Call for papers


Oeconomia – History /Methodology/Philosophy,


Special Issue: “Economics and literature: beyond praise and disparagement”



Deadline for submission: November 1st , 2012


Planed publication of the issue: 2013


Editors: Estrella Trincado Aznar, Jérôme Lallement


See http://weboeconomia.org/call_for_papers.html .



Since the nascent of political economy in 17th century, and even before, 
literature has been both a place for broadcasting and challenging economic 
ideas through idealizing fables and pastiches. In turn, economists could 
borrow from literature some ways to present their own ideas or to criticize 
alternative doctrines. The purpose of this special issue is to reflect on 
the transformations of the frontiers between economics and literature: to 
investigate how literature can reflect economic ideas and arguments and to 
see how economics and economists have dealt with literary presentations of 
economic ideas.

Regarding the complex links between economics and literature, it is quite 
certain that very different national traditions can be identified. For 
instance, it is sometimes said that the 1848 Revolution in France 
established a clear-cut divorce between economics and literature. Similar 
breaking points may have occurred at different times in different countries. 
Later on, economists that were against the use of mathematical symbolism and 
reasoning would be labeled “économistes littéraires”. From this last phrase, 
one is allowed to think that, from the marginalist revolution onward, not 
only literature had become of no use to the development of political economy 
but also that it was now something incompatible with its development as a 
science.

Things are probably not that simple, since the boundaries of literature 
itself have necessarily changed in parallel with the transformations of 
society, and that what could be expected from literature at the end of 19th 
century, after the burst of modernity, was quite different from what could 
be expected in the end of 17th century. Literature has always evolved in 
relation to the development of society and human knowledge, taking as its 
own raw material the representations of the world expressed in all fields of 
science and philosophy. Therefore, literature has always redefined its own 
boundaries as it was progressively facing the development of political 
economy, moral philosophy and political thought as organized discourses. 
Again, it would have to cope with the rise of other social sciences in the 
19th century, and more largely with the institutionalization of the 
production of knowledge and the rise of disciplinary boundaries.

Therefore, the interplay between economics and literature is twofold. On the 
one hand, political economy progressively developed as an autonomous 
discourse, where arguments, ways of thinking, proofs, debates, 
contradictions, examples, commentaries, hypotheses, conclusions, have been 
progressively normalized in such a way that literature would no longer 
appear as an adequate means for broadcasting its own discourse and 
representations of the world. On the other hand, as political economy was 
progressively organizing itself as a discipline, literature would reflect in 
a different way upon the development of economics, either to ridicule its 
logical and abstract way of thinking, or to condemn its development as a « 
dismal » science, or possibly to make it a source for literary inventions 
and novelty.

Oeconomia – History /Methodology/Philosophy, plans to publish papers dealing 
with this subtle and moving links between economics and literature. It 
welcomes articles dealing with a particular work, author, national 
tradition, or providing a broader view of the relations between economics 
and literature through the study of specific genres and sub-genres (farces, 
comedies, pamphlets, fables, novels, philosophical novels, essays, utopias, 
etc.) and the way it is bound to reflect upon the transformations of 
economics. Articles dealing with original economic ideas from well-known 
writers are also welcome. Authors are invited to submit an article (in 
English or in French) at: http://www.editorialmanager/oec. For any 
complementary question, please contact us at [log in to unmask] Editors 
should retain the right not to go ahead with the special receive enough 
papers of sufficient quality. If there are some strong enough, then they 
could be published as stand-alone papers.