Commentary: Economic and Literary History : An Economist's Perspective

Economics and Literature

A recent New York Times article examined an academic discipline and found that it resembled a secret society, initiating curious entry-level graduate students into the practice of a craft that was unintelligible to the outside world, speaking a bizarre language, learning highly stylized modes of analysis that seemed to have little relevance to the world as outsiders experienced it and to have little practical application. These graduate students entered the field believing that they would be studying something familiar to their experience and found that they had little idea about how the profession was actually practiced. This description could apply to a number of departments as commonly viewed, and it would surprise few if it were about Literary Studies. In fact, of course, it was about Economics. ¹

In another article in the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco quotes the Provost of the University of California at Berkeley to the effect that "[o]n every campus there is one department whose name need only be mentioned to make people laugh." She went on to warn: "You don't want that department to be yours." It would not surprise those at some universities if his article were about Economics, but of course Delbanco is concerned about the fate of Literary Studies as it is currently practiced, with the spread of "theory." ²

In his essay for this New Literary History issue, Scott Meikle notices that economists have a distinct way of thinking. Indeed, to outsiders economists are often a tribe apart, speaking and writing in an arcane tongue filled with Greek letters and bizarre formulations that seems designed to repel the outsider, displaying a disdain for the outside world and the general intellectual public. But it could be said that almost any academic discipline as currently practiced has a distinct method of analysis. Every academic discipline has become increasingly specialized, or professionalized, in the true sense of professionalization; that is, turned into a distinct body of practitioners, with its own rules of admission, its own criteria of excellence, and its own language. University departments have become distinct corporations in the medieval sense, just as the fields of law and medicine traditionally have been.

The trend toward greater specialization in the academy is consistent with greater specialization and division of labor throughout the economy. Regenia Gagnier, in her contribution to this volume, recounts how both Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer understood the division of labor to be the driving force behind both greater complexity in the organization of society and the emergence of individuality as we know it. Both of these authors saw greater complexity and individuality as constituting Progress. The proliferation of specialists in the academy, as elsewhere, could be seen as giving rise to "narratives of perfection." The thickening of the blacksmith's arm and the lengthening of the sight of the sailor are metaphors which could be used to describe the sharpening of focus that a student achieves through rigorous training in one of the specialized disciplines, whether it be a natural science, a social science such as Economics, or a humanist discipline, such as English. If division of labor in the production of goods and services provides much greater abundance than is possible when every man produced for himself, it would seem to follow that greater division of labor in the production of knowledge should provide similar abundance.

While there is a general perception that academic disciplines have become more and more specialized, there is a concurrent realization that those same disciplines have become increasingly imperialistic in their ambitions, imposing their particular methods on material that was formerly left to others. For example, it is not unusual to find courses taught in English departments that cover relations between different social classes, advertising, political movements, industrial production, and elections. Some fear that it is possible to graduate with a major in English without having read any poems or...