2002 MMLA
Global Exchanges
Vincent B.
Leitch
University of Oklahoma
Do not cite without permission of author.
The Rise of the Lilliputians: The New
Economic Criticisms
During recent decades market-oriented economics has emerged as the dominant
discourse of everyday life in the U.S., displacing religion, politics,
and entertainment. This discourse is, of course, overwhelmingly the laissez-faire
economics developed by the neoclassical tradition stemming from Adam Smith,
not the regulatory, welfare state economics of John Maynard Keynes and
later neo-Keynesians, nor the radical economics of Karl Marx and other
socialists, nor that of non-Marxist progressives. In the U.S., this mainstream
economics seems increasingly a truncated ideology whose doctrines are
ever more broadly disseminated through all the channels of social life,
especially academia and the media. A neoliberal market-oriented perspective
conditions not only our thoughts and decisions, but our imaginations and
futures. Nothing appears to exist outside its scope. Alternatives and
countercurrents hardly register in the public domain, and when they do
so, it is typically in the form of unmotivated eruptions and partisan
battles like impromptu boycotts and protests and unforeseen strikes, minor
disruptions.
It is in this context that certain countercurrents and alternatives take
on significance. Among these are the "critical economics" movement composed
mainly of progressive, Marxist, and feminist economists in the university;
the new economics movement amongst literary critics, many of whom are
liberal neo-Keynesians; and the recent critics of globalization who tend
to be reformers and cultural critics working toward new post-communist
liberal-to-socialist political economies. A longer version of my paper
considers each of these three phenomena in more detail, demonstrating
that critical economists, neo-Keynesians, and progressives, both inside
and outside the university, fault mainstream neoclassical economics for
a recurring set of shortcomings. To be specific and to preview the argument,
the homo economicus posited by orthodox theory stands accused of being
self-interested, competitive, utilitarian, and calculating to the degree
that little space exists for cooperation, altruism, family, or community.
Economic man's macho obsession with consumption and maximization renders
him a one-dimensional figure, occupying a single unhealthy subject position.
In addition, mainstream economics slights an array of major concerns,
especially environmental care, the rights of future generations, social
justice, shared decision making, social safety nets, fair labor practices,
and reciprocity between centers and peripheries. Not surprisingly, those
critical of mainstream business-oriented academic economics often stage
returns- sometimes unconsciously-to "political economy," retrieving the
moral and political dimensions of this old discipline, joining up with
recent traditions of cultural studies that refuse to leave economics to
professional economists and market doctrine. I side with this cultural
studies orientation. Many of today's diverse countercurrents and alternatives
encouragingly coalesce around a Lilliputian strategy, a disaggregated
postmodern front of new social movements, non-governmental organizations,
unions, and poor people seeking similar reforms, restitutions, and transformations
of the political economic order. This new front has been most visible,
of course, during recent protests against the World Trade Organization.
Critical Economics
Perhaps the most dramatic element of "critical economics" is its critique
of homo economicus (HE), rational economic man, the self-interested, fully
conscious, calculating maximum utilitizer of orthodox economics and its
metanarratives. This attack is part of the wider postmodern critique of
Enlightenment humanism, particularly its promotion of the Cartesian subject,
a masculine figure whose instrumental reason controls desire, privileging
mind over matter, order over chaos, self over society, work over play,
and competition over cooperation. According to feminist economists, for
instance, HE is a fictional figure, a straw man, who construes altruism
and community as irrational and feminine, valorizing his own atomized
and isolated, possessive individualism. Consider one example.
In her "Robinson Crusoe: The Quintessential Economic Man?," economist
Ulla Grapard criticizes Daniel Defoe's fictional version of homo economicus
celebrated by economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo onwards.1 Shipwrecked
and isolated on his primitive but charming Caribbean island for 30 years,
Crusoe (a former slave trader and colonialist), a self-sufficient producer
and consumer of goods and services, is unrealistically not bothered with
family, sexuality, society, politics, or history. (Before his adventure
on the island, he is an exile from stifling middle-class life.) HE improbably
represents man in a state of nature, optimizing work, consumption, and
leisure, keeping ledgers all the while. On this fantasy island, Crusoe
owns and controls everything, especially nature. There are no women to
worry about. Friday, a person of color and his slave, is a passive, child-like
inferior, a feminized housekeeper. In Grapard's argument Crusoe is the
universal subject of Western science and philosophy, a socially constructed
masculine figure, acting in exploitative, sexist, and racist ways characteristic
of neoclassical economics yesterday and today.
New Economic Literary Criticism
In their historical introduction to The New Economic Criticism: Studies
at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, a recent landmark collection
of twenty-two papers growing out of a mid-1990s conference, editors Martha
Woodmansee and Mark Osteen offer a wide-ranging and incisive overview
of this interdisciplinary field (complete with bibliography). They briefly
review the last three decades and then single out for preliminary discussion
six main aspects of the movement: work on the economics of authorship;
research on the relationship of money and language; the emergence of critical
economics; theory of gift exchange; the main economic approaches to literature;
and future directions. Despite its range and sophistication, there are
some limitations with this introduction and collection, as my full commentary
on the new economic literary criticism details. Woodmansee and Osteen
single out two stages in the historical development of the new economic
criticism amongst literary critics. After the groundbreaking books by
Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (1978), and Kurt Heinzelman, The
Economics of the Imagination (1980), they cite a flurry of New Historicist
and some cultural studies texts from the late 1980s to the present, featuring
as a prime example Walter Benn Michael's The Gold Standard and the Logic
of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987).
But they overlook work in many key areas, notably research on subaltern
literatures; critiques of the canon and its economics; studies of ethnopoetics
in relation to ghettoes, reservations, and other impoverished enclaves;
British cultural studies of popular culture and its commodification; Marxist
studies of global capitalist culture; and the class system in academe,
especially concerning part-timers, the star system, and TA and teacher
unionization.
Gift theory, as Woodmansee and Osteen make clear, plays a revealing role
in recent alternative economic theory. Research on gifts and primitive
exchange, especially in the French line from Marcel Mauss to Georges Bataille
to Jean-Francois Lyotard to Jacques Derrida,2 has provocatively explored
issues of altruism, obligation, reciprocity, and expenditure. Key questions
for economic literary criticism and economics arise in this area. Is a
perfect gift-one with no strings attached-possible? (Interestingly, men
and women tend to answer that question differently.) Is there a gender
dynamic to gifts? Do gift exchanges occur outside of economic accounting?
How do the subject positions of gift givers compare to homo economicus?
Do gifts disrupt prized neoclassical notions such as economic equilibrium?
Don't gifts--insofar as they are unforeseen and excessive like panics--inject
irrationality into the economy, and thereby strategically raise special
doubts about the mainstream doctrines of maximum utility and rational
decision making? Gift theory poses a number of significant challenges
to mainstream economic doctrines, but characteristically from outside
the field of economics. It is a topic mainly for anthropology. Most importantly,
it introduces alternative utopian dimensions into economics, trying to
imagine non-monetized and non-commodified exchanges free of the baggage
of homo economicus, GNP, and the rest of orthodox dogma. Is there anything
before or outside (market) economics?--that is, in some senses, the most
challenging question of all today.
Significantly, the new economic literary criticism appears programmatically
miffed about the left anti-capitalist orientation of many New Historicists.
New economic literary critics are not Marxists, generally appearing to
be liberal pluralists with neo- Keynesian sentiments. (Yet consider Marc
Shell who is studiously neutral.) In making common cause with "critical
economics," these literary intellectuals loosely affiliate themselves
with some Marxist economists, although they do not personally identify
with the working class or socialism or the wider Lilliputian front. A
main shortcoming of the new economic literary criticism, as configured
in Woodmansee and Osteen's bulky collection, is the absence of discussion
about the politics of economics. By ferreting out the politics at work
in these many new economic literary studies, one can extrapolate a spectrum
that runs from moderate to liberal political values, with more extreme
ends absent. Why? The omission of much discussion about standpoint theory
in the volume raises questions about the larger movement (not school)
as broadly configured by Woodmansee and Osteen. It is hard to know why
they omitted the exciting work on postmodern culture, globalization, and
late capitalism usually associated with, to name just three well-known
texts, Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991), David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), and New
Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (1990), edited by Stuart
Hall and Martin Jacques. Is this a political exclusion? The odd effect
is that the pressing issues surrounding economic globalization go undiscussed.
The new economic literary criticism appears, as a result, to be a middle-of-the-road
branch of literary history and criticism largely focused on earlier times,
unselfconsciously rooted in present-day political economy about which
it has little to say. It is separate from, and evidently out of sympathy
with, much of cultural studies, especially the influential British lines
stemming from Raymond Williams, the New Left Review, and the University
of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the latter of
which continues to shape much U.S. cultural studies.
Globalization Studies
The field of globalization studies has been forming for a long time, though
its contemporary origins date from the symbolic tearing down in 1989 of
the Berlin Wall and the proclamation of the triumphant capitalist New
World Order. This turn of events very much concerns the definition and
the work of current cultural studies of all varieties. There are two well-recognized
schools of thought about capitalist globalization, as Anthony Giddens,
among many others, has argued.3 The hyper-globalizers, associated with
neoclassical economics and transnational business, celebrate the erosion
of the nation-state and the formation of spectacularly profitable regional
economic zones spurred on by market imperatives. The skeptics of globalization,
affiliated with left-wing politics and economics, lament the collapse
of the regulated welfare state and the spreading disorders of consumer-oriented
society. A few skeptics regard globalization as a myth and dangerous master
narrative. Overlooked by Giddens is an obvious third school, the reformers,
usually liberals, who promote globalization stripped of its excesses.
What do the reformers of economic globalization have to say? Liberal billionaire
financier George Soros, to take one famous example, in his celebrated
1998 Atlantic Monthly article on global society anxiously enumerated five
main deficiencies of the global capitalist system: uneven distribution,
financial instability, threat of monopolies and oligopolies, erosion of
welfare state, and absence of shared values to insure social cohesion.4
Along the way Soros, a neo-Keynesian, singles out other telling deficiencies
of global capitalism such as its erroneous laissez-faire beliefs in the
self-correcting power of the market and in rational expectations and equilibrium;
its asymmetries between centers and peripheries; and its inadequate protection
of human rights, the environment, fair labor practices, social justice,
and individual freedom.
Given Soros's damning indictment, one can understand the sardonic yet
completely serious slogan uttered by the left-wing economist and skeptic
of globalization Robin Hahnel: "Bring back the Keynesians. Any Keynesian!"5
Hahnel's illuminating little book, Panic Rules! Everything You Need to
Know about the Global Economy, which originated as a series of articles
in Z magazine on "Capitalist Globalism in Crisis," was recently published
by South End Press as a manual for progressive non-economist readers.
Though a professional economist, Hahnel is surprisingly straightforward
throughout his book, as, for instance, in his admonition "stop corporate-sponsored
globalization by any means necessary" (106), although he believes economic
globalization can be rendered useful. Given the current triumph of hyper-globalization,
the return of reformist Keynesians of any stripe would represent, in Hahnel's
view, measured progress at this point, yet not the ideal end state.
As Hahnel configures matters, there are two schools of thought in mainstream
U.S. economics, the "A Team" of free-market, neoliberals in charge since
the early 1970s and the "B Team" of Keynesian liberals in charge during
earlier decades. Both teams support capitalism and corporate-sponsored
globalization. What is needed now is a "C Team," a people's movement populated
by progressives of all sorts, unions, farmers, members of new social movements,
non-governmental organizations, and the disenfranchised around the globe.
(Here I would add critical economists.) This is the "Lilliputian front"
once again, which promises to expand in the days ahead.6
Conclusion
For humanity's sake, economics should not be left to professional marketoriented
economists-that is an argument of many critical economists, neo-Keynesians,
and C Teamers, though not of mainstream economists. Not surprisingly,
political economy is making a public return under the pressure of economic
globalization and the New World Order (in a second phase since September
11).7 "Lilliputians" are growing in numbers as problems with global capitalism
spread and countercurrents mount.8 It is not surprising in this context
that feminist critics, minority critics, ecocritics, postcolonial theorists,
Marxists, and cultural studies scholars increasingly deal with economic
problems, extending the potential ranks of Lilliputians as well as the
scope of their separate projects. In his Preface to The Cultures of Globalization
(1998), a collection deriving from a mid-1990s conference, Fredric Jameson
prophesies--and I shall close with this magisterial quotation: "What seems
clear is that the state of things the word globalization attempts to designate
will be with us for a long time to come; that the intervention of a political
relationship to it will be at one with the invention of a new culture
and a new politics alike; and that its theorization necessarily uniting
the social and the cultural sciences, as well as theory and practice,
the local and the global, the West and its Others, but also postmodernity
and its predecessors and alternatives, will constitute the horizon of
all theory in the years ahead."9
Notes
1. Ulla Grapard, "Robinson Crusoe: The Quintessential Economic Man?,"
Feminist Economics 1 (1995): 33-52. A much-discussed strand of "critical
economics," not treated in this paper, is the discourse analysis launched
by Donald (Deirdre) McCloskey in The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: U
of Wisconsin P,1985) and continued in several subsequent books and many
articles, all critical of mainstream economic modeling and discourse from
a reformist anti-foundationalist perspective. Pioneering selections of
feminist critical economics appear in Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory
and Economics, eds. Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (Chicago: U
of Chicago P,1993), and Out of the Margin: Feminist Perspectives in Economics,
ed. Edith Kuiper and Jolande Sap (New York: Routledge,1995). To sample
critical economics from a Marxist vantage point, see Rethinking Marxism:
A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society, edited by Jack Amariglio,
David Ruccio, and Stephen Cullenberg, economists who have themselves published
representative articles, chapters, and books.
2. Major texts of French gift theory include Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms
and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New
York: Norton, 1967); Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on
General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988); Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana
UP,1993); and Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), and The Gift of Death, trans.
David Wills (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1995).
3. Anthony Giddens, "On Globalization," UNRSID News 15 (Autumn 1996/Winter
1997), 4. For Giddens, pro and contra positions on economic globalization
are represented, respectively (and accurately, I might add), by Kenichi
Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy
(New York: Harper Business, 1990) and his The End of the Nation State:
The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1995) and by Paul
Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International
Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity P,1996).
4. George Soros, "Toward a Global Open Society," The Atlantic Monthly,
281 (January 1998): 21-22, 24, 32.
5. Robin Hahnel, Panic Rules! Everything You Need to Know about the Global
Economy (Cambridge: South End P,1999), p. 92.
6. Immanuel Wallerstein earlier and more broadly defined the project of
these "antisystematic" movements in, for example, his Geopolitics and
Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1991), esp. pp. 229-30. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), pp. 272- 76, who reflect on the
creativity and the cooption of Lilliputian groups; and Jeremy Brecher
and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction
from the Bottom Up (Boston: South End P,1994).
7. One dramatic example is Jacques Derrida's opening up deconstruction
to the critique of globalization and the rise of the Lilliputian strategy
in his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge,1994) pp.
77-86. Derrida's critique of the New World Order centers on Francis Fukuyama's
The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free P,1992). But for a
ground-breaking post-Marxist feminist deconstruction of Marxian political
economy, see J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it):
A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996),
esp. chap. 6 on globalization theory in which the two authors set out
"to reject globalization as the inevitable inscription of capitalism..."
(139).
8. The World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle during the week of
28 November 1999--an event protested by a broad array of some thousands
of "Lilliputians"-canceled its opening and closing ceremonies as well
as its gala evening address from President Bill Clinton due to street
protests marked by excesses from police and the National Guard. The meeting
adjourned in chaos and acrimony with no agenda set for the subsequent
round. This was arguably the most successful public protest and multinational
popular resistance against the negative consequences of economic globalization
during the 1990s. Others have followed in its wake. For a firsthand account,
see Jeffrey St. Clair, "Seattle Diary: It's a Gas, Gas, Gas," New Left
Review 238 (November /December 1999), 81-96.
9. Fredric Jameson, Preface, The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke UP,1998), p. xvi. For two examples
of this growing preoccupation, see "Globalization?," special issue of
Social Text 17.3 (1999), and "Globalizing Literary Studies," special issue
of PMLA 116 (January 2001).