Literature and the Economics of Liberty

3. In Defense of the Marketplace: Spontaneous Order in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair

There are plenty of plots in the play but no plot to it; no one, villainous or virtuous, appears to be in charge.... [T]he fair itself is the engine that precipitates the action of the play... Jonson’s market operates, in effect, as an “invisible hand,” diverting private vices to the public benefit.... [T]he forms and conventions that Jonson introduced to achieve his dramatic purposes in the play do adumbrate the solutions that Adam Smith would later propose to those who feared the divisive social consequences of unrestricted competition. Like The Wealth of Nations, Bartholomew Fair imagined the market as a power capable of generating its own legitimacy through a negotiated process of mutual authorization. By making the fair itself the occasion of countless private calculations and, at the same time, the vehicle of their ultimate public reconciliation, Jonson was taking a step, however tentative, toward a functionalist legitimation of a free and placeless market.

I thank my colleague Katharine Eisaman Maus for calling my attention to this passage and for other help with this essay. My analysis may be regarded as a working out in detail of Agnew’s original insight, although, for what it is worth, I did arrive at the point independently, and my use of Austrian economics, rather than Marxist, to analyze Jonson’s view of the market leads me to emphasize different aspects of the play.

Condemning capitalist “hunger for profit,” it stressed the importance of maintaining quality standards, which it defined in great detail. The typeface of three “i”s must be exactly the same in width as one “m,” and the “m” must conform precisely to a model “m” deposited with the syndics and deputies of the guild, who were to inspect the thirty-six printing shops once every three months in order to make sure that each contained the requisite minimum of four presses and nine fonts of type, both roman and italic, in good condition.

Hither resort people of all sorts, High and Low, Rich and Poore, from cities, townes, and countrys; of all sects, Papists, Atheists, Anabaptists, and Brownists: and of all conditions, good and bad, vertuous and vitious, Knaves and fooles, Cuckolds and Cuckoldmakers, Bauds, and Whores, Pimpes and Panders, Rogues and Rascalls, the little Loud-one and the witty wanton.

Disputes in Religion will never be ended, because there wants a Measure by which the Business would be decided: The Puritan would be judged by the Word of God: If he would speak clearly, he means himself.... Ben Johnson Satyrically express’d the vain Disputes of Divines by Inigo Lanthorne, disputing with his puppet in a Bartholomew Fair. It is so; It is not so: It is so, It is not so, crying thus one to another a quarter of an Hour together.

The theater not only mimed new social relations within the visible framework of the old: it improvised—as a matter of its own constitutive conventions—a new social contract between itself and its audience, a new set of conditions for the suspension of disbelief that became over time the preconditions of most modern drama.

4. Shelley’s Radicalism: The Poet as Economist

The Country banks are breaking:
The London banks are shaking:
Suspicion is awaking:
E’en quakers now are quaking:
Experience seems to settle,
That paper is not metal,
And promises of payment
Are neither food nor raiment.

Quoted from The Works of Thomas Love Peacock (London: Richard Bentley, 1875), vol. 3, p. 222. On Peacock’s attack on paper money, see Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 118–23. This section also includes four examples of James Gilray’s marvelous cartoons satirizing the reign of paper money in Britain.

One would really suppose, that the general creed was, that the Bank Directors were the Gods of the country, that they were our Sustainers if not actually our Makers, that from them we derived the breath in our nostrils, that in and through them we lived, moved, and had our being.

On the issue of public credit and mystification, see Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 88–89.

No credit is due me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of the class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes.

Physicians, Parsons, Lawyers, and others of the higher callings in life, do, in fact, labour; and it is right that there should be persons of great estate, and without any profession at all; but then, you will find, that these persons do not live upon the earnings of others: they all of them give something in return for what they receive. Those of the learned profession give the use of their talents and skill; and the landlord gives the use of his land or his houses. (Cobbett’s italics)

we should, at all times, be free to cultivate the individuality, and follow the dictates, of our own judgement. If there be anything in the idea of equality that infringes this principle, the objection ought probably to be conclusive. If the scheme be, as it has often been represented, a scheme of government, constraint and regulation, it is, no doubt, in direct hostility with the principles of this work. But the truth is that a system of equality requires no restrictions or superintendence. There is no need of common labour, meals or magazines.

This clear warning against what have become socialist economic policies is a good indication that, despite the view of many intellectual historians, Godwin, just like his son-in-law, does not belong in the camp of protosocialists. For the contrary view, see Scrivener, Radical Shelley, p. 36: “If Shelley adumbrates Marx, so does Godwin.”

He speaks for the bourgeoisie who, at this stage of history, feel themselves the dynamic force of society and therefore voice demands not merely for themselves but for the whole of suffering humanity. It seems to them that if only they could realise themselves, that is, bring into being the conditions necessary for their own freedom, this would of itself ensure the freedom of all.... The bourgeois trammelled by the restraints of the era of mercantilism is Prometheus, bringer of fire, fit symbol of the machine-wielding capitalist. Free him and the world is free.... Shelley is the most revolutionary of the bourgeois poets of this era because Prometheus Unbound is not an excursion into the past, but a revolutionary programme for the present. It tallies with Shelley’s own intimate participation in the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement of his day. (Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry [New York: International Publishers, 1947], pp. 91–92)

5. Capitalist Vistas: Walt Whitman and Spontaneous Order

55Miller, “Introduction,” Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. xlviii.

6. The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism

For his gain, hordes of his fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably... lashed to their work by the invisible whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our “dangerous trades” ever see the shareholders whose power is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction.

Quoted from George Bernard Shaw, Major Critical Essays (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 198. See also p. 205.

I slipped in and out among the promenading crowd in a most unbecoming fashion, continually stepping out of the way of generals, cavalry officers, hussars, ladies.... It was sheer torture, a continuous intolerable sense of humiliation at the idea... that I was nothing but a fly before all that fine society.

The underground man is particularly humiliated by an encounter with an officer he knows: “He also stepped out of the way of generals and personages of rank; but men of my ilk... he simply crushed; he walked right at them, as if there were but empty space before him, and never yielded the way.” Quoted in the translation of Mirra Ginsburg, Notes from Underground (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 60–61. The situation of the Invisible Man in London literalizes what Dostoevsky presents metaphorically. Ralph Ellison’s notion of the invisible man also turns on the idea that his fellow human beings refuse to recognize him: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” See Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: New American Library, 1952), p. 7. McConnell plausibly argues for the influence of Wells’s The Invisible Man on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, “especially in the celebrated last scene of the novel, where the Professor is described as passing, unseen, like a plague among men” (Science Fiction, p. 116).

I was really surprised to observe how rapidly the young men and women whipped away the goods displayed for sale during the day.... Finally all the chairs were turned up on to the counters, leaving the floor clear. Directly each of these young people had done, he or she made promptly for the door with such an expression of animation as I have rarely observed in a shop assistant before. (pp. 111–12)

Griffin is struck by how much faster people work in a department store, but also by how much takes place behind the scenes, out of the sight of the customers. Once again, Wells highlights the “invisibility” in the working of capitalism.

It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account,... unless some process of manufacture changes the nature of the commodity (a mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and they are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. (p. 287)

This is exactly the kind of thinking Hayek identifies as the common man’s misunderstanding of the merchant’s activities: “That a mere change of hands should lead to a gain in value to all participants, that it need not mean gain to one at the expense of the others... was and is nonetheless intuitively difficult to grasp” (Fatal Conceit, p. 93).

It makes me regular uncomfortable, the bare thought of that chap running about the country!... And just think of the things he might do!... Suppose he wants to rob—who can prevent him? He can trespass, he can burgle, he could walk through a cordon of policeman as easy as me or you could give the slip to a blind man! (pp. 67–68)

I realized my career had got into a very awkward cul-desac.... There was nothing for me now but to stick it for at least a year, get some better clothes, save a few pounds, hammer away at my writing, and hope for some chance of escape.... Had that summer weather and my returning health and vigour lasted for ever, I should have slackened slowly from my futile literary efforts and reconciled myself altogether to the role of a second rate secondary teacher.

Wells sounds even more like Griffin in a letter in response to his second teaching assignment: “I have suffered as the son of not very well-to-do and rather illiterate parents at the hands of these scholastic pirates and I do not think I could refrain from the chance of sticking a knife under the ribs of this system of fraud if every friend I had stood on the opposite side” (quoted in Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Life, p. 80).