Writing the Common Good: Literature, Economic Liberalism, and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1776-1911

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Taking its cue from Adam Smith's now-classical postulation of the harmony between economic self-interest and the common good, this project explores intersections between literary and economic discourses in Britain in the long nineteenth century. Special attention will be paid to the prolonged crisis of economic liberalism in the mid nineteenth century as well as to the conceptualization and slow institutional emergence of the interventionist state after 1870. The period saw momentous shifts in the way the relationship between economic self-interest and the common good was framed, and these intellectual shifts in turn resonated in significant ways with literary writers. Building on recent innovative research in the history of economic thought, my project traces the complex transition from the individualist bias of early and mid-Victorian liberalism to new economic and philosophical understandings of the 'state'. It is the central contention of this project that economic theory did not address itself to a purely self-contained realm of economic affairs but that it continued to make reference to a shared ethical substrate, thus enabling a busy traffic of ideas with literary authors. My project draws on substantial archival research which enables me to reconstruct how London venues such as the Rainbow Circle and the South Place Ethical Society sponsored a cultural exchange that transcended the artificial confines of literature, economics, and popular discourse. Central writers explored in this project include Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, George Gissing, Edward Carpenter, H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster. As I point out, literary authors of the long nineteenth century narrativized moral dilemmas and obligations that were also examined in contemporary economic theory; in turn, economists and moral philosophers frequently drew on the tropes and techniques of narrativization used in literary works.