In this seminar we will read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) alongside Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
(1719) with a particular focus on metaphors related to the contested
idea of the ‘invisible hand’ that continues to surface in
political-economic debates to this date. With the long-standing
conviction that the novel was born out of middle-class, Protestant
anxieties (Watt 1959), challenged by recent scholarship (McKeon 2000;
Parker/Smith 2013; McGurl 2017), as a backdrop, we will scrutinize
intertextual references to reconstruct the semantic field of late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economics. That re-evaluation
is warranted by recent developments in the domain of macroeconomics that
call into question the idea that individual self-interests give rise to
the public good and sustain social stability (Mizuta 2000; Krugman
2021). We will also probe ideas of ‘liberty’ and ‘free will’ and
scrutinize how the meaning of these words has changed over time.
‘Liberty’ within the context of Christian virtues, as expressed in
Crusoe’s novel, for example, is a much narrower, morally charged concept
closer to what we would call ‘responsibility’. It is our aim to tease
out the historical framework and the intellectual and metaphorical
landscape in which the concept of the ‘invisible hand’ took shape.
Students
taking this course must be willing to engage with economic theory and
the poetics of the novel. Active participation in our discussions based
on a thorough preparation of set texts is a prerequisite for taking part
in this course.
Reading
assignments will be communicated in advance, and writing tasks will be
an integral part of this seminar. [Studienleistung]
- Dozent/in: Felix Sprang