1985 Deidre McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics focused on the rhetorical aspects of science in general, and notably of economics (McCloskey 1985 [1998]). By taking into account the rhetorical aspect of each type of discourse, she considered economists as storytellers. Despite the polemical aspect of thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction and overview
• Part I Passions and interest: A comparative study of economic texts and literary masterpieces
• Part II Economic ideas and metaphors in literature: An interdisciplinary approach
• Part III Facing change: Reflections of economic development and crises in historical and literary texts
• Index of Names
• Index of Economics and Literary Terms