A tale of two capitalisms : sacred economics in nineteenth-century Britain / Supritha Rajan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rajan, Supritha.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Life in literature.

Economic policy.

Great Britain--Economic policy--19th century.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Social conditions--19th century.

Social conditions.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2015.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

No questions are more pressing today than the ethical dimensions of global capitalism in relation to an unevenly secularized modernity. A Tale of Two Capitalisms offers a timely response to these questions by reexamining the intellectual history of capitalist economics during the nineteenth century. Rajan's ambitious book traces the neglected relationships between nineteenth-century political economy, anthropology, and literature in order to demonstrate how these discourses buttress a dominant narrative of self-interested capitalism that obscures a submerged narrative within political economy. This submerged narrative discloses political economy's role in burgeoning theories of religion, as well as its underlying ethos of reciprocity, communality and just distribution. Drawing on a range of literary, anthropological, and economic writings from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, Rajan offers an inventive, interdisciplinary account of why this second narrative of capitalism has escaped our notice. The book presents an unprecedented genealogy of key anthropological and economic concepts, demonstrating how notions of sacrifice, the sacred, ritual, totemism, and magic remained conceptually intertwined with capitalist theories of value and exchange in both sociological and literary discourses. Rajan supplies an original framework for discussing the ethical ideals that continue to inform contemporary global capitalism and its fraught relationship to the secular. Its revisionary argument brings new insight into the history of capitalist thought and modernity that will engage scholars across a variety of disciplines. Book jacket.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Economies of sacrifice

Circular economies, sacred economies: the sacrifice of labor in John Ruskin and nineteenth-century political economy

Rational agents, ritual actions

The visible hand : models of communality and economic information systems

The making of household gods: value, totems, and kinship in the nineteenth-century domestic novel and Victorian anthropology

Household gods revisited in George Eliot and Anthony Trollope

Magical technologies : forces of interest in Rudyard Kipling and Marshallian economics

Electric Kim and the ludic rituals of empire

Coda

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-346) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472072552

9780472052554

9780472120949

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.7664610

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.