As a literary scholar, I think we need to reevaluate such enthusiasm about Piketty’s use of literature as data. In particular, I believe literary critics need to assess the consequences of the feeling, shared among these reviewers, that literature can provide facile and transparent access to the economic realities of the nineteenth century. In this essay, I challenge this assumption by examining the complex ways in which Piketty deploys literature to undergird his assertions about the economic past of Europe. Then, I demonstrate how Piketty’s use of literature, while considered and reflective, originates in the attitudes of behavioral economics, despite his concerted attempts to avoid it. Finally, I turn to the analysis of literary scholars who examine Piketty’s use of literature using the techniques of “big data.” Their techniques show how the use of literature in Piketty’s Capital points to more fundamental differences about what qualifies as evidence in cultural study.

In Capital, Piketty uses literature in two ways that contrast quite strongly with those identified by his laudatory reviewers. First, he uses literary characters to personalize his arguments, making them more accessible to readers and portable for other criticism. He calls the insight that inheritance makes individuals richer than their income ever could “Vautrin’s Lesson.” He names the problem of inherited wealth dominating those who gain money from income “Rastignac’s Dilemma.” Both of these phrases draw on figures from the novels of Balzac and both of these literary episodes help structure Piketty’s book by serving as section titles. These titles reveal that some of Piketty’s thinking about historical economics originated in literature. He said in a 2014 interview that he initially became interested in questions of wealth accumulation by wondering whether Rastignac’s anxieties about becoming rich were widely shared in nineteenth-century France or were unique to Balzac who, Piketty notes, was “obsessed with his own debt.”

In addition to personalizing larger economic forces, Piketty uses literature to illustrate the effects of historical economic realities and, more controversially, he sometimes uses literary references themselves as the evidence for that empirical reality. For example, what Piketty calls the “classical patrimonial society” of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Europe is also named “the world of Balzac and Austen.” This world is typified by the sort of gentry country estate depicted in the works of the era’s most famous landscaper, architect Humphry Repton, and by the manners of its inhabitants, represented in the novels of Austen.

The contrast to these lavish country estates that Repton helped create and that Austen described was the impoverished nineteenth-century world of urban France often found in Balzac’s novels, whose moments are so frightening because, Piketty claims, they “[contain] such precise figures” itemizing its penury.

Piketty is well aware of the difficulty of economists’ confidence that their specific models best represent economic realities. He offers that the “verisimilitude and evocative power” of novelists like Austen and Balzac is one “no statistical or theoretical analysis can match.” “Film and literature, nineteenth-century novels especially,” he enthuses, are “full of detailed information about the relative wealth and living standards of different social groups.” Because the “physical reality of inequality” also possesses a “fundamentally subjective and psychological dimension,” Piketty believes there will always be a value in the way art and literature capture income inequality. The artistic reveals otherwise rarefied econometrics and presents critical rhetorical strategies for popularizing the abstruse findings of economics.

The question that Piketty never resolves—perhaps cannot be expected to resolve—is the consequence of seeing literature not just as “verisimilitude” but also as “detailed information,” as potentially another form of those distribution tables and income indexes that make up his ample and publicly available datasets. He insists, for example, that among Austen, Balzac, and their readers, “money had the same meaning.” The shared meaning of money resulted from the stability of monetary values and the consistent wealth accumulation that occurred as nations used taxes to pay off the public debts to its creditors. “Hence,” Piketty writes, “it is no surprise that wealth is ubiquitous [omniprésent] in Jane Austen’s novels: traditional landlords were joined by unprecedented numbers of governmental bondholders.” Piketty immediately continues: “(These were the same people, if literary sources count as reliable historical sources).” (In the French, he writes this assertion as: “…en grande partie les mêmes personnes, si l’on en croit les récits littéraires comme les sources historiques…”)

The language of this parenthetical phrase explicitly considers whether literary sources “count” (“can be believed” or “can be trusted”) as reliable historical sources of economic data. Despite the seeming uncertainty introduced by Piketty’s language, his analysis seems to indicate that he believes that literature does count—in every sense of that term—as reliable information. He argues, for example, that Germinal or Oliver Twist “did not spring from the imaginations of their authors, any more than did the laws limiting child labor.” Instead, he seems to propose that they arose from historical circumstances for which their authors are a kind of conduit. Balzac may have been obsessed with his debt, but it was the economic realities that propelled his writing and created the shared understandings among Austen’s readers.

From one vantage, this is not an especially controversial way to read literature; for decades, literary critics have evaluated how empirical reality is differentially represented in imaginative writing. But Piketty’s confidence in the ways literature can capture the empirical realities of the economic past shares much with the ideologies of behavioral economists like Dan Ariely and Tyler Cowen, who explain life events as disparate as house purchases, poetry readings, and food selection as decisions of taste and preference reducible to quantifiable forces of supply, demand, and price.

The tendency to explain social phenomena through economic models and quantification is not new, arguably dating back to Gary Becker, an innovator in the field of the economics of human behavior. As Becker writes in his 1975 paper on money and marriage, economists can use “economic theory … to explain behavior outside of the monetary market sector, and increasing numbers of noneconomists have been following their examples.” Becker describes marriage, for example, as a “scarce resource” in a market economy. Such scarcity has consequences for social organization, reproduction, and population growth, leading him to conclude that the marriage market demonstrates “compelling additional evidence on the unifying power of economic analysis.” Personal and socio-cultural choices have underlying economic dynamics, Becker concludes, whether individuals are aware of it or not.

Michel Foucault recognized the gravity of this shift toward economic analysis as a “unifying power.” Foucault referred explicitly to Becker in his 1970s lectures at the Collège de France as an origin of neoliberalism. He noted that the economic human being described in Becker’s research “appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced” so that he is “the correlate of a governmentality.” (Becker humorously responded to Foucault’s critique in 2012, claiming he “like[d] most of it and did not disagree with much.”)

Becker’s sense that economic analysis can be modified to evaluate any human behavior is a powerful methodology with consequences for how we think about art and literature. Consider this account from Dan Ariely, who, in an effort to prove that “we are all economists” who “hold the basic beliefs about human nature on which economics is built,” recalls an experiment he devised about the concept of price anchoring. Price anchoring is a notion that humans overly rely on an initial price when they determine the value of a good or service. Ariely describes how he begins his experiment by reading from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to a group of students. He then asks one group of students whether they would pay him $10 to have him read poetry; he asks a separate group of students whether they would listen to him read poetry if he paid them $10. Afterward, he solicited bids for his poetry reading services from all of the students. He found that those asked if they would pay him offered more money for poetry reading than those whom he offered to pay. The initial “anchor”—whether Ariely seemed ready to pay or be paid to read poetry—altered their monetary valuation of the same experience.

Of course, Ariely conflates this monetary valuation with the “pleasure” or “pain” of an aesthetic experience. He concludes that in his experiment he is like Tom Sawyer, for “[m]uch like Tom Sawyer, I was able to take an ambiguous experience [poetry reading] … and arbitrarily make it into a pleasurable or painful experience” depending on the price—that is, depending on whether students thought they were getting a “good” price to hear Ariely read.

This example is meant to be partly humorous, as Ariely speaks with self-deprecation about his poor skill at reading poetry. But the intermixture of price anchoring with the performance of Whitman’s poetry and the economic interpretation of Twain are linked directly to the methodological confidence of a figure like Becker. The primary assumption is that cultural experiences, like encountering Whitman’s poetry, fundamentally depend on price; art, like iron ore, is a “scarce resource” whose quality can be quantified.

It is within this context that Piketty’s arguments about the reliability of literature as an archive of historical economic data become so crucial. As literature becomes a dataset for econometrics, whether it is pursued by the methods of Piketty or Ariely, we are increasingly forced to ask ourselves what kind of data literature provides.

One answer might be offered by the new forms of literary criticism developing at the intersection of big data, digital humanities, and distant reading. Using these techniques, Ted Underwood, Hoyt Long, and Richard Jean So examined one of Piketty’s assertions about literature and economics: the supposedly precipitous decline in novelistic references to money in the twentieth century. For Piketty, this amounts to the dissolution of money as possessing a shared meaning as it did in the “age of Austen and Balzac.” Underwood, Long, and So disagree, concluding that while readers should “trust” Piketty on the significance of income inequality, they should “ignore what he says about literature.” Piketty’s account of literary history is “wrong,” they claim; in fact, “it’s exactly the reverse of Piketty’s story about the disappearance of money” with references to “specific units” of currency in English-language literature nearly doubling (from 2 instances to 4 instances per 10,000 words of text) between 1800 and 1950, the period during which Piketty maintains it declines.

They reach these conclusions by identifying references to monetary values in 7,700 novels published between 1750 and 1950 found in HathiTrust Digital Library. However, as with most criticism, the dilemma of computational analysis is determining what qualifies as data to be put into the model. For digital humanists—and for literary critics especially—these decisions about data are provoked in part by the excursions of social scientists, especially economists, into the literary.

Is it significant, either culturally or formally, that the number of references to money nearly double between 1800 and 1950 in 7,700 novels? It’s unclear whether the mathematics tell us that it is or isn’t. As Underwood, Long, and So themselves suggest, such results might be explained by the changing audience of novels over these two centuries. Typically, these questions of significance have been resolved by matching measurable data—for example about changing patterns of literacy in the Anglo-American world—to assertions about how individual literary works are constructed and used by readers. For me, the literary text is the bedrock unit of analysis, and examining how it is constructed and influenced by historical and political forces is the basis of my professional analysis. I make an argument in concert with a corpus of primary and secondary texts to support the significance of my observations.

The quantitative analysis of the kind Underwood, Long, and So apply to Piketty’s assertions might compel a reexamination of this model by forcing literary scholars to use other measures of significance. It might be that these quantitative measures of literature reveal underlying patterns of significance that can only be viewed from extremely large gatherings of texts. Or perhaps, as with the analysis of the paragraph by Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti, it is an attempt to sensitize us to overlooked (and undervalued) structures of literature. Much of the unease about the scholarship of digital humanities results from the way big data and digital humanities have inventively altered the form, especially the visual form, of literary criticism by populating it with graphs, tables, charts, and numerical figures about word frequency, word proximity, and topic modeling.

For a literary criticism that has been dominated by a single form—continuous prose occasionally interrupted and accented by representational images—these changes in form are substantial and should not be overlooked. They require literary critics to read arguments in ways that are largely alien to their training.

Still, as the techniques of digital humanities expand and become more commonly known and as they become more firmly integrated into institutions of higher education, with their own economy of prestige and reputation, digital humanists will be called on again to explain the aim of expanding the scope of factual knowledge about literature that can be collected and analyzed with its methods (to adapt an insight from Barbara Herrnstein Smith). In the process, digital humanities may need to distinguish its procedures from those Foucault associates with the neoliberalism of behavioral economics. One answer might be that measuring literature in these ways is an intervention in the ongoing contest over what counts as data and how data becomes evidence in the analysis of culture. In some sense, the appeal to measurement and quantification by literary scholars may be a response, decades later, to the assertions of scholars like Becker that economic analysis can sufficiently explain the production of all cultural phenomena, including literature. Rather than see literature as economics in another form, literary criticism’s use of measurable, quantifiable data offers a rejoinder to behavioral economics by asserting that literature possesses its own arithmetic, its own data that can be analyzed using tools adapted to its uniqueness.

Further Reading

References to Thomas Piketty are to Capital in the Twenty-first Century translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, 2014). References to the French edition are to Le capital au XXIe siècle (Paris, 2013).

David Harvey’s review of Piketty is “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital.” For Larry Summers’s comments, see “The Inequality Puzzle” in The Democracy Journal (Summer 2014): 92. For Paul Krugman’s comments and review of Piketty’s Capital, see “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age,” New York Review of Books (May 8, 2014).

Stephen Marche’s assessment of Piketty as a new kind of literary criticism can be read at “The Literature of the Second Gilded Age,” Los Angeles Review of Books (June 16, 2014).

Piketty made his remarks about Balzac’s obsession with his debt originating his interest in the economic realities of wealth accumulation and inequality in an interview hosted by BBC’s Business Daily.

For representative recent works related to behavioral economics, see Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions (New York, 2010) and Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive your Next Meeting, and Motivate your Dentist (New York, 2007) and An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies (New York, 2013).

Piketty is not the only economist who has recently appealed to literature and to Austen specifically to make arguments about economic models. See Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York, 2010).

To read more about Gary Becker’s ideas on marriage and how it relates to his other work on behavioral economics, see “A Theory of Marriage” in The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, 1976).

Foucault’s comments about Becker and neoliberalism are transcribed in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell (New York, 2008).

Becker’s reply to Foucault, and other thoughts on behavioral economics, were made in 2012. A recording of the interview and its transcript can be found at “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker” interview, May 9, 2012.

For literary critics’ response to Piketty’s mode of literary analysis, see Ted Underwood, Hoyt Long, and Richard Jean So, “Cents and Sensibility” (2014) in Slate.

For a description of the process by which Underwood, Long, and So reached their conclusions, see Ted Underwood’s talk delivered at Stanford Feb. 13, 2015, “Piketty’s Model: Literary History without Fixed Objects.”

Barbara Herrnstein Smith wonders about the aim of factual data in digital humanities in her talk “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Collisions, Negotiations,” forthcoming in Common Knowledge.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

James Mulholland is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University and the author of Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 (2013).

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What then might I, as a student of eighteenth-century cultures of colonialism and nation-formation, add to this conversation? Piketty’s Capital, after all, attends to capital formation and inequality largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it almost seems unfair to ask why the book does not consider the crucial role of colonial systems of expropriation and primitive accumulation in the making of Europe and Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Piketty actually has an answer for this historical objection: he states that “Foreign possessions first became important in the period 1750-1800, as we know, for instance, from Sir Thomas’s investments in the West Indies in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. But the share of foreign assets remained modest: when Jane Austen wrote her novel in 1812, they represented, as far as we can tell from the available sources, barely 10 percent of Britain’s national income, or one-thirtieth the value of agricultural land” (120). As statistician, Piketty is interested in aggregates, which means that ten percent of national income is not enough to demand more systematic attention than is enabled by his occasional literary references. Ten percent is not negligible in any context, but in the years ranging from 1750-1800, as the economist Nuala Zahedieh shows, the growth rate of colonial trade was disproportionately high, and its impact on social and cultural formations particularly visible. (Zahedieh also points to the dynamic changes that colonial commerce generated, including major innovations in institutional systems ranging from shipbuilding to law to financial accounting.) If Piketty had turned to literary writing before Austen, as I will, he would have found a world teeming with the world-creating energies of overseas trade that Zahedieh, and other economic historians, take very seriously.

Piketty does note that for both Balzac and Austen, people could live with a minimum of elegance only when their income was about thirty times the average income of the day, which was thirty pounds per annum. This “material and psychological threshold” (411) corresponded “to the average income of the top 0.5 percent of the inheritance hierarchy (about 100,000 individuals out of an adult population of 20 million in France in 1820-1830, or 50,000 out of a population of 10 million British adults in 1800-1810) ” (619, n. 36). Piketty understands the eighteenth century to be largely inflation free, so he can state that in both Austen’s and Balzac’s worlds, “land (like government bonds) yields roughly 5 percent of the capital invested” (53). He highlights this figure because its consistency over almost a century suggests to him that capital investments were “quiet” rather than “risky,” even though he emphasizes the fact that “Capital is never quiet: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least in its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulate in large enough amounts—that is its vocation, its logical destination” (115-16).

So Piketty sees the eighteenth century as an era of quiet capital, invested in land or bonds at home; how then should we understand the instance that Daniel Defoe, that astute observer of economic energies, offers in Robinson Crusoe? In that text, the young Crusoe, who was born in 1632, ventures into the Atlantic world against the advice of his father, and when he returns from his first voyage to Guinea, brings back gold dust worth “300 l” which represents a 750 percent return on his initial investment of forty pounds. Toward the close of the novel, Crusoe has become the English landowner he has always fancied himself—he has £5,000 in capital and a guaranteed annual income of £1,000 from his plantation in the Brasils. The novel ends by promising us “further adventures” as Crusoe sails away to resume his status as settler-owner of his island plantation colony.

In an earlier instance of “risky” capital investment, we learn that Drake’s successful privateering aboard the Golden Hind allowed his investors a profit of 4,700 percent. One of them, the then impecunious Elizabeth I, made enough to retire the national debt and to invest £42,000 in the Levant Company; John Maynard Keynes believes this booty “may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British Foreign Investment.” We can multiply such instances of highly successful risky investments across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not all of which find mention in literary texts. But many did, and those successes contributed to contested, but ideologically crucial, conversations about the economic urgency of overseas privateering and plunder, as well as control over oceanic trade routes, entrepôt and territories elsewhere. At one point in Alexander Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America (translated into English in 1684), he tells us that after their raids on Spanish Atlantic coast towns, each of Françoise l’Olonnais’ buccaneers earned £230, which, as Piketty’s numbers remind us, was eight times the average annual income in England. That they drank or gambled it away in short order is another matter! In Defoe’s The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720), Bob Singleton makes a great deal of money during his buccaneering and wandering overseas and in Africa, and, since he also learns astute business practices, figures out methods of transferring £11,000 and more in the form of tradable goods into England so that he and his beloved Quaker William can settle into anonymity in a village outside London. Toward the end of the century, in Samuel Foote’s comedy The Nabob (1772), Sir Matthew Mite, newly enriched in India, offers to settle upon his future father-in-law the equivalent in Indian rupees of £60,000 and thus to restore him to his estate. This sum of money is vast enough to remind Foote’s audience why Englishmen who made their fortunes overseas were to be envied and resented. These last two instances do not feature what Piketty terms “quiet” capital, but they do illustrate just how money made overseas works hard to transform itself into the English landownership that will make it appear so.

Jane Austen’s genius lay in part in her novelistic capacity to denominate as timelessly, effortlessly English the landscapes, estates and interiors that had been remade for over a century by imports and by wealth generated in overseas trade and plantations. This is the quiet comfort Piketty finds in her world: if you simply mention the money each character is worth, you have no need to note the chinoiserie that they eat out of (or even evacuate themselves in); nor do you have to think about the origins of all that they consume, from sugar to tobacco, or of the cotton or silk they wear; nor do you have to think about the role played by continual warfare, the slave and bullion trades, or indeed class exploitation at home, in enabling comfortable lives. Nor do you have to remember William Cobbett’s acerbic comment on those whose investments initiated agrarian capitalism: “The war and paper-system has brought in nabobs, negro-drivers, generals, admirals, governors, commissaries, contractors, pensioners, sinecurists, commissioners, loan-jobbers, lottery-dealers, bankers, stock-jobbers; not to mention the long and black list in gowns and three-tiled wigs.”

Raymond Williams remarks that the unsettlement and remaking of socio-economic relations in the countryside was rendered less conspicuous by the fact that the new investors were often the younger sons of the “‘resident native gentry’ who had gone out to these new ways of wealth, and were now coming back.” For Williams, Austen’s “achievement of a unity of tone, of a settled and remarkably confident way of seeing and judging,” brings calm to what actually is a “chronicle of confusion and change.” In her novels “money from the trading houses, from the colonial plantations” comes into view only once it is realized in orderly estates (“it has to be converted into these signs of order to be recognized at all”). That is the Austen who beguiles Piketty. On the other hand, those of us who read in the non-Austen literary history of the eighteenth century, in the literary texts that celebrate and bemoan the making of “Great Britain,” discover a different scenario of exciting, risky capital, one that presumes that there is no growth without bloodshed and violence, where capitalism births its future in its furious coupling with colonialism. That, to riff on Piketty’s title, and to conclude, is the dynamic, world-forging history of capital in the eighteenth century. 

Further Reading

David Harvey’s “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital” is available online (accessed on November 14, 2015). Thomas Frank’s commentary appeared in Salon magazine (accessed on November 14, 2015). The Financial Times investigation of the “series of errors” in Piketty’s data was reported by Chris Giles (accessed on November 14, 2015), and Piketty’s rebuttal appeared in the Huffington Post (accessed on November 14, 2015). Nuala Zahedieh’s arguments are available in her The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 2010). J. M. Keynes’s remarks are from A Treatise of Money vol. 1 (London, 1930): 156-57. William Cobbett published his essays on rural society between 1822 and 1826; they were collected as the two-volume Rural Rides in 1830. Raymond Williams’s bracing, sensitive commentary on Austen’s achievement is to be found in The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973): 108-19.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Suvir Kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2009); Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (2000); and Of Gardens and Graves: Essays on Kashmir; Poems in Translation (2015). He teaches and writes on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, South Asian writing in English, and on critical theory, including postcolonial studies.

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[L]eading the way through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises [Mr. Collins] asked for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind. He could number the fields in every direction, and could tell how many trees there were in the most distant clump.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

If neoliberalism is characterized not so much by its values, but by the way it goes about assigning value, and by the epistemological frameworks it uses to translate “humanity” into that which can be traded on a market, we can do worse than look to the way writers reacted to the gradual emergence of quantitative political economy (PE) in the latter half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries for insight into the ethical ramifications of doing so. Standing at the threshold of new ways of thinking, these writers clearly perceived the dangers of an economistic understanding of the world insofar as that understanding was anathema to values that to them were sacrosanct: love and beauty above all.

Needless to say, abolitionists’ critique of institutionalized slavery’s reduction of human beings to prices is but one of many indices of the palpable disdain wide swaths of the English populace felt toward the logic of PE during this period. And, yet, when it comes to reading that archive—or, to take another example, that concerning the exploitation of workers in industrializing England—economism itself often escapes blame; indeed, economism is often enlisted in support of such critiques (e.g. the argument that the global traffic in slaves slows the development of normative commerce). This is to say that the critiques of slavery, or exploitation, or, to take a recent example, of economic inequality, must themselves be analyzed for signs of lurking economism. For while we all agree that slavery, exploitation, and inequality are social and moral evils, the means employed to solve such problems often entail subjecting the affected populations to epistemological frameworks that dehumanize even as they seek to cure.

To find, then, in the pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century the names of Austen, Balzac, and other literary authorities thus suggested for me the possibility of a reorientation of PE vis-à-vis the intellectual historical foundations of the discipline, the possibility that Piketty might have been able to take seriously the forms of value discussed and represented in literary texts, and to thereby call into question the economist’s tendency to treat everything in purely quantitative economic terms. This would be to consider forms of value that exceed, supersede, or simply differ from the sorts of values with which PE ordinarily concerns itself. Alas, this was a mistaken assumption on my part, for the literary texts raised in Capital serve only as so many confirmations of Piketty’s data. The references to Austen, et. al., in other words, merely lend a patina of humanity appealing to readers more familiar with the Georgian author and Keira Knightley movies than Stanley Kuznets and Pareto efficiency.

This is not a matter of omission, as if more pages would solve the problem; rather, it necessarily results from the logic of Capital. Consider its central focus—“national wealth”—which Piketty defines as follows: “the total market value of everything owned by the residents and governments of a given country at a given point in time, provided that it can be traded on some market. It consists of the sum total of nonfinancial assets … and financial assets … less the total amount of financial liabilities” (48). To understand inequality, Piketty needs a number that can be divided by the total number of people, such that (in)equality can be measured. This method for determining value, though, is only arguably better than that used by the banks he critiques late in the volume (437-8). Economists must decide whether the inequality Piketty identifies can be ameliorated by Piketty’s proposals; but we should nevertheless observe that his approach requires us to subject everything to the logic of the market and that that which cannot “be traded on some market” will go untouched by those proposals. Is this part of the problem?

Wendy Brown might suggest that it is; Dickens certainly would. Henry Fielding would, too. In the second book of Tom Jones (1749) we find the unscrupulous Captain Blifil meditating on his potential inheritance of the venerable Squire Allworthy’s estate:

[H]e exercised much Thought in calculating … the exact Value of the Whole; which Calculations he often saw Occasion to alter in his own Favour: And secondly, and chiefly, he pleased himself with intended Alterations in the House and Gardens, and in projecting many other Schemes, as well for the Improvement of the Estate, as of the Grandeur of the Place: For this Purpose he applied himself to the Studies of Architecture and Gardening, and read over many Books on both these Subjects; for these Sciences, indeed, employed his whole Time, and formed his only Amusement.

These calculations “employed much of his own Algebra, besides purchasing every Book extant that treats of the Value of Lives, Reversions, &c.” Unfortunately for the Captain, as Fielding’s cosmic irony fully requires, it is precisely when he is in the midst of such venal reveries that “he himself died of an apoplexy.”

How does the Captain’s attempt to quantify “the exact Value of the Whole” relate to Piketty’s “total market value of everything owned”? In Fielding’s depiction of the Captain’s avaricious mathematics we find not one critique, but two. Unlike Piketty’s “total market value,” the Captain’s “exact Value” is derived for selfish reasons. The Captain aims at what most modern economists suppose to be true to our natures as homo œconomici: self maximization. Piketty, however, aims to improve the lot of the many, proposing a global tax on wealth. In this regard, Piketty steers clear of the first of the two charges Fielding levels at the Captain.

But Fielding makes another point in this passage: that the Captain’s mistake lies not simply in the object of his calculations, but in the calculation of value, tout court. There is an excess of meaning in Fielding’s description of the Captain’s attempt to establish the “exact Value,” which requires a unique algebra and morally outrageous—however ordinary they are for actuaries—books that index “the Value of Lives.” The Captain’s sudden and untimely demise proves the folly of the very books that occupied him while living. Fielding clearly signals that in addition to the moral error of gleefully anticipating the death of Allworthy, the Captain errs in his understanding of value itself. As far as Piketty is concerned, this charge sticks. Fielding often admonished those who understood value solely in terms of prices, incomes, estates, and costs, and we should be no less vigilant in offering such admonitions today.

Poised on the brink of PE, Fielding and his contemporaries sensed the impending mathematization of human life, regarded it as dubious, and said as much. Piketty places himself in this long history, asserting that the first question PE asked was the question that drives him today: “What public policies and institutions bring us closer to an ideal society?” (574). That’s one way of putting it, but it seems rather the third question PE needed to ask. For, before the role of a public state in private commerce could be analyzed, PE first needed a means whereby values could be translated from one experiential field to another. Its first question, thus, was rather: “How can value be translated from one field to another?” In the course of things, sensing that some aspects of experience were more hostile to acts of translation than others, it asked, “How can we make that which seems to resist quantification quantifiable?” Only after these were asked could PE proceed with the question that Piketty asserts as primary.

Of course, the fact that novelists and poets see human beings as more than what Brown, following Hannah Arendt, calls “mere life” does nothing to change the fact that people will go to bed hungry tonight and in need of better access to housing, healthcare, and education. These are problems that we need quantification to study and solve. At the same time, to imagine that the solution to inequality consists solely in maintaining “mere life” is to positively affirm a paradigm wherein life is nothing but mere life, or that which can be “traded on a market.” There is something both resigned and pitiable about an economics that proceeds along such lines, though the case of Piketty is somewhat different. Casually peppering a fundamentally quantitative analysis with allusions to great writers and their characters allows Piketty to create an illusion of Capital’s humanistic concern; in reality, this is a dangerous gambit that Piketty, I suspect, is unaware he is playing. Reducing the complex worlds of his chosen, representative authors to so many confirmations of a thesis that, as Piketty might say, the math can prove by itself, is to create a false sense of inclusiveness and an impression of an author more self-aware than he really is. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the concluding pages to his book, where we find no mention of the authors he has occasionally referenced throughout the volume. It is almost as if Piketty senses, but also does not sense, that the kinds of answers that his data ultimately provides cannot speak to the value of things that his invocation of literature tacitly, perhaps unconsciously, brought into view.

Further Reading

Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, N.C., 2005).

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).

Henry Fielding, ed. Tom Keymer, The History of Tom Jones; A Foundling (London, 2005).

Jill Lepore, “Richer and Poorer: Accounting for Inequality.” The New Yorker (March 16, 2015).

Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature (Chicago, 2008).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Dwight Codr is an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He has published essays in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, PMLA, Philological Quarterly, and Religion in the Age of Enlightenment and is the author of Raving at Usurers: Anti-Finance and the Ethics of Uncertainty in England, 1690-1750 (2016). His current research explores the development of the figure of homo economicus in accounting manuals, political economic tracts, and early novels.

The post “The total market value of everything owned”: Piketty and the Presuppositions of Political Economy appeared first on Commonplace.

Other timely studies have drawn similar conclusions about enduring and indeed increasing inequality of income distribution in the West. Piketty himself and with co-authors had already published preliminary findings. Yet these appealed primarily to specialists such as professional economists, sociologists, and historians. Strikingly, too, at nearly 700 pages, Capital appears better positioned to scare away readers than to attract them. Instead, the book has reached across the globe, and its author is now a widely recognized public figure.

So why Piketty? What accounts for the exceptional success of Capital? Many reviewers have noted that the book was well timed to resonate with American political debates that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Yet it is not merely a question of timeliness, nor of furnishing data to prove a central argument. Piketty’s study in economics is also an artifact of French culture that reflects France’s Enlightenment heritage and present-day norms. Surprisingly, across the vast response from journalists, the public, and specialists alike, the treatise’s cultural foundations have received hardly any analysis. Yet the author’s pedagogical and demystifying stance, humanistic and universalizing attitude, and approachable language are essential elements that shape the book’s presentation. These elements furnish a key to understanding its popularity among American readers.

More than most recent volumes authored by specialists, Capital sets out methodically to make economics understandable to the lay person and to emphasize inseparable links among economic, political, and social spheres. Having begun his career at an American university, Piketty critiques what he calls the “childish passion” of the discipline of economics, especially as practiced in this country, for “mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation.” He comes down hard on what he terms the pretensions of economics to “scientific legitimacy” and the discipline’s tendency to disregard historical research, input from other social sciences, and fundamental questions about human society (32-33).

With such statements, Piketty draws attention to the mystique surrounding economics, encapsulated in the notion that it is far too complex for the non-specialist to understand. For his part, by rendering economic ideas, methods, and data accessible to readers, Piketty demystifies the very discipline. As a specialist, Piketty is himself a priest in the economic temple. Yet he has stated in a 2015 interview with historian Kenneth Mouré that “I want to reach normal people.” With Capital, he has stepped out of the inner sanctum, rejected the halo of the sacred, and mixed with the laity. To be sure, he is not alone in doing so. Paul Krugman, among others, regularly writes for non-specialist audiences about economics in its connections to politics and society. What is remarkable is Piketty’s persistent focus on data—tools of the quantitative economist—which he highlights even as he addresses general readers.

The data that he draws upon notably include lengthy runs from tax records from several countries, with some extending back nearly 250 years. From these emerge comparative sketches of the economic progress over time of several rich countries, including the United States and France. Stating that the data—much of it generated collaboratively—constitute the primordial contribution of his work, Piketty uses it to illustrate two consequential points. The first point is that over the long term in the wealthy countries under study, capital has accumulated at a greater rate than wealth from income has grown. As a result, the largest capital holders have accumulated wealth most quickly. This has held true of aristocratic and bourgeois elites in pre-Revolutionary France, wealthy Belle Époque French at the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1 percent in America today. Those who have already, get more, faster. The rich get richer. The poor, poorer, as popular culture has long had it.

The second essential point is that economies and markets are not natural phenomena, but rather human creations. Their workings reflect policies and laws, as well as myriad decisions that individuals make, both in private and in institutional and public contexts. As he argues, the data show that the current structures and processes function “mechanically” to accumulate capital and privilege in the hands of a few, to the social, political, and economic detriment of the many. Contrary to the notion advanced by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and whose effects Smith described in The Wealth of Nations (1776), for Piketty, no “invisible hand” exists “naturally” to distribute wealth and effect economic equilibrium (9). Rather, Piketty’s data and arguments notably undermine the dogma dear to many Americans that an unfettered market rationally distributes wealth and develops democracy. His study underlines the sober—though not innovative—conclusion that the purportedly natural relationship between democracy and free-market economics is a mirage. It is a fictive alibi that obscures the destruction of American ideals of opportunity and equality. Tearing away the blinding veil of the national economic mythology, Piketty illuminates by means of data the gross workings of the system of concentration of private and corporate wealth by reinforcement of extant privilege.

The historical irony implied here is striking. In present-day America, the market economy fosters the unequal distribution of wealth and attendant privilege. Economic structures are deepening socio-economic distinctions and separating people into castes. Modern America—now a plutocracy—recalls other oligarchies, including the absolutist, monarchic state in eighteenth-century France. To recognize the nature of current conditions is therefore to face up to a historical responsibility and an ethical choice of grandiose proportion. Despite an overall increase in global wealth, in America, wealth inequality is notoriously great, and it is continuing to increase quickly, with consequent erosion of democratic customs and social justice. The current tendencies contradict political and social ideals of democracy, justice, equality, and opportunity. Is this state of affairs acceptable? This is the question that Piketty’s book ultimately sets before readers.

Because Piketty’s conclusions are far from original, they beg the question of his book’s hungry reception by American readers. What is unusual is the way that Piketty’s book works exceptionally hard to empower readers through knowledge and to set them onto a more equal footing with the specialist author and, by extension, with other economics experts. He admonishes readers that “all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history” and intones that “[r]efusing to deal with the numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well off” (577). Since we all participate in the economic and political system that Piketty addresses, it behooves us to understand it. What is remarkable is the way that Piketty—in the manner of his Enlightenment forbears—gives readers tools to actively learn and patiently incites them along the path to discovery.

To this reader, the relatively demotic style, exemplary sharing of information, and exhortatory stance loudly echo strategies that many an eighteenth-century French writer used to share critical knowledge—including knowledge about learning itself—with readers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fictionalized treatise on teaching and learning Emile, or On Education (1762) laid down by example an influential theory of independent learning. Reading the novel, we see how the character of the knowledgeable tutor craftily leads his pupil to make discoveries and evaluate them on his own. In the collaborative multi-volume Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert published over nearly 15 years (1751-65) during the mid-eighteenth century, the system of satirical and thought-provoking cross-referencing was designed to send readers from one article to the next, and in this way to encourage them to draw subversive conclusions based on the linkages among articles.

Similarly, Capital is laid out to encourage active learning on the part of readers. Within the text, the economist-author unpacks essential formulas and graphs, which he explains, lesson by lesson, to the reader. He indicates, furthermore, that his data are available for consultation. In fact, he has placed the data online, where they may be freely examined, along with, in the World Wealth and Income Database that he created with economists Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, expanded and also new sets covering additional nations. In a word, Piketty democratically shares his tool kit and techniques with the reader, to whom he further extends, as it were, the invitation to tinker as she sees fit.

Considered as an instrument of enlightenment for today, Piketty’s narrative, it appears, is meeting a need on the part of American readers to become better informed about economic matters, including achieving a deeper understanding of their social, cultural, and political dimensions. The explicit aim of the book is to “assist” readers to see dynamics at play in the economy and outline the choices that they will face in the future. This is a modest claim, but it certainly resonates with the book’s lucid, pedagogical exposition. Piketty states that his data and his own interpretations of it are mere “technicalities” and has repeated similar claims in interviews. That is, he has insisted that economic details are of contingent and provisional interest, only useful insofar as they can draw attention to and remediate injustice. To set things in perspective, he observes that, by contrast, climate change is a topic of truly pressing concern.

If this is so, we might ask why Piketty occupies so many pages with exposition of economic data, concepts, formulas, and history, and so few with direct discussion of social and political equality and environmental sustainability, beyond throwaway references? Why wrangle—at such length—big data, statistics, and mathematical formulas only to downplay, in the end, their importance relative to ultimate topics that are not even analyzed in detail?

Viewed from a different angle, the gesture is strategic. If Piketty’s ploy to draw readers evokes 250-year-old pedagogical ideals and communicative practices, he must deliver the immersion lesson in economics, but stop short of elaborate prescription. He must leave readers to draw their own conclusions and choose what to do with their new knowledge. The proceeding assumes that the reader is capable of learning about the important subject and worthy to judge its use. A fair number of individuals have stepped forward to meet Piketty’s challenge, through reading.

Beyond assuming intelligence and agency, Piketty appears to envision readers as possessing additional traits of a potentially disruptive nature to the current economic and political order. In contrast to much economic discourse and to common usage in media settings, the author does not refer to human persons as consumers, but rather as “citizens” and simply as “people.” He disdains the word “global” in favor of the planet Earth itself, referring to “planetary finance” and especially “planetary” concerns about human-induced climate change. These terms reflect lived circumstances, necessities, and ideals. While the “citizen” may be able to act at the level of the nation, her concerns, updated for current conditions of the transnational, finance-based economy, are now planetary.

In effect, the planetary agglomeration of citizens must be concerned about the same problem of rising inequality and wealth concentration. The vocabulary emphasizes the transcendent, universal nature of the predicament and the necessity for informed political participation by each person as citizen of a polity and of the human race. Against the paradigm of exploitation and division, a vision of relative equality and reciprocity comes into view, recalling typically French ideals of cosmopolitanism and appeals to a shared, if abstract, humanity. In point of fact, as Piketty reiterates, to more fairly distribute wealth, promote social mobility, and reshape the plutocracy back into a democracy, we must differently manage the market and economy. Since we have made the economy, we can also remodel it for the future, by changing policies, laws, expectations, and behaviors.

In a short period, Piketty has reached a broad audience who are now engaging in conversations about economics, reframed in terms of political economy. This is an important step—indeed, the necessary first step—to modify the current economic culture.

Further Reading

Critiques of economic discourse and practice appear in Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison, Wis., 1985) and Gavin Wright, “Economic History as a Cure for Economics” in Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, N.J., 2001): 41-51.

From literary studies, Hans Robert Jauss discusses the interplay of reader expectations and responses in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982).

Historian Arno Mayer drew conclusions about income distribution that pre-figure Piketty’s in The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981; New York, 2010), while Pierre Rosanvallon similarly addresses related issues of social and economic inequality in The Society of Equals (Paris, 2011; Cambridge, Mass., 2013).

An essential earlier publication from Thomas Piketty co-authored with Emmanuel Saez is “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118:1 (February 2003): 1-39.

For French and American attitudes toward politics, economics, and culture, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Paris, 1835/1840; New York, 2004) is indispensable.

Richard F. Kuisel’s Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1981) and The French Way: How the French Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton, N.J., 2012) illuminate the specificity of modern French political economy and culture.

From sociology, Michèle Lamont’s Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Middle Class (Chicago, 1992) compares views of money and economics in France and America.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Julia Abramson is a professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of the Literary Mystification (2005) and Food Culture in France (2007). A recent Gustave Gimon Research Fellow in the History of French Political Economy at Stanford University and recipient of a research grant from the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, she is writing a new book about finance and culture.

The post Pourquoi Piketty? French Enlightenment and the American Reception of <em>Capital in the Twenty-First Century</em> appeared first on Commonplace.

To speak of the imperfection and incompleteness of numerical data about the life of capital in the twenty-first century is, for Piketty, a way of speaking about the work of the economist. The data have no inherent purpose, and will only do the work to which the economist puts them. Here they allow him to model a study that can disrupt the “intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth [that] has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.” Piketty wants the book to have a motivating effect, and become material for “lessons [that] can be drawn for the century ahead.” The economist uses numerical data as evidence, but it is not his job to “produce mathematical certainties” that would “substitute for democratic debate.” Economics looks like political economy again: the people are back in it.

The book insists from the very beginning that its narrative about capital is an alternative to the Marxist eschatology ruled by the “principle of infinite accumulation.” This kind of narrative would have arrogated a whole world to itself, until it did away with the world altogether. Having avoided the “Marxist apocalypse,” we find, however, that the “distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. It is of interest to everyone, and that is a good thing.” Apocalypse averted, the post-apocalypse still seems deeply fascinated with the tendency of any “market economy based on private property, if left to itself,” to create “powerful forces of divergence which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.”

Drawing on the new, transnational, numerical historical facts, Piketty argues there are economic forces at large in the world that create the discrepancy between the rates of return on capital and the rates of growth of income and output. “The inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction,” Piketty argues. This seeming paradox allows old wealth to grow faster than output and wages: this is how “the past devours the future.” The consequences of such logic of wealth distribution are “potentially terrifying,” the more so because the financial dynamic is now impeccably documented. Perhaps we are not past the apocalypse just yet.

What are these unspeakable terrors lurking beyond the curve? Unprecedented in depth and volume, the data index the significance of new technological powers available to researchers with a new kind of work to do. They are no longer just looking at comparative information on income and taxation from disparate national markets (the somewhat unexhilarating area of Piketty’s “primary” academic expertise). Piketty aspires to refurbish earlier narratives that have treated capital and capitalism as a political and social force field intrinsically related to what Piketty calls the “ideal society.” He marks the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers about the movement of capital (Marx, Ricardo, Malthus, Smith, Locke) as the work of storytellers whose claims about the workings of capital could be read as imaginative and representative, speculative and predictive. Piketty argues that the technological powers that generate the data, and their global reach, redeem these old narratives from their speculative insecurities, and re-assert the ethical dimension of writing about money (fig. 1).

Capital offers to use numerical data to redeem the powers of prophecy by empiricism. Numbers become a kind of thick description that transforms the nature of reference: all who agree to read these statistics the right way can have a glimpse of the shared (terrifying) future. Then the data can become a synthetic and synoptic body of evidence for the existence of the global process the book plots out. We can now claim to see the future of “everyone,” and this is why “everyone” should care. Seemingly boring volumes and genealogies of numerical information lend credence to a catastrophic social and political future that will grow from our economic history and the present.

Capital is a great narrative about the cost of ambivalence about reading science as prophecy, or numerical representation as mythology, when all are understood to be social and historical discourses. If read correctly (as “terrifying”), this twenty-first-century story about capital should propel “everyone” not just to become interested in the adventures of capital, but to act on their new knowledge. But how are readers to know that this is a book about them? Even if they can see the same future from the same numbers, how will they be saved from (the fear of) becoming the victims of capital? Piketty explains that the rate of return on capital now grows irrespective of the actions of its owners. Quite frequently the owners need do nothing at all, such that it looks as if capital moved itself, an agent in its own right, seamlessly conjoined with culture, nation, and social policy. And yet this movement is generated by precisely the “society” whose institutions, labor laws, and assessments of risk and profit create its trends. Readers’ interest and actions would be meaningful in the context of the democratic society that wants to see and mitigate the “strangeness” of the logic of capital accumulation. But who can plot for a more ideal society when, in the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as society?

It is revealing then that, to correct the “logical inconsistency” of wealth inequality, Piketty recommends the implementation of a “global capital tax.” In order to treat taxation of capital socially and politically the way capital usually likes to treat itself, the global tax would disregard the borders of nation states, much like capital and its owners do in the pursuit of new markets. This tax assumes that a fundamentally different relationship between the financial and the socio-political is still possible—that there are people still in there.

But this ideal is not to be, or not just yet. Capital remains unconcerned with even wealth distribution precisely where its definitions of the social are confined to those that serve the nation state, that is, where it shows itself not to be the origin or a natural byproduct of democracy. It implements national borders, denies legal protections, restricts access to living wage, and unfurls militarized law enforcement against “economic migrants” (fig. 2).

A stark reminder of the socio-political entanglements of capital, the ongoing refugee crisis has pushed millions from regions decimated by lethal political violence. The violence followed unchecked depletion of natural resources, coordinated by global political and economic systems glad to unsee the origin of their propulsion fuel. Drifting away from these destroyed (post)colonial national economies (can it ever be only one?), the refugees negotiate administrative and physical barriers to their migration toward imagined centers of more equitable capital distribution in Europe’s North and West. As they attempt physically to approach their fantasies of a more ideal society, the migrants learn, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, that “‘there is no Norway,’ even in Norway.” It’s as though everybody is in the future already.

Then we can only start at the ending. Thick numerical description concerns “everyone” only if “everyone” had been waiting for numerical facts to issue their prophecies about what may befall “everyone” in a society that needs few people in it to make its money. We should not forget how prophecies were made from the insight and knowledge prior to the abstraction of data sets, about the way money and people have treated each other in the flesh. Saree Makdisi tells us in Romantic Imperialism that William Blake already spoke like a prophet without numbers, 200 years ago, when he versified about the power of the formal logic of global capitalism to forge the manacles of modern subjects’ experience across a “Universal Empire.” Some it enslaved, some it made into indigent children who could fit in a chimney that needed cleaning, and some into “aged men wise guardians of the poor.”

Readers of Piketty’s Capital could do worse than to learn from readers of the gothic about the frustration of reading and writing about a kind of reality nobody else can or wants to see. It is a description of an unnatural order of things that feels familiar nonetheless. Such a reality is terrifying, and reading about it is only stupid if one insists on knowing only one language and only one way to read. Forces greater than those of visible society, and greater than the observable masses of people and numbers, shape this reality and this reading. Right now, at the end, one must learn to imagine how else to know them and how to live with them.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Olivera Jokic is associate professor of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She writes and teaches about gender, colonialism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and about their relationship to histories of writing and methodologies of textual interpretation.

The post Future by Numbers appeared first on Commonplace.

This forum therefore follows up on our roundtable by launching such a conversation. Taken together, the short essays gathered here point out the ways in which numbers and graphs constitute narratives, and insist that data’s stories are just as constructed as those found in words and novels. It moreover behooves us to bring the tools of the humanities to interrogate these narratives and the stories they tell in order to understand better how they work on readers (both now and in the past), to identify what they include and exclude, and why. To this end, we hope this forum points toward possibilities for developing a critical business humanities, an endeavor made all the more necessary in a neoliberal age in which the human is increasingly defined in terms of numbers.

Julia Abramson shows us how an understanding of the knowledge and discourse practices of the French Enlightenment helps us to recognize the larger political project of Piketty’s book and its surprising success among the U.S. reading public. For Abramson, Piketty’s data is at once a magnet attracting the attention of economists, and a screen that shelters an argument for general readers about social and political forms of justice. Dwight Codr asks where to locate the human and determine its status within the field of political economy that emerged in the eighteenth century. Bringing the novelist Henry Fielding to bear on Piketty’s archive and arguments, Codr offers a reverse reading to Abramson’s: rather than using numbers to smuggle in an argument on behalf of the human, Codr asks if Piketty uses the tools of the humanities (such as novels) to cloak the inhumanity of economistic understanding. Olivera Jokic turns this dial further to suggest that Piketty treats seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists as storytellers rather than proto-scientists. Thinking about Piketty’s own data as a narrative, Jokic asks whether there might be a poetics of statistics.

Suvir Kaul interrogates Piketty’s curious blindness to the long historical relationship between capitalism and colonialism. While he brings an extended archive of eighteenth-century novels and other texts to bear on Piketty’s narrative, Kaul also suggests that this oversight is perhaps less the result of Piketty’s limited literary archive than his mode of reading it. Piketty emerges as a financial reader of Jane Austen rather than a materialist one who might recognize the often violent relations of production and exchange beneath the apparent banality of economizing numbers. Piketty may read novels, but he reads them rather like a business major after all. James Mulholland exposes Piketty as both such a reader and writer—a business allegorist who, for example, names economic problems for literary characters—and wonders whether such an approach (one aligned with the field of behavioral economics) is really the humanities at all. Mulholland concludes by turning to the work of digital humanists who have shown—using the very algorithmic tools on which the business world relies—that while Piketty’s economic numbers may be unassailable, his literary ones are fundamentally flawed. But Mulholland also raises the question of whether digital humanities marks the ascent of a neoliberal literary studies, or whether it promises an antidote to neoliberalism’s increasing encroach on the academy.

We thank the editors of Common-place for hosting this forum, and look forward to discussing with readers the ideas, questions, and possibilities raised by these essays.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Michelle Burnham is professor and chair of the English Department at Santa Clara University. She has published widely on early American literature, including books and articles that aim to bring the fields of literary and economic studies into greater dialogue with each other.

The post <em>Capital in the Twenty-first Century</em> in the Eighteenth Century; or, Piketty and the Humanities appeared first on Commonplace.