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

这个项目以亚当·斯密关于经济私利和公共利益之间的和谐的经典假设为线索，探索了漫长的19世纪英国文学和经济话语之间的交集。将特别关注十九世纪中叶经济自由主义的长期危机，以及1870年之后干预主义国家的概念化和缓慢的制度化崛起。这一时期见证了构建经济自利和公共利益之间关系的方式发生了重大转变，这些智力转变反过来又在文学作家中产生了重大共鸣。基于最近在经济思想史上的创新研究，我的项目追溯了从维多利亚时代早期和中期自由主义的个人主义偏见到对“国家”的新的经济和哲学理解的复杂转变。这个项目的核心论点是，经济理论本身并不是针对纯粹自给自足的经济事务领域，而是继续参考共同的伦理基础，从而使文学作者能够进行繁忙的思想交流。我的项目借鉴了大量的档案研究，使我能够重建伦敦的场所，如彩虹圈和南方伦理协会如何赞助一场超越文学、经济学和通俗话语的人为限制的文化交流。本项目探讨的核心作家包括哈丽特·马丁诺、乔治·艾略特、乔治·吉辛、爱德华·卡彭特、H·G·威尔斯和E·M·福斯特。正如我所指出的，漫长的十九世纪的文学作家叙述了道德困境和义务，这些也在当代经济理论中得到了审视；反过来，经济学家和道德哲学家经常利用文学作品中使用的叙事的比喻和技巧。

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.