Economic Agnosticism: Questioning Economic Knowledge in 19th Century Literature and Sociology

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The social sciences and humanities have dedicated their attention to the investigation of economic, and in particular monetary, forms of knowledge, arguing that these knowledges become constituted and stabilized through cultural devices, like narratives, genre conventions, strategies of persuasion and discursive inclusions and exclusions. In contradistinction to this, the proposed project investigates into discourses that question forms of monetary knowledge, and more generally the very possibility and significance of knowing the economic and the monetary. This ‘economic agnosticism’ will be traced in France of the ‘long’ 19th century with a view to literary and sociological discourses. At stake is an interpretive reconstruction of forms and formats of questioning and denying economic, in particular monetary, knowledge in sociology and literature, distinguishing both of these discourses from political economy and the emerging neoclassical economics which take a knowledge of the economic for granted. The project focuses on France of the long 19th century, as it was here that interdependencies between literary and sociological representations of societal problematics were most intensive. Thus, the project will contribute a genealogy of doubting monetary knowledge to the already existing and much-discussed genealogy of the epistemic formation and aesthetic imagination of the monetary.