Abstract
Shortly after the Restoration, Lucy Hutchinson composed a lengthy memorial to her husband, the regicide Colonel John Hutchinson, who had died in a Royalist prison in 1664. Describing the nature of her late husband’s love for her, she wrote “never was there a passion more ardent and less idolatrous.”4 What did she mean? What is this “idolatrous” passion that Hutchinson evidently regards as not merely distinct from, but opposite to, healthy, “ardent” affection? Are we to imagine that the Hutchinsons held conversations about their feelings for each other in which the need to eschew idolatry figured prominently? If so, how typical were they in this? What connections, if any, did they perceive between this idolatrous passion and the idolatry of priest and king, against which John Hutchinson spent his life fighting? These are the kinds of questions this book seeks to address.
And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more. —Revelation 18:11 1
And now the Hireling Teachers of all sorts, the Merchants of Mystery Babylon, shall cry, Alas! alas! thatgreat City, People begin to see us, and they will not trade with us, nor buy our Merchandize, as in former dayes, but declare against it. —Thomas Taylor, To the People at and about Stafford2
That which we call national economy today is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. Credit-money, in the specialform imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property. … —Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West3
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Notes
Thomas Taylor, To the People at and about Stafford (London, 1679), 7.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 398.
Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, edited by N. H. Keeble (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 51.
Ibid., 26.
“Since she whom I lov’d,” lines 5–6. Quoted from John Donne, The Complete English Poems, edited by C. A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent, 1985).
“The Pulley,” 13–14, The English Poems of George Herbert, edited by C.A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), 167. Gregory of Nazianzus describes idolatry as a “transferral to the creature of the honour due the creator.” As Aquinas explains, “the term idolatry was used to signify any worship of a creature, even without the use of images.” Cited in Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 66.
David Hawkes, Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1996).
For Milton’s favorable opinion of usury, see The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, edited by Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:322.
James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (New York: Verso, 2000). Holstun conclusively establishes the importance of class consciousness to the religious and political discourses of the era, and his barbs against revisionist historians and new historicist literary critics who ignore the category of class are timely and appropriate. But Holstun’s conception of the class struggle appears to depart from the conventional, materialist Marxist understanding of the term and to imply a more nuanced interpretation of “class” conflict. He writes: In this book, I will argue that the English Revolution was a class struggle. By that, I don’t mean the quasi-natural collision of a declining gentry, or the aristocracy, or the feudal countryside with a rising gentry, or the bourgeoisie, or a proto-capitalist London. Rather, I mean the struggle among various groups that were endeavoring to maintain or transform the relations of production (87–88). Whereas a member of one social class would have been immediately distinguishable from a member of another, it is surely very likely, even inevitable, that the same individual would oscillate, both objectively and subjectively, between actions and opinions that tended to “maintain” and those that tended to “transform” relations of production.
Cited in Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Verso, 1990), 116–117.
See Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: G. Routledge and K. Paul, 1946), 55–56.
R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Gloucester, MA.: P. Smith, 1962), ix.
Christopher Hill, The English Revolution, 1640 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941), 9. Elsewhere, Hill confidently declares that “most historians would agree that there is some connection between the Puritan and the bourgeois virtues,” The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Norton, 1961), 63, emphasis in the original.
Cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1987), 79–80.
Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 89–90.
Cited in Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 39.
Christopher Hill, “Marxism and History,” Science and Society 3 (spring 1948): 53.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: N. L. B., 1974), 42.
See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
See also Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 1:159–160.
See Ernest Mandel’s introduction to Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 42.
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, edited by Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 111–112.
Karl Marx, Capital vol. 3, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Company, 1909), 812.
Paul Sweezy, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1976), 49.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5.
Wallerstein’s thesis is challenged by Robert Brenner in his “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present, 70 (February 1976): 30–75.
Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (New York: Verso, 1991), 98–99.
See also Grant McCracken’s analysis of the origins of consumer culture in sixteenth-century London, in Culture and Consumption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 11–16.
Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1.
The seminal theoretical studies of this convergence include Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (New York: Telos Press, 1981);
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);
and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
For examples of economists who participate in the new economic criticism, see Warren J. Samuels, ed., Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1990);
and A. Klamer, D. N. McClosky and R. M. Solow, eds., The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), 3.
In addition to the centrally important works of Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux, Woodmansee and Osteen mention several seminal influences on the new economic criticism, including: Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Economics (The Hague: Mouton, 1975);
Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980);
Donald N. McClosky, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985);
Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Gregory P. LaBlanc, “Economics and Literary History: An Economist’s Perspective,” New Literary History 31:2 (spring 2000): 355–377.
Hence Pierre Bourdieu’s protest: “The charge of economism which is often brought against me consists of treating the homology between the economic field … and the fields of cultural production … as an identity, pure and simple …” In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 111.
Deirdre McClosky, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 336.
See also Jack Amariglio, “Economics as a Postmodern Discourse,” in W. J. Samuels (ed.), Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 15–46; and Robert M. Solow, “Comments from Inside Economics,” in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, 31–37.
See especially Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance 1871–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economics from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 180.
See also Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Jean-Joseph Goux: Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 18.
For an interesting application of economic concepts to literary criticism, see June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985 ).
For an equally interesting application of literary critical concepts to economics, see Willie Henderson, Economics as Literature (London: Routledge, 1995).
Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 19, emphasis in the original.
See Mohamed Zayani, Reading the Symptom: Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and the Dynamics of Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), for what might be described as a marriage between Goux and Slavoj Zizek. One important difference between the work of thinkers such as Goux and Zizek and my approach here is their introduction of psychoanalytical concepts into their studies of the relations between financial and linguistic semantics. As Goux puts it, recalling the genesis of his project in the introduction to Symbolic Economies: “what had previously been analyzed separately as phallocentrism (Freud, Lacan), as logocentrism (Derrida), and as the rule of exchange by the monetary medium (Marx), it was now possible to conceive as part of a unified process” (4). While not questioning the importance of Freud and Lacan to the study of representation in the twenty-first century, I have found so little correspondence between their theoretical frame of reference and that of the writers analyzed here as to convince me that to apply their theories in this study would risk anachronism. The spiritual effects of early modern political economy were discussed and understood by those who experienced them in a theological rather than a psychoanalytical vocabulary, and I have tried to study these writers in their own terms.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 2.7.39.1–5.
Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Philip Brockbank (New York: Norton, 1992), 1.1.1–3, 11–13, 22–23.
William Clark, The grand Tryal: or, Poetical Exercitations upon the book of Job (1685), part 3, chap. 28, retrieved from ChadwickHealey’s Literature on Line, available 5/1/01: http://lion.chadwick.com/home.cgi?source=config2.cfg.
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© 2001 David Hawkes
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Hawkes, D. (2001). Introduction. In: Idols of the Marketplace. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312292690_1
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