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548 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:4 Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book, however, is Copeland's discussion and analysis of the complex matrix of attitudes towards the employment of women. For Austen, Burney, Edgeworth, and Wollstonecraft, employment represents a social descent, but the less literary "didactic novels stress the respectability of female employment ... for those women of the pseudo-gentry, the daughters of clergymen and other genteel professionals ... who have fallen on hard times" (p. 163). Most interesting is his classification of such positions as "odious": companion and governess; and "possible": schoolmistress, seamstress, actress, and even prostitute (pp. 166-90). The key distinction between the two classes is that while the odious positions convey more prestige, the others provide more independence. Copeland has provided a useful guide to, though not the definitive study of, money in women's fiction of the period. One would like to have seen all this material discussed in reference to the male novelists of the time, and to the century before—with useful distinctions drawn between the heroines of this period and earlier ones such as Moll and Pamela—and with reference as well to the wealth of instructional non-fiction such as Defoe's The Complete English Tradesman. Thomas K. Meier Elmira College David Kaufmann. The Business of Common Life: Novels and Classical Economics between Revolution and Reform. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xii + 196pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8018-4930-6. David Kaufmann aims to enrich the way literary historians understand liberalism, so that we no longer rest content with commonplaces about Hobbes and Locke, individualism and private property. To that end, he reminds us how the first three decades of the nineteen« century witnessed not only the institutionalizing of political economy in periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review, but also a newfound critical status and authority for fiction. In the era in which political economy became "classical," some novels became "classics," as figures such as Barbauld and Scott undertook the editorial work that equipped the novel with a canon and tradition. The promising project of The Business ofCommon Life is to disclose the complexity of liberalism by making sense of this convergence. Kaufmann wants us to understand how novels and economics operate in different ways to describe and legitimate commercial modernity. Both modes of describing human motive and action cast happiness—secular satisfaction rather than virtue—as the telos of history. Both discourses circle around what Kaufmann identifies as the "Utopian core of economic liberalism" (p. 91), the promise that the rights of private property can be squared with social needs, that "commutative rights" can accommodate "distributive justice." Kaufmann's initial presentation of the interrelations of the two discourses draws on the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adomo and (much more fruitfully) on the sociology of Niklas Luhmann, who depicts modem society as a set of co-ordinated but functionally differentiated organizational systems. This theoretical framework allows Kaufmann to avoid treating economics as a master discourse for decoding fiction, and instead present novels and economics as competing idioms for schematizing "the business of common life." The questions about jurisdiction that this use of Luhmann foregrounds—questions about that division of labour which dictates, for instance, that economics is devoted REVIEWS 549 to scientific law and the novel devoted to the realm of exceptions—also constitute the enduring dilemma posed by the history of liberalism. Disputes about the proper sphere of government are the very stuff of liberalism. Since the debate in the 1790s about "outdoor relief," the notion that the state should ensure its citizens the minimum conditions for economic existence has been perpetually countered by the claim that only the market can "make work." The Business of Common Life demonstrates the fruitfulness of engaging British novels—represented here by Frankenstein, Radcliffe's The Italian, Scott's Waverley, The Antiquary, and Ivanhoe, and Austen's Persuasion—in these terms. It is interesting to speculate with Kaufmann about how novels might compete with and complement economics in their efforts to segregate the domain of civil society from that of the state. It is interesting to think about how the Waverley novels depend on the parable of progress— the claim that economic...

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