By John O'Brien
Lengthy prior to Citizens United and sleek debates over businesses as humans, such organisations already stood among the private and non-private as either cars for trade and creative constructs in response to teams of people. during this publication, John O’Brien explores how this courting performed out in economics and literature, fields that received prominence within the comparable era.
reading British and American essays, poems, novels, and tales from the 17th during the 19th centuries, O’Brien pursues the belief of incorporation as a trope discernible in quite a lot of texts. Key authors contain John Locke, Eliza Haywood, Harriet Martineau, and Edgar Allan Poe, and every bankruptcy is orientated round one of those company mirrored of their works, reminiscent of insurance firms or banks. In exploring concerns corresponding to no matter if sentimental curiosity is equal to monetary curiosity, those works undergo witness to capitalism’s influence on background and human exertions, wish, and reminiscence. This period’s inventive writing, O’Brien argues, is the place the unconscious of that approach left its mark. by means of revealing the elaborate ties among literary versions and financial thoughts, Literature Incorporated indicates us how the company company has formed our figuring out of our social international and ourselves.
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Additional resources for Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850
Example text
9 Conceptualizing persons as property was fundamental to the slave system that European companies developed to support the colonial project. It is also critical to the development of modern property rights, which proceed from the claim, best expressed in the English tradition by Locke, that the right to own other things proceeds from the absolute right to own one’s self. And the academic discipline of economics itself, as it has developed out of the work of Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century, is indebted to a strong misreading of the Second Treatise as well as of Locke’s writings on money.
The drop in the value of precious metal invoked here does not con- 38 Chapter One cern a certain precious quality which it is thought of as possessing in itself, but its general power of representation. Money and wealth are to be thought of as twin masses, which necessarily correspond with one another. (182–83)20 Locke’s quotation shores up Foucault’s claim by asserting that even in spite of the tenfold increase in the quantity of silver in circulation, the “proportion” between it and other commodities remains the same.
182–83)20 Locke’s quotation shores up Foucault’s claim by asserting that even in spite of the tenfold increase in the quantity of silver in circulation, the “proportion” between it and other commodities remains the same. But it also cracks open a window that will let us see outside Foucault’s “Classical” system of correspondences. In its invocation of “the West-Indies,” which here as often in seventeenth-century English writing typically stands in for the Americas tout court, Locke’s passage is one of a number of places in this section of The Order of Things where Foucault gestures, fleetingly, elliptically, and here through citation, to the colonial horizon.