A Herstory of Economics. Edith Kuiper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Edith Kuiper
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Экономика
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509538447
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in one’s life. The Discourse is an intriguing essay in which the author starts out making a set of rational arguments for the right to live a happy life, followed by some instructions of how to achieve happiness and arguments about the importance of love. The text ends in what can be read as a reflection on her relationship with Voltaire.

      The debate on a secular ethics, or the new morality of commercial society, also took place on the other side of the Channel. In Scotland, an important center of the Enlightenment movement, David Hume (1711–76) published A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). He was known as an atheist, which prevented him from ever holding an academic position (Carlyle, 1973). Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Adam Smith’s predecessor at the University of Glasgow, stressed the tendency in human beings to engage in benevolent actions. The second part of his An Inquiry into the Original of our Idea of Beauty and Virtue (2004 [1726]) addressed “the moral good and evil” and described benevolence as a driving motive in human behavior. These discussions were all part of the larger debate on “the nature of man” that evolved around David Hume at the time. Although they did not have access to academic institutions, women writers made substantial contributions to these debates anyway. Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), for example, critiqued and compared Shakespeare’s and Voltaire’s works and the morals ingrained in them, deciding – of course – in favor of Shakespeare. So, who was this Elizabeth Montagu?

      Elizabeth Robinson was born into a gentry family in Yorkshire in 1718 and was the older sister of Sarah Robinson Scott, author of A Description of Millennium Hall (1762). Elizabeth was a smart, spirited young woman who obtained most of her education from her grandfather, a librarian at the University of Cambridge (Kuiper and Robles-García, 2012). In her early twenties, she married money: the 54-year-old landowner and scholar Edward Montagu, owner of several coalmines and large estates. Elizabeth Montagu would become a well-known member of London society. Until a few decades ago, we only knew her as the Queen of the Bluestockings. The Bluestocking Society was a group of women and a few men who gathered over dinner to discuss culture, politics, and their writings. After the death of her husband in 1776, Elizabeth took over the management of the coalmines and estates, which she ran successfully for the rest of her life; indeed, so successfully that, at her death, she was the richest woman in England.

      Montagu stressed particularly Shakespeare’s extraordinary ability to let the audience sympathize with his main characters, rich or poor. She did this against a background in which sympathy was a widely discussed concept and the authority on the topic was Adam Smith. The two had met on a trip to Scotland in 1766 and both had pleasant memories of their conversations, but they did not keep in contact.

      In articulating his moral philosophy, Smith applied and defined a specific conceptualization of masculinity. Both Stewart Justman (1993) and I (Kuiper, 2003) have analyzed Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as a gendered text, a text that is structured by a specific definition of masculinity and femininity. Justman sees Smith’s reasoning as an attempt to retain male autonomy in the context of the emerging commercial society, which was generally perceived as feminine. Applying a psychological framework, I describe Smith’s reasoning throughout his book as a way to construct a masculine identity by identification with an imaginary father. For Smith, who never met his father since he died a few months before his son was born, it is the identification with the impartial spectator that provides a man with the moral authority to make decisions: “The man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command … He does not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts them. He almost identifies himself with, he almost becomes himself that impartial spectator, and scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him to feel” (1984 [1759]: 146–7)

      Although Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is an impressive account of the process through which men develop a conscience, the perception of this process is limited to modern standards, and women play hardly any role in the book. It is, nevertheless, Smith’s understanding of human nature and his perception of masculinity or “manhood” that would become ingrained in political economy as the moral basis for economic decision-making – or rational choice, which is how individual economic behavior came to be defined. In the context of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, women were neither considered rational nor legally able to make contracts (see, e.g., Folbre, 2009).