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[This query comes via Michael Perelman, who originally received it, and 
wondered if anyone here could help. I will post responses and forward 
them on to the original inquirer, who is a Ph.D. candidate in English at 
UC-Berkeley. -- RBE] 
 
Can you recommend a title or two--or a scholar or two--which will give me 
a history of the terms "sympathy" and "sentiment" as they're used in 
market discourse today? I'm assuming they come out of the tradition of 
moral sentiments as adumbrated in Smith and Hume.  The dozens of volumes 
on "sentiment" and "sympathy" in American literary scholarship don't 
mention the terms' common usage in the stock and commodities markets.  My 
particular interest is in moments when "sentiment" and "sympathy"--in 
American fiction, typically virtuous, humanizing, feminizing moments of 
identification or empathy or consensus between individuals--become 
pathological and catastrophic, as in market panics.  In short, I'm trying 
to figure out what the relation between economic writers' usage of the 
terms and fiction and reform writers' usage of the terms was in the U.S. 
in the 19th century, how two extremely common discourses employed common 
terms so differently.  They would seem to oppose and confuse each other, 
but no scholarship to my knowledge has studied this. 
 
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