The Economics of Jane Austen: Delusional Riches?
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their self interest.”
… For example, one of the volumes in the Austen family library was Thomas Percival’s A Father’s Instructions: Moral Tales, Fables, and Reflections, a children’s commonplace anthology that proselytized for the new sciences and moral thought of the Enlightenment. A footnote in the reissued 1781 edition points Percival’s younger readers to Smith’s description of the process of making a pin in The Wealth of Nations, the famous demonstration of the division of labor at work. (Yes, indeed: children’s books came with footnotes back then.)
.. But if any Smith book was likely to have sat on an Austenian side table, it wasn’tThe Wealth of Nations, but the work that Smith himself considered foundational, and thus revised a staggering six times over the course of his lifetime, up until the year of his death. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) introduced Smith’s concept of sympathy. This was a word used slightly differently in Smith’s time than in our own, and doesn’t have much to do with the modern tendency to click like on a Facebook friend’s engagement announcement to show our support, or to feel terrible about the plight of child soldiers. It referred instead to the mortar of civilized society, the way that we modify our behavior as we come to an understanding of how others see us and realize that they cannot regard our problems in the same close and passionate way that we do.
.. “As to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbor is capable of loving us.” We might, if we listen closely, hear a slight echo in bookish Mr. Bennet’s philosophy: “For what do we live for but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
.. it is only our self-delusion that it is better to be rich that “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” This deception farms the fields, builds the cities, creates the surplus that enables the existence of art and literature, something higher than the hardscrabble for mere existence.
.. Smith never can decide how one should feel about the pursuit of wealth. On the one hand, it keeps in motion the industry of mankind. On the other, it doesn’t make people very happy.
.. After all, without Marianne’s earlier self-deception, there wouldn’t be much of a novel. (Elinor and Edward are clearly not emo enough to sustain three volumes of agony, even with the Lucy Steele complication lurking.) Literature is generated in the end by someone’s failure to recognize nature’s deception, just as Adam Smith promised.