Economic Agnosticism
- Welcome
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Welcome to the website of the DFG-funded research project Economic Agnosticism: Doubting Economic Knowledge in 19th Century Literature and Sociology.
The project, which is based at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, is carried out jointly by the Chair of General Comparative Society, headed by Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl, at the Institute of Sociology, and the Chair of French and Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies, headed by Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen, at the Institute of Romance Studies.
- Project Presentation
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The DFG-funded project examines how social knowledge about the monetary economy and the monetary sphere was problematized in France in the long 19th century. It is concerned with the way in which literature and sociology reflect on the possibilities and limits of knowledge and the ability to act in monetarily mediated relationships and negotiate problems of individual ethics and social orders. It examines doubts about the reasonability, observability, communicability and reproducibility of monetary knowledge that are articulated in literature and sociology.
Based on the observation that the economy, in particular the monetary economy - explicitly the credit and financial economy - which became popularized and gained political significance in the 19th century, developed into a central area of social relations, it increasingly emerged as an epistemic problem for contemporaries. As a problem of society, the monetary is primarily addressed by novel literature and the emerging sociology.
Both discourses refine the problematic as a core component of the social imaginary. In particular, the project explores how the monetary was problematized as an epistemic object of society, i.e. in what way monetary knowledge, its knowledge value, the relevance and the limits of monetary knowledge became thematic and reflexive as a social problem in literature and sociology. The project undertakes an interdisciplinary reconstruction of what we call 'economic agnosticism': The question is through which literary and sociological forms of representation the (monetary) economy is set as socially relevant as an area about which knowledge is limited or even impossible.
- News
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// March 2025
Workshop Report 'On the Concept of Speculation'
A report on our first project workshop on the concept of 'speculation', written by Karsten Klein (Saarbrücken), was published on H-Soz-Kult on March 26, 2025.
You can read it here.// December 2024
Project Workshop No. 1, 11-12 December 2024, JLU Giessen
The first workshop is dedicated to the concept of 'speculation' as one of the three central transdisciplinary concepts of the project. Speculation accompanies the emergence of economic/monetary knowledge from the long 19th century to the present day and occurs in different configurations in moments of doubt.
Images: Jean Béraud, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons// September 2024
Joint panel: Congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature (ESCL), ‘Le jeu: Gambling, Gaming and Play in Literature’, 2-6 September 2024
Sorbonne Université, Paris
Our panel in Paris traced the manifold connections between economics, literature and sociology on the topic of 'play' from a sociological-literary perspective. In particular, it focused on speculation, gambling and game-theoretical approaches as 'playful' basic elements of a modern, aleatoric economic culture. The contributions to the panel complement the project's research on forms of economic knowledge, epistemic practices and aesthetic imaginaries. They engage in a dialogue between literary and sociological perspectives on the economic, shedding light on how both disciplines use the notion of play and speculation to adopt a critical and reflexive stance towards the economy.
Contributions to the panel:
- Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen: “The Fabric of Dreams: Texture, Fashion, Gambling and Speculation on Social Advancement in Texts by Flaubert and Maupassant”
- Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl: “The Production of Uncertainty as Precondition for Speculation: Game Theory in Economics, Strategic Studies, Sociology, and Decentralized Finance”
- Felix Hempe: “Scenes of Speculation: The L’Année Sociologique and the Durkheimians”
- Marie-Theres Stickel: “The literary system: An institutionalised form of speculative literary economic gambling? On Adrienne Monnier’s Gazette des Amis des Livres”
[Publication of the papers in preparation.]
Photos: M. Stickel// January 2024
New publication: Book chapter „Literatur und Soziologie als Genres der Reflexion monetären Wissens“ ("Literature and Sociology as Genres of Reflecting Monetary Knowledge")
We are pleased to announce a new contribution to the project: the chapter "Literatur und Soziologie als Genres der Reflexion monetären Wissens" ("Literature and Sociology as Genres of Reflecting Monetary Knowledge") by Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen and Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl has just been published in the literary-sociological anthology 'Die drei Kulturen' reloaded (eds. Christine Magerski and Christian Steuerwald).
In the 19th century, the economy, and in particular the monetary economy (including credit and finance), which was growing in popularity and political importance, became a field of social relations that was increasingly visible as an epistemic problem. The chapter examines the ways in which the question of economic knowledge and its (im)possibility was intensively discussed in literature and sociology during this period.
Learn more
- Contact
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Contact
Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen
Institute for Romance Studies
Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl
Institute for Sociology
Felix Hempe
Institute for Sociology
Marie-Theres Stickel
Institute for Romance Studies
Images:
Paris: Colourbox.de / Kostiantyn Levin
Zweifel, Palast der Republik, 2005: Jula2812, CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons
