Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice: Historical Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages

In The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, I traced a broad cultural shift during the second half of the nineteenth century from an Enlightenment conception of Reason as the mind's ability to understand and improve the world to rationality as the individual's chosen path towards a goal irrespective of the quality of the choice.¹ Under this shift, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as universal or collective consensus, sensus communis, would give way to individual choice as Taste, or mood, or lifestyle. The goal of Rational Choice theory is not the particular substantive end or product but rather the formal mapping or modelling that leads to a desired end (whatever it is) in the form of subjectively ranked preferences. In these mappings and rankings, any attempt to comment on the quality of revealed preference is typically labelled "paternalism," and the preferences are "revealed" by the choices. Any constraints on choice are typically left to one side as "exogenous."

While Rational Choice theory was colonising most social science disciplines, when I published my book in 2000 it had received no other attention in literary and cultural criticism. Yet two philosophers in particular have used literature, specifically nineteenth-century fiction, to reflect on the limits of Rational Choice theory. In Poetic Justice (1995), Martha Nussbaum found that Rational Choice was inadequate to human experience in its reduction of quality to quantity; aggregation to total or average utility without concern for distribution; sum-raking or maximizing procedure; conception of self-interest as motivation; and exogenous preferences as simply given rather than socially mutable.² Nussbaum proposed literature as an alternative that allowed us to assess quality of life and that through sympathetic imagination involved the reader in the assessment. Reading literature, she thought, gave us a basis of sympathy with each individual life and a state of judicious spectatorship essential to human flourishing.

In Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999) and Ulysses Unbound (2000) Jon Elster argued that the main value of art is emotional, not cognitive nor perceptual, and that the emotions matter "because many forms of human behaviour would be unintelligible if we did not see them through the prism of emotion." In his more recent Closing the Books (2004), he considers how transitional justice, or retribution and reparation after a change of political regime, may be shaped by the immediate urgency of emotion and by the decay of emotion over time.³ For Elster, the interaction between emotions and incentives is more complex than most cost-benefit models, and he called for an "historical psychology" that would include anthropology, sociology, and neurobiology, plus fiction for a "fine-grained understanding of real-life emotional phenomena."⁴ In claiming that the "main value of art is emotional not perceptual nor cognitive,"⁵ Elster, and to a lesser extent Nussbaum, endorsed a dualism only too acceptable to social scientists. Interestingly, when Elster lists the disciplines to be consulted in historical psychology—anthropology, sociology, neurobiology—he does not then include literary criticism, but rather "fiction." Yet the first three are disciplines; their objects are human kinds, society, the body. The last, fiction, is the object or field of the discipline of literary or cultural studies. Elster should have written anthropology, sociology, neurobiology, and literary and cultural studies or humankind, society, the nervous system, and literature, but not three disciplines plus raw fiction, the object of a discipline.

This article proposes a less dualistic historical psychology, in which reason is not the province of science and emotion not that of literature, and in which we are not asked to choose between what Elster sees as "the economic imperialism" that explains emotions by the Rational Choice paradigm and the "cultural-studies imperialism" that sees emotions as endlessly malleable social constructions.⁶ C. Wright Mills argued as early as The Sociological Imagination (1959) that the genre of biography joined historical change and social structure within the dynamics of particular lives and that only biography could make available to us the detailed processes of historical change.⁷ It is well...