The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (review)

This book is a collection of papers unified by a common theme: to provide a cultural reconstruction of the theoretical changes that occurred in economic thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century and of the parallel changes that the aesthetics of the period underwent. The conception is rich and daring and here I shall attempt only to pull together some of the threads of what is a complex story.

The story runs as follows. Beginning with the marginalist revolution of William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, economic theory undergoes a deep change (93–94). The center of analysis shifts from production to consumption, from labor to pleasure, from the substantive to the formal, from value to price (41). Concerns about social welfare disappear, to be replaced by an analysis of individual efforts to pursue own desires and private interests. Utility ceases to be linked to needs (43) and becomes the repository of all human wants, desires, and fancies (44). Since wants are considered to be insatiable (45), striving for them becomes an unending process and society finds itself in a perpetual condition of scarcity. Given scarcity, conflicts of interests, competition, and property claims will necessarily follow (47). This is a very different world from that of the classical economists, whose emphasis was on the producer and on value as the embodiment of human labor. In that world, history mattered and class and market relations were viewed as temporary.

The interpretation I have briefly summarized is not new to economists, since it is a well-established tradition in Marxian economics to read marginalism as a shift to problems, such as individual consumption and pleasure, that rank low in the hierarchy of social values. Yet, it may come as a surprise to be told that this interpretation has an almost perfect match in the history of the aesthetics of the nineteenth century. A knowledge of the economic models of the period, Regenia Gagnier claims, helps to reconstruct different strands that recent aesthetic theory has in fact obscured (115).

There are at least three aesthetics from Kant to the end of the nineteenth century, Gagnier argues (115): ethical aesthetics, whose concerns are the creation of self-regulating subjects; the aesthetic of production, which focuses on the conditions of production and creativity; and the aesthetics of tastes and consumption, which became dominant at the end of the century (123). The first is the Kantian aesthetic of moral freedom that in John Stuart Mill becomes the aesthetic of the autonomous and disciplined agent not driven by passion or self-interest. The second is John Ruskin's and William Morris's aesthetics of the creator of art. The third is the aesthetic of the late Victorians, although it goes back to David Hume and Edmund Burke. In particular, it is the aesthetic of Walter Pater, who saw aesthetics as a science of pleasure, and beauty as a subjective concrete experience (54). As in economic thinking, then, so in aesthetics, the nineteenth century witnesses a progressive abandonment of the social categories of production and labor in favor of the subjectivity of a uniquely individual experience.

This reconstruction of the matching changes of economic and aesthetic models does not persuade. Not only is the method of arguing often based on associating textual evidence without reconstructing its context, but there is another, more substantial reason. Although it is true that marginalism signified an analytical shift toward individual decision making, to think that consumption and human desires play the main role in this shift is to stop at the surface narrative. Take the claim that human wants and passions are insatiable and therefore multiple and varied. How can one reconcile this with the fact that in the neoclassical world wants and tastes are assumed given and stable—as stable as the Rocky Mountains, as Gary Becker and George...