Letts Calculate : Moral Accounting in the Victorian Period

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_884F4A919BC2
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Letts Calculate : Moral Accounting in the Victorian Period
Journal
History of Political Economy
Author(s)
Maas Harro
ISSN
0018-2702 (Print)
1527-1919 (Online)
ISSN-L
0018-2702
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2016
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
48
Number
annual supplement 1
Pages
16-43
Language
english
Abstract
This essay examines the importance of an accounting culture for the rise of marginalism in Victorian England. I trace the use of accounting tools in family and private life to fend off uncertainties in the market and to enhance moral control of the self, examining the use of diaristic accounting for two Victorians, George Eliot and William Stanley Jevons, in more detail. The philosopher of mind Alexander Bain recommended the use of mercantile accounting tools, Benjamin Franklin's moral algebra in particular, to harness the mind against emotional and myopic decision making. Bain's recommendation was critically tested by Eliot in Middlemarch and used by Jevons to naturalize the mind's balancing of pleasures and pains as an algebra of feelings. Washing out all differences between reason and emotion, Jevons's theory of pleasure and pain became foundational for the economists' theory of utility. Contemporary critics of rational choice theory take this naturalized image of the economic agent as its bogeyman, ignoring the social infrastructure that brought this agent, thinking as a merchant, into existence. The idea that we calculate captures a sociohistorical reality, rather than a physiological or psychological fact.
Keywords
moral accounting, Benjamin Franklin, moral algebra, marginalism, George Eliot, William Stanley Jevons
Create date
26/03/2017 19:11
Last modification date
20/08/2019 14:47
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