Moralizing the economy: Contestations of economic authority in mid-Victorian literature and culture.

摘要

In this dissertation I argue that literary critiques of classical political economy in mid-Victorian England were a response to the popularization of economic theory in the early nineteenth century. Ricardo's followers not only claimed for his theories the scientific authority to which his own writings aspired, but also extended those claims into the domains of morality, politics, and social theory in order to earn for Ricardo's theories a broader cultural support. In response, writers such as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew argued that political economy's definitions of human nature and the "laws" of human activity were at once invalid and dangerous. Dickens and Mayhew contested political economists' isolation and privileging of economic factors in their approach to social relations and individual psychology. In addition, these non-specialist critics contested the very methodology whereby political economists claimed sole authority over the "economic" as their area of expertise. In place of the economic analyses offered by scientific economic theory, they advocated a more general approach to both the "economy" and what many political economists defined as "non-economic" issues. Only by seeing the moral, social, psychological, and economic aspects of an issue as continuous and interconnected could Victorian thinkers and the Victorian public discover true solutions to the problems confronting their society. Even some political economists thought that the Ricardian version of economic theory was too narrow and exclusive. Thus, J. S. Mill responded to criticisms of classical political economy by attempting to expand it from within--to make a place for the concerns of the social, psychological, moral, and political within economic theory. While the critical projects of Dickens, Mayhew, and Mill failed in their attempts to determine the direction that economic analysis would take in the nineteenth-century, those projects nonetheless illuminate an important moment in the historical constitution of economic authority. These cultural contestations reveal the complexity and unevenness of the historical process led to that constitution; even more importantly, they reveal that the constitution of economic authority was a historical process.