Abstract
The modern definitions of “political economy” and “literature” emerged around the same time in eighteenth-century Britain, although both concepts were centuries in the making. One important work that anticipates both, for example, is Thomas More’s Utopia, which employs a series of literary techniques to stage debates about the role of wealth in the commonwealth. Some two hundred and fifty years later, the chief architect of modern political economy Adam Smith also developed his ideas about political economy in and through his study of literature and rhetoric. Beginning with a brief consideration of Smith’s own intellectual development, this chapter then exmaines the intersection between “literature” and “political economy” from Utopia to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in relation to three overlapping rubrics: the nation, language, and the body.
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Notes
- 1.
Foucault in The Order of Things defines literature as a type of “pure language” that emerges in the nineteenth century as both a useless and “enigmatic” category of writing (89).
- 2.
All quotations in this essay have been modernized and use American spelling.
- 3.
All citations of Smith in this chapter are to the Glasgow edition of his works published in six volumes by the Clarendon Press at Oxford between 1976 and 1983. Each of the six volumes has different editors. Volume 2, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, reproduces The Wealth of Nations in two parts, so citations to that work will provide both volume number and part (e.g., “2.1”) before giving page numbers after the colon.
- 4.
The labor theory of value was designed, as Craig Muldrew notes in his essay “From Commonwealth to Public Opulence,” to free “the industrious laborer to earn what the market would give him in order to buy goods whose prices had not been inflated by monopolistic manipulation” (333).
- 5.
Smith mentions in the lines following this quote that poverty discourages marriage.
- 6.
Michael C. Amrozowicz argues that Smith’s vision of history draws on the “stadial” theory of history introduced by Sir John Dalrymple in his An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain (1757), adding language to the two criteria used to distinguish each of the four stages of history: means of subsistence and attitude toward private property (151).
- 7.
The full title of Gosson’s work is The School of Abuse: Containing a Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and Such Like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; Setting Up the Flag of Defiance to Their Mischievous Exercise, and Overthrowing Their Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, Natural Reason, and Common Experience. For Sidney’s defense, see Vickers, ed., 336–91.
- 8.
As Hythloday’s valorization of Greek over Roman sources suggests, however, More’s civic humanism goes beyond Cicero to its Greek source in Plato.
- 9.
The metaphor of a tree was also employed by both Bacon and Descartes in the seventeenth century as emblems for systematic philosophy. See, e.g., Redman, 24.
- 10.
See, e.g., the discussion of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales in Brian Vickers, ed., pp. 24–25. English authors from Thomas Elyot to Ben Jonson elaborate on the bee metaphor as a defense of poetry and playwriting, as Jonson says in his Notes on Literature that the poet should process raw materials like the bee in order to “draw forth out the best and choicest flowers…and turn all into honey” (Vickers ed., 586).
- 11.
All quotations from Shakespeare are from the Norton edition edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al.
- 12.
McCloskey repeats and refines the subject of this address in Chapter 2 of her Rhetoric of Economics, which is entitled “The Literary Character of Economic Science.”
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Kitch, A. (2018). Literature and Political Economy. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_29
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