Abstract
This volume seeks to restore the social context to economic abstractions through readings of nineteenth-century literary texts. The introduction provides a brief history of literary-critical precedents and explains the rationale for the book’s organization around keywords, focusing attention on central topics that link literary and economic concerns. It also provides a brief history of the shift from political economy to economics: from a conception of economic discourse that considers individuals as social beings to the ostensibly neutral mathematical abstractions that constitute neoclassical economics. It concludes by discussing recent attempts to recover the social and relational components of economic discourse, a project to which this volume contributes and which it hopes to advance.
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Notes
- 1.
For a different sort of approach to the critique of economics via the redefinition of keywords, see Leary (2018).
- 2.
There is a sizeable body of work on economics and American literature, as well, which Eby’s chapter in this volume gestures toward. Given the focus on the nineteenth-century British origin of economics and our field expertise, we will not provide an outline here of this growing archive. However, the chapters in this volume confirm that the boundary between nation-states means little for economics in particular, as it becomes in the twentieth century a transnational project with a mathematical lingua franca.
- 3.
- 4.
Robert Fogel is credited with a form of economic history that depends heavily on data and math, which is labeled “cliometrics.” It adopts econometrics in its interpretation of historical events.
- 5.
Exogenous: “relating to or developing from external factors.” See https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=exogenous. A key term in economics drawn from the biological sciences.
- 6.
Mirowski (1989, 205–207) questions what many others consider the strong genealogical relation between Bentham’s utilitarianism and neoclassical economics.
- 7.
- 8.
There were a few exceptions. Bezemer (2009) identifies Steve Keen, Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Jakob Brøchner Madsen and Jens Kjaer Sørensen, Kurt Richebächer, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.
- 9.
The emphasis upon empirical data as a response to neoclassicism’s deductive method is questioned by Steinbaum (2019). See https://bostonreview.net/forum/economics-after-neoliberalism/marshall-steinbaum-empiricism-wont-save-us.
- 10.
Notable names are Ester Boseup, Diane Elson, Paula England, Marianne Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Ailsa McKay, Julie A. Nelson, Diana Strassman, and Marilyn Waring.
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Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (2019). Introduction: Reclaiming the Social. In: Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (eds) From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_1
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