Titre
Letts Calculate : Moral Accounting in the Victorian Period
Type
article
Institution
UNIL/CHUV/Unisanté + institutions partenaires
Périodique
Auteur(s)
Maas, Harro
Auteure/Auteur
Liens vers les personnes
ISSN
0018-2702
Statut éditorial
Publié
Date de publication
2016
Volume
48
Numéro
annual supplement 1
Première page
16
Dernière page/numéro d’article
43
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Langue
anglais
Résumé
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.
PID Serval
serval:BIB_884F4A919BC2
Date de création
2017-03-26T18:11:23.524Z
Date de création dans IRIS
2025-05-20T23:10:22Z