Race, Liberalism, and Economics

Contextualizing David Levy's How the Dismal Science Got Its Name; or, Revisiting the Victorian Context of David Levy's History of Race and Economics

Contextualizing David Levy's How the Dismal Science Got Its Name; or, Revisiting the Victorian Context of David Levy's History of Race and Economics Susan Zlotnick In How the Dismal Science Got Its Name (200I), David Levy opens with an analysis of an I893 depiction of John Ruskin, author of Unto This Last (I862), one of the most influential nineteenth-century attacks on classical economic theory. Levy turns to this image, the cover illustration of Ruskin on Himself and Things in General (I893), for visual proof that proslavery attitudes are embedded in the early Victorian critique of the free market. The image is a striking one. It represents Ruskin as St. George, doing battle with a man dressed in banker's garb-replete with spats, waistcoat, and moneybag. To anyone familiar with the representational practices of Victorian culture, the figure holding the moneybag, a monstrous hybrid of man, ape, and dragon, is instantly recognizable as a caricature of a capitalist . However, Levy (200I, 5) pegs the figure as an ex-West Indian slave formally attired and thereby signifying the "merger of a black person and the discipline of economics." This original interpretation supports Levy's contention that the critics of capitalism were hostile to both blacks and the free market, but it does not hold up under scrutiny.I Unfortunately for Levy, the capitalist's vaguely racialized features cannot be read as evidence of racial identity. In this case, the features indicate the capitalist's otherness-not his race-and thus underscore his alien85 86 RACE. LIBERALISM. AND ECONOMICS ation from Englishness and the thoroughly English Ruskin, who is appropriately costumed as the nation's patron saint. Deployed in a variety of ways throughout the nineteenth century, race was a reality to the Victorians , in that they believed in racial differences that denoted moral, physical , and intellectual divides between people ofdiverse skin colors. Yet they also used race figuratively, with race functioning as a floating signifier that could be attached to any group (e.g., the Irish or the urban poor) to signify its otherness. Mistaking a figurative use of race for a literal one, Levy fails to grasp the image's main point, one frequently articulated in the late Victorian period: that capitalism itself was inimical to traditional English ways of life.2 This misreading of the Ruskin image highlights the fundamental problem with Levy's thesis: his unfamiliarity with the complicated cultural landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. As Levy publicly stated at the conference, the motivating force behind his scholarship is the desire to show that the free market is the black man's best friend. Since the daily headlines in the New York Times or even the Wall Street Journal do not offer him much evidence, Levy goes trawling in historical waters in search of the proofhe needs. He drifts back to the early decades ofVictoria's reign in order to argue that the Victorian critics of capitalism (Ruskin as well as Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens) embraced slavery as the alternative to capitalism, while the political economists of the period, such figures as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay, championed the freedom of all men through their advocacy of the free market. In brief, there are three main thrusts to Levy's argument. First, he recasts the Victorian critics of capitalism as history's villains: he ascribes an undeserved proslavery pedigree to them and argues for an intimate link between anticapitalist and proslavery attitudes. Second, he tries to recuperate capitalism by (mis)characterizing the economists as antiracist, abolitionist "good guys" (Levy 2001, 58). Third, Levy accuses the contemporary literary establishment of a reprehensible (and perhaps racist) silence about the racism of Ruskin, Carlyle, and Dickens, a silence that in Levy's mind arises from the infamous anticapitalist biases that latter-day English professors share in common with the Victorian men of letters. Even if these assertions were correct-and, in my view, they are not-it remains unclear to me how they would ultimately prove that the free market is a boon to people of color. However, I will leave that problem for others to ponder. The modest goal of this chapter is to address the historical inac- Contextualizing David levy's How the Dismal Science Got Its Name 87 curacies that throw into doubt many of Levy's conclusions about the Victorian era. Levy's difficulties with history seem to arise...