Project Presentation
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.