Political Economy and the Novel

A Literary History of "Homo Economicus"

Sarah Comyn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319943251
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of 'Homo Economicus' provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figure's significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith's seminal texts – Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations – and Henry Fielding's A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen's Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens' engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway 's exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and DonDeLillo's Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sarah ComynPolitical Economy and the NovelPalgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94325-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sarah Comyn¹

(1)

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Sarah Comyn

End Abstract

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.¹

In his famous diagnosis of the unpredictability of the stock market, John Maynard Keynes offers this advice: “we must have regard … to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends”.² Although unnamed, it is clear that the target of Keynes’ wit is the supreme figure of economic theory: the resolutely rational homo economicus.³

Decades later, the psychological and socio-political inadequacies of this economic model have begun to be more closely studied and recognised. In The Cash Nexus (2001), for instance, the conservative economic historian Niall Ferguson recognises a critical failing in the model of homo economicus with which economists work, arguing:

The true homo economicus—constantly aiming to maximise his utility with every transaction—remains a rarity, and to most of us a rather monstrous one. Every day, men and women subordinate their economic self-interest to some other motive, be it the urge to play, to idle, to copulate, to wreck. ⁴

The limitations of this concept of a rational, self-interested “economic man” have been emphasised in the most recent crises to shake the financial world. Writing in response to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009, Paul Krugman suggests that “the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth”.⁵ He goes on to argue that this crisis necessitates that the economics profession “acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic ‘theory of everything’ is a long way off”.⁶ Subsequently, the “irrational exuberance” and over-borrowing that accompanied cheap credit and caused the Eurozone crisis, and the austerity measures that have been put in place to rectify the ensuing recession, have raised additional questions about the purpose that this stalwart of economic theory serves.⁷

Despite these deficiencies becoming ever more apparent, this model of homo economicus as the basic unit of an efficient market society persists. This book, through the novelistic counter discourse produced by the Anglo-American novel, seeks to examine the creation and evolving construction of this celebrated subject of economic theory. I use the Anglo-American novel as an evaluative medium through which to explore the homo economicus of economic theory. Adopting a transhistorical approach, through the juxtaposition of economic and literary texts that illuminate historical moments crucial to the development of both discourses, this book examines the manner in which the novel offers an investigation into and a critical account of the psychological, socio-cultural, and moral aspects of homo economicus that the economic vision of rational egoism often ignores. Recognising and exploring the discourse of moral philosophy that political economic theory emerges from, and the emotional and imaginative insight of economic theory’s origins, my analysis will, simultaneously, identify and investigate the category of what I term the “empathic imagination” in the origins of political economic theory and the novel, and its implications for the development and understanding of homo economicus.⁸

In its transhistorical investigation of homo economicus, this book addresses two concerns shared by political economy and the Anglo-American novel over the 250-year life-cycle of both discourses: value and representation; and the empathic imagination. As will become evident, these are not independent elements, but rather interlocking strands of my argument that homo economicus is a crucial character in the history of both political economy and the Anglo-American novel.

Value and Representation

In a 2003 work entitled Bullion the German photographer Thomas Demand foregrounds the malleability of the category of value, as the realms of paper and gold collide in a close-up photograph that depicts a “Midas-like stack of gold bars”.⁹ With his customary wit, Demand makes an implicit commentary on the nature of value and representation: the stacked bars of gold that fill the frame of the photographic image are made from paper and, following Demand’s modus operandi, shortly after the photograph that forms the art piece has been taken the “bullion” is destroyed.¹⁰ The concept of accurate representation is, in this work, perpetually deferred, pointing to the ephemerality of value. Equally, Demand’s Bullion evokes the anxiety that once accompanied the implementation of the gold standard in Britain. While the gold standard came to symbolise economic stability and security, the introduction of the standard by the British Parliament in 1816 was met with distrust. As Alexander Dick argues in Romanticism and the Gold Standard (2013), the standard is “not a constitutive, but a ‘regulative ideal’” that projects rather than embodies a “universal or ‘absolute’ value”.¹¹ Demand’s piece emphasises the potential slippage between these eternal twins, value and representation, and the anxieties associated with their relationship.

Literature and economic discourses share a primary anxiety: the changing nature of value, whether aesthetic, cultural, or monetary. Additionally, the novel and political economy emerge during the same period, and their interrelatedness consequently deserves further inspection. Both discourses are, therefore, preoccupied with attempts to represent and thus stabilise value. This primacy is reflected in the attention it is given in the recently developed form of literary criticism labelled “new economic criticism” by Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, particularly within the category they identify as “production”. Production focuses on the historical and cultural formations and representations that works of literature can give voice to.¹² Examining the socio-cultural and economic contexts in which works are produced, this form of criticism recognises that value is not a static concept, nor is it confined to the financial realm.

One proponent of this form of criticism, James Thompson, argues that “from high post-structuralism to the present age of cultural studies” the concept of value has “in some sense been our central object of scrutiny, as a host of concepts of absolute value—aesthetic, racial, gendered, sexual, and ethnic—have been theorised and deconstructed”.¹³ The concept of value is a fraught one, even within the boundaries of economic theory. Studying the controversies surrounding the attempts to define this concept has proved a rich subject of analysis for literary critics as they draw connections between economic and literary debates. Fundamental to such accounts is the complex relationship formed between value, representation, and fiction. Indeed, Mary Poovey argues that it is representation that forms the critical connection between literary and economic writings: “What economic writing and Literary wr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Contested Birth of Homo Economicus
• 3. The Speculative World of Sanditon
• 4. A Marginal Life in Great Expectations
• 5. Woolf, Keynes, and the Compulsion to Consume
• 6. The Neoliberal Ideologue
• 7. The Asymmetric Prostate: Symptoms of a Failed Technocrat in Cosmopolis
• 8. Coda
• Back Matter