Les Lois de l’économie selon les romanciers du xixe siècle. Par Christophe Reffait

Abstract

Political economy, wrote Flaubert in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, is a ‘science sans entrailles’. ‘Heartless’ is probably a better translation of the phrase than ‘gutless’, ‘merciless’, or ‘pitiless’, although, as Christophe Reffait shows in this large and well-organized monograph, all these terms were very readily associated with political economy throughout the nineteenth century. Reffait’s book takes this characterization as his starting point, but his investigation is very different from the usual reconstruction of the avalanche of hostile adjectives aimed at the subject of political economy. Its aim is to examine the uses made of some of the major conceptual components of the history and historiography of political economy in the literature of nineteenth-century France, from the time of Stendhal and Balzac to that of Jules Verne and Émile Zola. The first of these components is the distinction between the passions and the interests, a distinction usually associated with the history of eighteenth-century economic thought and the scholarship of the famous development economist Albert O. Hirschman. This is followed by an extended set of examinations of the subjects of the division of labour, the law of markets, or the idea that supply creates its own demand, and the principle of population, subjects often linked with the thought of Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Thomas Malthus respectively. Reffait’s aim is to piece together the ways in which, partly because of their presence in Stendhal’s works, many of the key concepts of political economy were taken up and scrutinized aesthetically and analytically, not only in subsequent works of literature but also in an impressively wide range of accounts and reviews in contemporary periodicals. The result is a study of how the history and conceptual resources of political economy were integrated into the imaginative and dramatic worlds of literature and, inversely, an investigation into the light that the resources of literature help to throw on the content of political economy. Although at times these results are somewhat predictable — partly because the intellectual initiative seems, for both chronological and analytical reasons, to belong to the conceptual resources generated by political economy, and partly because of the overlap between much of the subject matter of political economy and works of fiction — Reffait’s book forms a real companion piece to comparable studies of political economy in nineteenth-century British and American literature. The result is a thought-provoking examination of the relationship between fiction in literature and abstraction in economics, which is certain to ensure that Reffait’s book will have as large a readership among historians of economic, social, and political thought as among specialists of literature.