The Problem of Profit: Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Attacks againstthe pursuit of profitin eighteenth-century Britain have been largely read as reactions against market activity in general or as critiquesof financial innovation. In The Problem of Profit, however, Michael Genovese contends thatsuch rejections of profitderive not from a distaste for moneymaking itself but from a distaste for individualism.

In the aftermath of the late seventeenth-century Financial Revolution, literaturelinked theconcept of sympathy to the public-minded economic ideals of the past to resist the rising individualism of capitalism.This study places literary works at the center of eighteenth-century debates about how to harmonize exchanges of feeling and exchanges of finance, highlighting representations of communitarian, affective profit-makingingeorgic poetry as well as in the work of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Sarah Fielding, HenryFielding, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Laurence Sterne, among others. Investigating commercial treatises, novels, poetry, periodicals, and philosophy, Genovese argues that authors conjured alternatives to private accumulation that might counter the isolating tendencies of impersonal exchange.

However, even as emotional language and economic language arose together in the 1700s, the attendant aspiration to form a communitarian economy in Britain was not fulfilled. By recovering an approach to moneymaking that failed to thrive, The Problem of Profit argues for the relevance ofan unfamiliar narrative of capitalistic thought to today'sanxiety over the discord betweenpersonal ambition and public good.