From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social ed. by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter Eleanor Courtemanche (bio) From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter; pp. xiii + 287. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, $84.99 paper, $64.99 ebook. This fascinating and useful volume of essays marks a new stage in the study of political economy from the standpoint of Victorian studies. This subfield, with its origins in New Historicism and the "New Economic Criticism," has developed new branches in response [End Page 521] to recent work on environmental crisis, the history of slavery, and critiques of inequality that sharpened after the global financial crisis of 2008 (5). This subfield of Victorian studies has always had an edge of ideology critique, in its claim that axioms of economic law have been abstracted from their historical and social contexts and then used to dominate discourses of capitalist experience. Yet it was also defined at the outset by a rather abashed bracketing out of Marxism, as in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (1999), which claimed that "most literary critics' knowledge of economics begins and ends with Karl Marx" (edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [Routledge], 12). In response, scholars drilled down specifically on the British tradition of political economy, including the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, as well as representatives of the neoclassical or marginalist turn such as William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, and a vast, shadowy host of otherwise-forgotten economists. The goal was to carefully disentangle this theoretical tradition from its oversimplification as "capitalist ideology," and to read it for its own internal contradictions and use of literary terms, as well as its historical embeddedness in an age of turbulent industrialization and imperial expansion. That subfield was mapped out by Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and Regenia Gagnier between roughly 1985 and 2005 in work that articulated the crucial transition between "political economy," a term that admits that economics is a field structured by power, and "economic theory," which naturalizes its prescriptions with narrow mathematical certainty (10). As its title suggests, this volume follows in this tradition by defending the "social" against the presumably anti-social abstractions of economic theory. Its general thrust is to defend the empirical and inductive—observed social life and historical impasses—rather than to follow the path of formalist analysis laid out by Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell, or of Marxist-semiotic analyses of money and credit as themselves fictional. The autonomy of fictional or aesthetic ways of knowing is not the main point here. But the banishment of Marx is over, and this volume is a welcome opening in Victorian studies to some non-British and even radical approaches to economic history. The volume's introduction frames its task in terms of this critical genealogy, stressing its allegiance to historical rigor and aversion to presentism. But it also defines its intervention as making the connections between contemporary capitalist crisis and the study of the nineteenth century more "directly" than earlier work—perhaps more in the line of Audrey Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock Market Graph (2010), which connected Victorian and contemporary obsessions with stock market graphs (7). I am not sure any of this work will ever give a University of Chicago economist even a momentary twinge of regret about their discipline's limitations. However, in an age when neoliberalism seems to be cracking under multiple pressures, the opportunities for critical engagement with economics extend beyond rereading the classics. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which used novels by Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to illustrate a world of inherited financial inequality that might be returning, is referenced by several writers as a new interdisciplinary interlocutor. Though unified by their engagement with nineteenth-century political economy, the essays in this volume splinter out in many directions, each engaging with a new set of contemporary theorists and problems. [End Page 522] The essays...