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In its depictions of characters' processes of decision-making, Jane Austen's Emma incorporates a model of choice that later came to dominate neoclassical economics. This model is preferential choice, which asserts that individuals choose based on their subjective, idiosyncratic preferences rather than following socially sanctioned value systems. While Emma represents preferential choice and illustrates its connection to consumer capitalism, unlike neoclassical economists, the novel ultimately exhibits skepticism toward this modern model of decision-making. This skepticism is rooted in Emma's conservative economic and political vision. Its conservatism paradoxically gestures to a point that is important to some of today's progressive thought: that our valorization of preferential choice—of the idea that choices should be a matter of individual desire for one option among many—is not inevitable and comes with its own significant difficulties. This article shows that even as the novel distances itself from consumerism's mode of preferential choosing, Emma's representation of preferential choice acknowledges its aesthetic importance in the construction of interiorized characters and in open-ended narrative forms. Such an acknowledgment shows Austen's recognition that consumerist habits of mind are important to literary production, especially at a moment when novels vied for attention in a competitive literary marketplace. In such a marketplace, readers chose among many disparate titles; the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary field was, indeed, one of the first manifestations of modern consumerism wherein overflowing markets tried to convince shoppers to express their individuality through their preferences for some goods over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the figure of the prostitute does a lot of hard labor in Marxist thought and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Karl Marx uses. Topics icnlude the Marx renders the prostitute at once a metaphor for and a paradigmatic example of wage labor's capacity to turn all human activity into commodifiable labor time and the distinguishes Marx's treatment of the prostitute from that of later thinkers would appear not as the living commodity of labor but simply as a fungible.

This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period's embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offer information on historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski and the sociology of nescience. Topics discussed include Mirowski's account of "economics as social physics;" the Neoclassical economics and Newtonian doctrine; and the views of Mirowski on neoliberalism's impact on thought and culture.

The article discusses the effect that the socialist calculation debate, economic reforms in socialist Eastern Europe and the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989 had on the understanding of neoliberalism, neoclassical economics and socialism. An overview of the Bolshevik Revolution, "new socialism" in Great Britain and the economic policies of Yugoslavia is presented. The author contends that 1989 was an important year in which neoliberalism subverted market socialism as an economic policy in Eastern Europe.