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5 The death of Cordelia and the economics of preference in eighteenth-century moral psychology William Flesch Biology recapitulates economics: at least evolutionary biology seems to be rediscovering and analysing the same kinds of ideas that the great eighteenth-century economic psychologists (from Mandeville to Hume to Smith) had explored. Over the last few years there has been a heated debate among evolutionary theorists – scientists, mathematicians, the odd humanist – about whether altruism is possible, given the core idea that evolution is driven by the
In this chapter I want to instance disorientation and leverage in the university by exploring the problematic doubleness of economics as indeterminately both inside and outside contemporary cultural theory. Here, I shall argue that the interdisciplinary approach of cultural analysis has a certain amount of difficulty positioning economics as either simply
. Lucille's abandonment of Ruth is not instantaneous. It is first an emotional abandonment that mirrors the typical process by which one sibling matures more quickly than another. Ruth's efforts to conform to Lucille's increasingly rigid expectations, however, are eventually rendered useless, and the separation becomes more permanent. Ruth relates that at school she ‘saw [Lucille] often, but she avoided me. She became one of a group of girls who ate lunch in the Home Economics room […] Lunches were terrible […] It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar
far as to argue that ‘no honest woman can live in marriage: no woman honest in her will to be free. Marriage delivers her body to another to use’ (61). The hostility towards marriage in twentieth-century feminist thought – evidenced in striking terms by Dworkin but shared by other prominent figures like Kate Millett and Jessie Bernard – stands in stark contrast to the idealised and romantic notions of marriage represented in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictions. Baruch, for instance, argues that while economics is a significant factor
-faire economics, Spencer proposed a teleological vision for the future of mankind, progressing towards higher and higher forms of altruism through the parallel action of biological and social development. But, by the turn of the century, his efforts to develop a ‘synthetic philosophy’, which combined evolutionary principles with biological, sociological, psychological, and broadly moral concerns, were falling
-educating by learning to sew and she even secures a Home Economics teacher, Miss Royce, as a maternal role model. Lucille is thus ‘adopted’ into a new social family but, as Geyh observes, she symbolically rejoins a framework of patriarchy (Geyh 140; Holmgren Troy, Keller, and Wahlström 98). Unlike Lucille, however, Ruth has learnt how quickly this domestic security can dissolve and finds herself unwilling to learn the skills necessary for domestic conformity: ‘indifferent to my clothes and comfortable in my skin, unimproved and without the prospect of
increased access to education. (“Onward” 45) Toward the end of the essay, she also asks: ‘What has personal holiness to do with politics and economics? Everything, from the liberal Protestant point of view. They are the means by which our poor and orphaned and our strangers can be sustained in real freedom, and graciously, as God requires’ (51). For Robinson, the mainline has a ‘liberal’ – in the American sense – or ‘progressive’ political identity. It has its origins in Abolitionism and
youth to be efficient workers. Workers. That language is so common among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually lost the Cold War. ( When I was a Child I Read Books 24) Here we also find what Robinson identifies as the driving ideology held by those who actively work to devalue liberal arts education: economics. Robinson raises the notion that Americans have forsaken their identity as Citizen for that of Taxpayer ( What Are We Doing Here
parliamentarian and economics professor had turned gunrunner and war correspondent, Kettle would have cause to retract his claim (indeed, as we shall see, he also played a significant role in resuming the duel), but in his introductory commentary he could write with confidence that ‘the crowd, the common herd, the multitude’, which the philosopher famously railed against, ‘has dismissed Nietzsche’s ideas in order
Rossetti’s title in print, positioned at the top of the third column of the list, meant, in fact, that the work on Dante ‘conformed to the demands of Mudie’s and its audience’ and successfully won over his ‘complex rhetoric of selection’ ( Eliot, 2006 : 137). Consequently, the book, the author and her literary reputation deserved to benefit from both the economic and cultural power that Mudie’s library exerted on the economics of the Victorian