------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (January 2009)

Mary Poovey, _Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain_. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008.  x + 511 pp. $59 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-226-67532-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by David Mitch, Department of Economics, University
of Maryland –- Baltimore County.


In recent decades, literary critics have generated a body of scholarship
that they have come to label the New Economic Criticism. This body of
work defies ready summary but suffice it to say that it represents the
interest of literary critics in economic literature and matters economic
from a variety of perspectives. It has become sufficiently extensive to
be the subject of the edited volume by Woodmansee and Osteen (1999). New
economic critics are publishing book length studies with major academic
presses, hold important chairs in university literature departments
(e.g. Marc Shell at Harvard, Catherine Gallagher at Berkeley), and are
producing new generations of literature doctorates.  Mary Poovey (Samuel
Rudin Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, New York
University) is one of the leading new economic critics and her latest
work _Genres of the Credit Economy_ can be seen as a contribution to
this field and certainly draws heavily on it; on pages 10-14 she
provides her own distinctive overview of this field of literary criticism.

Poovey’s book itself is an exercise in what could be called genre
analysis and it is both apt and ironic as she herself notes on p. 14
that her latest work further confirms her own originality in producing
new intellectual genres. This ability is already on display in one of
her earlier books, _A History of the Modern Fact_ (1998), which can be
described as a history of epistemology in work on economic and social
affairs. That book put forward the plausible, albeit provocative, claim
that by the first half of the nineteenth century, writers on economic
and social affairs had come to emphasize quantitative measures regarded
as objective facts as the foundation of knowledge and policy discussion
in contrast with a previous skepticism of such facts.  The social
constructionist perspective evident in her 1998 book is amply on display
in her latest effort.  To my mind, she is fundamentally correct in the
underlying premises both of her earlier book and of her new one. _A
History of the Modern Fact_ presumes that “quantitative objective facts”
in actuality entail considerable amounts of political and social
interpretation (e.g. election vote counts, census population totals,
national income measures, cost of living and poverty indexes). Her
latest book presumes that the functioning of a modern credit economy
fundamentally entails elements of trust. I suspect that one could
readily find widespread agreement with both premises with the latter in
particular being perhaps self-evident. However, in the case of her
earlier book there are issues to be raised regarding her chronology of
changing cultural attitudes towards quantification in social affairs,
her degree of mastery of vast bodies of both contemporaneous literature
and more recent historiography, and the extent to which the changes in
epistemological cultural attitudes she maps out are primarily
relativistic or have entailed genuine social progress. For a quite
skeptical take on Poovey’s earlier book by a leading historian of
science see Margaret Jacob’s essay in _History and Theory_ (2001).

¬_Genres of the Credit Economy_ states in its opening sentences that it
tries to address two questions that arise from Poovey’s earlier book:
“If the kind of knowledge that contemporary society values is really the
modern fact, then why does the discipline of Literary studies matter?
What can Literary scholars do?” (p. 1). As Poovey explains in a footnote
to this passage, these dilemmas arise insofar as prioritizing facts
tends to devalue the activity of interpretation, the activity that would
seem the focus of Literary studies.  Although Poovey at points (p. 14)
labels her latest book as a history, its chronological development is
less linear than in her previous _History of the Modern Fact_.  Her
latest book alternates between tracing general intellectual trends and
fine-grained textual analysis of specific works; she jumps back and
forth in time in her consideration of various genres. After setting
forth her general thesis that imaginative, economic, and monetary forms
all emerged as distinctive genres in response to the rise of a credit
economy, the core of Poovey’s text consists of detailed readings
concentrating on modes of argumentation, organization, and style in
selected works of economic and imaginative literature written in Britain
between 1650 and 1870.

Poovey acknowledges that other intellectual genres that she does not
consider were involved in the modern differentiation of economics and
literary criticism; she points in particular to natural philosophy (p.
5). However, she notes “a conviction that many contemporary scholars
share -- that economics and Literary studies have some special
relationship to each other.”  She goes on to argue that the two fields
should be studied together because of a common concern with what
literary critics term the problematic of representation. Poovey defines
the problematic of representation as “one way scholars describe the gap
that separates the sign from its referrant or ground (of value or
meaning), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution,
obscurity” (p.5).   It is perhaps apparent why the relation between sign
and referrant should be an on-going concern of literary scholars;
however, she argues that financial crises have also brought this problem
to the fore in the fields of economics and finance and that it is useful
to consider the parallel treatments of this problem in the cases of the
two disciplines. She also takes note of the frequent employment of
financial themes by nineteenth century British novelists.

Another term sometimes used by literary critics also recurs throughout
her discussion:  naturalized (or alternatively naturalization). By
naturalization Poovey means a process by which behaviors which are
initially new and strange and hence subject to suspicion and scrutiny
become customary and taken for granted. She emphasizes its importance
for the use of new types of monetary instruments in a credit economy:
“money has been _naturalized_: through the social process that I
describe in this book, money has become so familiar that its writing has
seemed to disappear and it has seemed to lose its history as (various
forms of) writing” (p.3). To highlight the significance she attaches to
these two terms, she introduces each of them by placing them in italics
in the text (pp. 3, 5).  And one of Poovey’s central claims is that both
naturalization and the problematic of representation were central to
functioning of money in the rise of the modern credit economy.

In a preamble, she describes the emergence of imaginative literature,
financial writing, and monetary instruments as distinctive written
genres over the course of the eighteenth century in Britain.  She argues
that all three genres developed as ways of “naturalizing” the use of
money and hence of dealing with the problematic of representation
inherent in monetary instruments: that such instruments frequently only
symbolize some underlying item of value without guaranteeing access to
the item itself.

The first two self-identified chapters of the book consider writing
about money in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first
chapter takes up the attention given by contemporaries between the late
seventeenth and early nineteenth century to the problematic of
representation inherent in money. She backs into this through looking at
J.R. McCullough’s collection of pamphlets dealing with money. She gives
particular attention to Joseph Harris’ “An Essay upon Money and Coins”
published in 1757-58, in which he challenges the ideas that either the
imprint on a coin’s face or its metallic content is its source of value.
Then after quickly touching on Locke’s views on the nature of money, she
fast-forwards to debates in the early nineteenth century involving
Ricardo, McCullough, and Macaulay among others on the desirability of
convertibility between coins, paper money, and bank notes. In the last
section of the chapter, Poovey offers the intriguing suggestion that
writing regarding money in the eighteenth century frequently blurred the
distinction between fact and fiction and she identifies a fact/fiction
continuum in this regard.  The second chapter looks at episodes in what
she identifies as generic differentiation of treatments of Money. She
notes that Defoe’s work frequently blurred fact/fiction distinctions and
in particular focuses on a manuscript of his since labeled _Roxanne_.
Poovey argues that it was later editors who classified this work as
fiction; she suggests that one of Defoe’s aims in this text was the
non-fictional one of explaining the workings of credit. One example of
the insights her literary background provides is her observation (p. 98)
that Defoe employed the classical oral rhetorical device of elaboration,
i.e. offering long lists in order to engage listeners in an imaginative
flight, in written form, with a similar aim of engaging the reader’s
imagination.  She turns to parallels between James Steuart’s work on
Political Economy and Fielding’s novel _Tom Jones_, noting similarities
in the treatment of personal character in each. She then notes Adam
Smith’s more abstract mode of argumentation in contrast with Steuart’s
more fictionalized narrative. The chapter concludes with observations on
the blend of fact and fiction in Thomas Bridges’ _Adventures of a
Bank-Note_ (1770-71), a work based on depicting the perspective on
passing surroundings a bank note might have as it made its way from
holder to holder, including intervals when tucked in a woman’s bosom (p.
149).

A first “interchapter” then takes up the rise of book publishing and of
the issuance of bank commercial paper. This really constitutes her brief
notes on matters that are pertinent to issues elsewhere in the book; as
she notes herself, these issues have been taken up in much greater depth
by other authors; indeed each of these topics deserves and has been
given book length treatment by others and I did not find the 17 pages
she devotes to them sufficient to add much further insight to this other
work.

Chapters three and four take up the emergence of economic writing as a
distinctive set of genres in the early nineteenth century. Chapter three
takes note of increasing skepticism about the workings of the growing
credit economy. It examines publications by critics of paper money such
as William Cobbett and John Francis Bray. Chapter four takes up the
differentiation of writing on economic theory from financial journalism.
After giving relatively brief attention to David Ricardo’s employment of
abstraction in his theoretical work, she focuses at some length on J.R.
McCullough as a writer engaged in both economic theory and journalism.
She then turns to Walter Bagehot’s and D. Morier Evans’ emergence as
specialized economic journalists while attributing to William Stanley
Jevons the effort to define economics as a narrow specialist science,
giving particular attention to his interest in developing a sun spot
theory of the business cycle. Poovey’s general argument in this chapter
is that economic journalism and abstract economic theory became
increasingly differentiated in the early to mid nineteenth century as
part of a social process of naturalizing credit instruments. Economic
journalists such as Bagehot and Evans instilled familiarity with the
financial system and depicted the occasional crash or panic as an
aberration from normal stability. At the same time the emergence of
abstract economic science as practiced by Jevons with his work on
sunspot theory -- precisely because it employed arcane, mysterious
techniques apparently at variance with observable reality -- in Poovey’s
view helped establish an expertise which could testify to the value of
bank money. This authority provided a way of dispelling doubts about
credit instruments implied by the problematic of representation.

Chapter Five then turns to literary authors and suggests that Wordsworth
and Coleridge were keen to separate aesthetic from commercial value in
literature. Poovey suggests that their concerns were motivated by the
growth in demand for cheap popular publications. In a second
interchapter, Poovey notes that recent work by literary critics on
Harriet Martineau employs formal aesthetic criteria of organic unity in
evaluating Martineau’s work though claiming to deviate from literary
formalism. She then proposes an alternative approach to interpretation
she labels “historical description” as a means of engaging with texts
while placing them in a larger historical narrative. She illustrates her
approach in Chapter Six which offers meticulous readings of novels by
Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope focusing on passages in which
financial matters come to the fore. Her arguments include the audacious
economic determinist claim that Jane Austen’s _Pride and Prejudice_ was
in large degree a response to the Bank Restriction Act of 1797: the
breach of promise to redeem bank notes with gold explicit in the Bank
Restriction Act according to Poovey motivated Austen’s interest in
portraying Elizabeth Bennett’s concern about her potential broken
promise to thank Mr. Darcy.

The book concludes with a four page “Coda” in which Poovey bemoans both
the low current prestige of literary studies in comparison with that of
economics in modern American and British universities and the divide
that has arisen between the two disciplines.

Recent economic events would seem to make it abundantly evident that the
modern economy is a credit economy and that loss of confidence in credit
instruments and their underlying connection to value can wreak economic
havoc.  Thus, Poovey’s theme is certainly timely. The book itself raises
numerous stimulating questions and surveys a wealth of literature both
past and more contemporary with which I, for one, was not previously
familiar.

One general issue of evaluation posed by her book is that implied by the
questions she poses in her introduction -- namely whether a
post-modernist literary critic can bring any useful tools to bear in
understanding the history of economics, economic history or modern
economics.  Quite possibly, new economic critics, including Poovey, are
aiming their work primarily at fellow literary critics; but as Poovey
herself wonders in the passage cited above from her introduction, should
those outside of this guild take the burgeoning body of work by new
economic critics seriously?

Difficulties are certainly evident with the scope of Poovey’s book.
While the range of her reading is impressive both in contemporary
sources and in the more recent historiography both of social scientists
and literary critics, there are notable omissions in her surveys of
relevant literature. Moreover, at points she openly acknowledges not
having completed her scholarly homework and assumes an alarmingly
nonchalant attitude about not having done so. These issues surface when
at points she fails to distinguish or at least elides the fields of
economic history and the history of economic thought.  This shows up in
a particularly egregious manner in her introduction (pp. 9-10) in which
she admits her inability to trace out the relationship between the
modern discipline of economics and its nineteenth century precursors and
blames this on the lack of interest of modern economists in the history
of their discipline. She then states (p. 10), “I can only hope that some
day an economic historian will write a version of this history from the
other side so that Literary scholars like myself can see how this
discipline’s present informs the way we understand its past.” I presume
that she means “historian of economics” rather than “economic historian”
in this passage.  Poovey clearly has done some reading in the history of
economics and indeed even cites such standard works as Schumpeter’s
_History of Economic Analysis_.  I am not clear on what are the
requirements for Poovey’s desired “history from the other side” or why
Schumpeter’s work or Mark Blaug’s less compendious _Economic Theory in
Retrospect_ or the Warren Samuels, Jeff Biddle, and John Davis edited
_Companion to the History of Economic Thought_ would not suffice.  It
would seem that Poovey simply ran out of energy in trying to master the
history of economics as well as modern economics. So why undertake to
write the parallel histories of economics and literary criticism from a
modern perspective unless one is prepared to take on the admittedly
formidable task of reading reasonably deeply in the comparison
discipline as well as one’s own discipline? Later (p. 94) she claims
that “economic historians rarely consider Defoe’s writing at any
length.” However, the works she cites to illustrate this are all
histories of economics. No mention is made of early modern economic
historian Peter Earle’s book entitled _The World of Defoe_.

Given Poovey’s focus on the rise of the credit economy, a particularly
glaring omission from her bibliography is Anne Goldgar’s _Tulipmania_
(2007), which provides particularly rich documentation of the
psychological reactions and issues of trust and betrayal associated with
the mid-seventeenth century Dutch tulip bubble. Perhaps Goldgar’s book
came out too late for Poovey to incorporate it in her own analysis.  In
her discussion of the problem of monetary shortage no mention is made of
the important study by Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde, _The Big
Problem of Small Change_ (Princeton, 2002).

Central parts of Poovey’s argument are often based on a complex and
extensive secondary literature. While she does have her own distinctive
take or twist in most of these instances, she frequently does not
succeed in the space she has allotted in convincingly expounding the
arguments and evidence in question. For example, her claim that money is
simply one form of written literary genre comes across as a bit
contrived in the 25 pages she devotes to it in comparison with Deborah
Valenze’s book length study, _The Social Life of Money in the English
Past_ or Carl Wennerlind’s article “Money Talks but What Is It Saying?
Semiotics of Money and Social Control.”   Poovey (p. 59) does
acknowledge and cite extensively from Valenze’s work while arguing for
her own greater emphasis on the role of other written genres in
naturalizing money as a genre.

I found the organization and coverage of Poovey’s book rather fragmented
and indeed cubist in nature; by cubist, I mean offering shifting
perspectives on a given object rather than a cohesive, continuous
overview. This may in large part reflect her unabashed use of the tools
of literary criticism. Rather than attempting any sort of comprehensive
or connected overview, Poovey picks and chooses particular works for
intensive analysis. While her choices are intriguing, they also seem
idiosyncratic.  I was unaware before reading Poovey’s book of Thomas
Bridges’ _Adventures of a Bank Note_; and its premise of a banknote’s
eye view of the world is interesting. However, it is less evident to me
that this work is central to understanding eighteenth century literature
on finance.

Although _Genres of the Credit Economy_ considers examples of how the
fields of economics and literary criticism treat the problematic of
representation, at the end of the day it doesn’t really develop the
comparisons and contrasts between them.  This, in part, stems from the
book’s cubist organization as it jumps back and forth between time
periods and subject areas and genres without offering a developed
concluding chapter that pulls together her take on how writing on
finance and economics has dealt with the problematic of representation
inherent in financial markets in comparison with how literary studies
have done so.

Poovey’s book itself has the phrase “mediating value” in its subtitle;
at points she does take up the contrast between market value and
aesthetic value.  And she does note issues regarding the influence of
market criteria on aesthetic values raised both by nineteenth century
authors and subsequent critics; both groups of writers essentially
employed aesthetic values to assess the workings of the market. Yet she
does not consider work by economists that discuss the engagement between
the market and the aesthetic, both using the market to evaluate
aesthetics and the use of aesthetics to evaluate the market. Thus no
mention is made of the work of David Galenson, among others, that uses
art auction prices as a means of assessing relative artistic or
aesthetic merit or the work of Tyler Cowen that argues that market
forces of competition lead to cultural richness and diversity rather
than bland homogeneity, as is commonly alleged. Nor does she consider
arguments by Cowen (2008) regarding how literary works can provide
fodder for developing economic models, nor Frank Knight’s claim that
“economics is a branch of aesthetics and ethics to a larger degree than
of mechanics” (1935, p. 97) -- and she only briefly touches on the work
by McCloskey regarding rhetorical forms in economic argument.

Poovey’s choice of end point for her study in the 1870s would seem to
derive from her focus on the relationship between the problematic of
representation and the rise of the credit economy. She argues that by
the 1870s the field of economic theory had become differentiated from
financial journalism. Both endeavors in her view served to naturalize
how the credit economy deals with the problematic of representation --
financial journalism by providing familiarity and economic theory by
providing the authority of the technical expert. In the meantime,
imaginative writing and literary criticism had begun to develop its own
distinctive approach to the problematic of representation through
emphasizing elite aesthetic values over popular taste in literature.

However, by abruptly ending her account of disciplinary differentiation
in the 1870s, it seems to me that Poovey forestalls consideration of
important aspects of both continuity and change central to understanding
evolving contrasts and relationships between the economic and literary
fields of endeavor.  One literary genre that has been persistently used
by economists and writers on economics over the centuries as a means of
reaching general audiences is the parable and its kindred, the fable and
the allegory. She does give some mention to Daniel Defoe’s and Harriet
Martineau’s use of the parable. Yet the continuity of this tradition
would seem worthy of further consideration. She makes no mention of
Mandeville’s _Fable of the Bees_ (though she does give brief attention
to Mandeville in _History of the Modern Fact_). And after taking up
Martineau in the second interchapter, Poovey drops further consideration
of this genre. But notable nineteenth century practitioners include
Frederic Bastiat in France and more recently in the U.S. Paul Heyne and
Russell Roberts, as well as the pseudo-nominal Angus Black and Marshall
Jevons among others.  (Richard Stern, the novelist, was invited to
review Marshall Jevons’ _Fatal Equilibrium_ for the _Journal of
Political Economy_ under George Stigler’s editorship and Stern did not
give it very high literary marks.) Perhaps Poovey’s focus on the
financial sector accounts for her decision to treat this genre only
briefly. However, Hugh Rockoff’s article on the _Wizard of Oz_ as a
monetary allegory and subsequent literature (Hansen 2002; Dighe 2002)
suggests scope for literary critics to consider the persistence of this
genre even with a narrower focus on financial and monetary matters.

The employment of the genres of the parable, fable, and allegory in
economic writing raises the more general question of whether an
examination of the relationship between economics and literature should
focus on how each field has engaged with ethics, the nature of human
happiness, politics, and social policy. It can be argued that increasing
concerns to establish economics as a science, with strong empirical and
formal foundations -- i.e., to distinguish economics from political
economy on the one hand and to emphasize the importance of aesthetic,
conceptual and formalistic concerns in the study of literature on the
other -- have displaced or at least obscured an underlying concern with
ethics and human well-being common to both economics and literary
studies. These are issues of long standing pedigree (see for example the
work of Frank Knight, Lionel Robbins, Matthew Arnold, Chris Baldick,
Wayne Booth, and Deirdre McCloskey). While this theme is not given much
consideration in Poovey’s book, it is a central focus in the book by
Poovey’s student, Claudia Klaver, _A/Moral Economics_.  However, many of
the key developments in this regard in both disciplines seem to me to
have occurred in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century as
each became increasingly centered in academic institutions. Despite
Poovey’s claim that it is common concern with the problematic of
representation that leads to an inherent affinity between economics and
literature, one might well think that the underlying architectonic
discipline is ethics rather than economics or literary criticism despite
intellectual imperialistic tendencies of each of these latter two
disciplines. But Poovey’s 1870 cutoff for her study would seem to
preclude examination of this issue.

Poovey’s take on the differentiation of economics and literary studies
does allow for both external, societal influences and internal
disciplinary considerations in both fields. However, it seems to me that
she does put more emphasis on external social influences in the cases of
economics and financial journalism than literary studies, casting
British economists and financial journalists as running-dog lackey
apologists for an emerging credit economy. One danger of genre analysis
is that genres themselves become reifications based on overly rigid
boundaries between fields of intellectual endeavor. One central issue
she poses is the degree of specialization which has occurred not only
between such broad spheres of endeavor as writing on economic affairs
and imaginative literature but also within such spheres. One of the
chief merits of Poovey’s study is bringing into play a rich array of
ephemeral and journalistic publications in conjunction with more
enduring classics of economic theory.  Poovey’s underlying premise is
the common presumption of the inevitability of increasing intellectual
specialization. In her account, eighteenth century writers such as Defoe
and Smith covered a broad range of topics even within a given work --
with Defoe in particular blurring the fact and fiction distinction in
his coverage of financial affairs. Then in the early nineteenth century,
in her view, work on economic theory came to be distinguished from
writing aimed at popular audiences, in turn distinguished from coverage
offered by financial journalists. Similarly, literary writers were
increasingly concerned to emphasize the importance of distinctive
aesthetic imperatives from those of the market for popular literature.
In her concluding “Coda,” she suggests that in the early twenty-first
century, it is unusual for academic economists to produce work aimed at
a general audience, citing in a footnote Steven Levitt’s _Freakonomics_
and Robert Shiller’s _Irrational Exuberance_ as exceptions, while it is
even rarer in her reckoning for literary critics to write for general
audiences.

However, taking the case of economics, it is of interest to consider
longer term trends in the extent to which prominent economists have
continued to cross the borders or even simultaneously engage in not only
academic work on economics but also economic policy making, business
endeavors, and writing aimed at student and general audiences, even if
economists in general are not necessarily renaissance people.  One can
begin with the case of David Ricardo, who at various points in his
career engaged in stock broking and service in Parliament as well as
writing on economics. If Ricardo’s writing on economics was in some
sense more intellectually specialized than Adam Smith’s, he was far more
engaged than Smith in business and political endeavors.  And although
Poovey depicts William Stanley Jevons as emblematic of the narrowing of
economics into a largely theoretical, mathematical, and
university-centered discipline,  she considers only his work on marginal
utility and sun spot theory.  She makes no mention of Jevons’
influential policy-oriented publications including _Methods of Social
Reform_, _The State in Relation to Labour_, and _The Coal Question_. And
there is certainly a long line forward of  prominent academic economists
who have been active in policy circles as well as producing introductory
  textbooks and other literature aimed at general audiences such as
Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Milton
Friedman. Currently Ben Bernanke’s introductory economics textbook is
still in print and coming out in new editions while he serves as Federal
Reserve chairman following his quite successful academic career at
Princeton and another Princeton academic, Paul Krugman, the latest Nobel
laureate in economics, is also an introductory textbook author, _New
York Times_ columnist, and television talking head -- to name just a
couple of many possible current examples. And academic economists have
also pursued financial ventures, as the notorious 1997 episode of
Nobel-laureates Robert C. Merton’s and Myron Scholes’ involvement in the
Long-term Capital Management debacle illustrate. In other words, the
increasing specialization of texts by genre does not necessarily reflect
a corresponding specialization of the authors who write them. In the
case of economics, one could explain some of this by the extensive
market both for textbooks and popular economic commentary in contrast
with, say, fine imaginative literature. Publishers, perhaps, have much
stronger economic incentives to induce leading economists to produce
introductory textbooks and work aimed at popular audiences than to do
the same for literary critics.  Books by Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, or Stanley Fish may not have the sales potential of those by
Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman.  But this still leaves the ongoing
pattern of those who have pursued successful careers in both academic
economics and economic policy-making from John Maynard Keynes to
Lawrence Summers.

A parallel issue unexplored by Poovey and presumably occurring after her
end period of the 1870s is the apparent increasing separation between
those who write imaginative literature and those who produce criticism
of it. The examples of literary criticism she cites in chapters 5 and 6
are primarily by those also engaged in imaginative writing such as
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Trollope. This raises the question of whether
the divide between those who write imaginative literature and those who
produce literary criticism has become wider than the gap between those
who write on economic theory, those who craft economic policy, those who
write economic journalism, and those who engage in financial affairs.
And if this is the case, what accounts for the greater degree of
specialization by those engaging in literary studies than in economic
studies?  Have the underlying ethical commitments of economists to
social well being been stronger than those of more ivory tower literary
critics?  Although Poovey does not explore these issues, her mode of
genre analysis should at least be credited for giving rise to them.

Poovey mentions J.R.McCullough’s activity as a book and pamphlet
collector but omits consideration of those in subsequent generations who
engaged in this activity. Some might infer that an increasingly
analytical mind set resulted in the extinction of the economist
bibliophile, although Poovey herself does not explicitly state this.
However, W.S. Jevons, who in the eyes of literary scholars such as
Claudia Klaver and Poovey had quite narrow analytical interests, in fact
appears to have been a quite keen economics bibliophile. By Keynes’
account, Jevons transmitted this bug onto the famed economics book
collector and Cambridge economist, Herbert Foxwell. And Keynes himself
was an avid antiquarian book collector (Keynes, _Essays in Biography_;
Harrod, _Life of Keynes_).  The importance of the book and pamphlet
collector for establishing the dimensions of various intellectual realms
and genres may warrant further consideration. Foxwell’s collections
formed the basis for both the Goldsmith’s and Kress libraries and these
collections have now entered electronically searchable cyberspace as the
_Making of the Modern World_ database. Keynes thought highly enough of
Foxwell’s contributions to economic science as to pen a 23-page obituary
for the _Economic Journal_ on Foxwell’s demise in 1936.

Despite the limitations that I think are evident in Poovey’s book, the
genre perspective she offers is worthwhile for pointing to alternative
intellectual boundaries and for posing questions that may not readily
occur to those working within the disciplines she considers.  She
usefully brings into play a rich array of contemporary and ephemeral
literature bearing on economic and financial matters. And her notion of
the fact-fiction continuum raises interesting issues about alternative
relationships between evidence and theory. The new economic criticism
more generally can be seen as providing economists and more specifically
historians of economics and economic historians a means of addressing
what could be called the Robert Burns problem: seeing ourselves as
others see us.  My own impression is that while historians of economics
and economic historians have not totally ignored the new economic
criticism, they have hardly embraced it with enthusiasm. Offsetting any
inclination to welcome those with an interest in one’s own subject
matter, are likely primordial instincts to defend professional turf
boundaries and claims of scholarly expertise. Furthermore, I suspect
that much of the new economic criticism is grounded in an ideological
outlook that some historians of economics would perceive as uncongenial.
Thus Poovey in her concluding Coda (p. 419) refers to “the longing for
an alternative to the market model.”  The extent and complexity of this
body of work is a further reason for outsiders to neglect it; the new
economic criticism, at least from this reviewer’s limited experience, is
not an easy read yet there seems lots of it to process before one can
claim to have much sense of it. Nevertheless, the new economic criticism
probably does deserve further attention by historians of economics and
economic historians. As Robert Burns reminds, seeing ourselves as others
see us can free us from many a blunder and foolish notion as we become
more aware of the louses crawling on our own bonnets.

References:

Matthew Arnold (1869), _Culture and Anarchy_.

Chris Baldick (1983), _The Social Mission of English Criticism
1848-1932_, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frederic Bastiat (1845), “The Candle Makers’ Petition,” _Economic Sophisms_.

Mark Blaug (1997), _Economic Theory in Retrospect_ (fifth edition),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wayne C. Booth (1988), _The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction_,
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Angus Black (1970), _A Radical’s Guide to Economic Reality_, New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Angus Black (1971), _A Radical’s Guide to Self-Destruction_. New York:
Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Thomas Bridges (1770-71), _Adventures of a Banknote_ (four volumes).
Reprint: New York: Garland, 1975.

Robert Burns (1786), “To a Louse: On Seeing One On a Lady’s Bonnet, At
Church.”

Tyler Cowen (2000), _In Praise of Commercial Culture_, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.

Tyler Cowen (2004), _Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing
the Worlds’ Cultures_, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tyler Cowen (2008), “Is a Novel a Model” in Sandra J. Peart and David M.
Levy eds. _The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations on
Analytical Egalitarianism_, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Ranjit Dighe (2002), _The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L.Frank
Baum’s Classic as Political and Monetary Allegory_, Westport, CT:
Praeger Publishers.

Peter Earle (1977), _The World of Defoe_, New York: Atheneum.

Robert Frank and Ben Bernanke (2008), _Principles of Macroeconomics_,
New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

David Galenson (2001), _Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of
Creativity in Modern Art_, Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press.

Anne Goldgar (2007), _Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the
Dutch Golden Age_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bradley Hansen (2002), “The Fable of the Allegory: tThe Wizard of Oz in
Economics,” _Journal of Economic Education_, 33 (3): 254-64.

Roy Harrod (1951), _The Life of John Maynard Keynes_, London: Macmillan.

Paul Heyne (1973), _The Economic Way of Thinking_, Chicago: Science
Research Associates.

Margaret Jacob (2001), “Factoring Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern
Fact,” _History and Theory_, 40 (May): 280-89.

Marshall Jevons (1985), _The Fatal Equilibrium_, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press

William Stanley Jevons (1866), _The Coal Question: An Enquiry Concerning
the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our
Coal-mines_, London: Macmillan.

William Stanley Jevons (1882), _The State in Relation to Labour_,
London: Macmillan.

William Stanley Jevons (1883), _Methods of Social Reform and Other
Papers_, London: Macmillan.

John Maynard Keynes (1936), “William Stanley Jevons,” _Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society_.

John Maynard Keynes (1936), “Herbert Somerton Foxwell,” _Economic
Journal_.  Reprinted in _The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes.
Vol.X, Essays in Biography_, London: MacMillan St. Martin’s Press.

Claudia C. Klaver (2003), _A/Moral Economics: Classical Political
Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth-Century England_, Columbus:
Ohio State University Press.

Frank Knight (1935), “The Ethics of Competition.” Reprinted in _The
Ethics of Competition and Other Essays_, New York: Harper.

Frank Knight (1935), “Economic Psychology and the Value Problem.”
Reprinted in _The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays_, New York: Harper.

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells (2009), _Macroeconomics_ (second edition),
Worth Publishing.

Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005), _Freakonomics: A Rogue
Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything_, New York: Harper
Collins.

_Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmith’s-Kress Library of Economic
Literature_/ Cengage Learning.

Bernard Mandeville (1924), _Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices,
Publick Benefits_ (With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and
Explanatory by F.B.Kaye), Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Deirdre McCloskey (2006), _The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of
Commerce_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Donald McCloskey (1985), _The Rhetoric of Economics_, Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.

Mary Poovey (1998), _A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge
in the Sciences of Wealth and Society_, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Lionel Robbins (1932), _An Essay on the Nature and Significance of
Economic Science_, London: Macmillan.

Russell Roberts (2002), _The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance_,
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Russell Roberts (2006), _The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and
Protectionism_ (third edition),  Prentice Hall.

Russell Roberts (2008), _The Price of Everything: A Parable of
Possibility and Prosperity_. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hugh Rockoff (1990), “The Wizard of Oz as a Monetary Allegory,” _Journal
of Political Economy_ 98 (4): 739-60.

Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle, John B. Davis, editors, (2003), _A
Companion to the History of Economic Thought_, Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.

Thomas J. Sargent and Francois R. Velde (2002), _The Big Problem of
Small Change_, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Joseph Schumpeter (1954), _History of Economic Analysis_, London: Allen
and Unwin.

Robert J. Shiller (2000), _Irrational Exuberance_, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

Richard G. Stern (1986), “Review of _The Fatal Equilibrium_ by Marshall
Jevons,” _Journal of Political Economy_ 94 (3): 683-84

Deborah Valenze (2006), _The Social Life of Money in the English Past_,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carl Wennerlind (2001), “Money Talks, But What Is It Saying? Semiotics
of Money and Social Control,” _Journal of Economic Issues_ 35 (3): 557-74.

Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, editors (1999), _The New Economic
Criticism: Studies in the Intersection of Literature and Economics_,
London: Routledge.


David Mitch is Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, Baltimore
County (email: [log in to unmask]). He is the author of “Market Forces and
Market Failure in Antebellum American Education: A Commentary” _Social
Science History_ (Spring, 2008). He is currently revising an essay on
“Chicago and Economic History” for the forthcoming _Elgar Companion to
the Chicago School of Economics_ and is also working on high stakes
educational testing in Victorian England.

Copyright (c) 2009 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the
author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net
Administrator ([log in to unmask]). Published by EH.Net (January
2009). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.


-------------- FOOTER TO EH.NET BOOK REVIEW  --------------
EH.Net-Review mailing list
[log in to unmask]
http://eh.net/mailman/listinfo/eh.net-review