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.

The research is guided by the three concepts of (1) imagination, (2) speculation and (3) scene.

1. Imagination:

The related concepts of imaginary and imagination have been taken up in literary theory and history to make a social theoretical point: namely, that the discovery of society's own life and its difference from the ruler's body politic made new forms of imagination possible. According to this approach, the 'social imaginary' is not only expressed through political-performative acts (revolutions, general elections, etc.), but is also cultivated in certain aesthetic practices of different genres, not least in (novel) literature.

2. speculation:

A certain problematization of credit, money and finance as speculation lent a particularly pronounced social verve to such processes of representation invoking the imaginary. This refers to the activity of an imaginative mind, in particular the ability to form future scenarios in the imagination and thus also to increase the scope for action in the present. In this way, practices of speculation and consumption, sociological rationalizations of the credit business as an increase in economic scope for action and literary reflections on speculation as a fascination are condensed into a morally charged concept of speculation that fuels the social imaginary.

3. scene:

What unites literature and sociology in the historical-imaginary constellation of the 19th century is the identification of social settings or scenes in which the social imaginary is exemplified in the form of financial dynamics. In contrast to classical political economy and neoclassical economics, the construction of these scenes does not tend to involve abstract model constructions (such as a Robinsonian island economy, a market with two commodities, etc.), but rather concrete social 'stages'. At the same time, these scenes serve a similar purpose to those model constructions in that they make a claim to represent a certain state of affairs.

The project is divided into the fields of literature and sociology, which are examined by the subsections in individual projects.

Romance studies subsection

The subsection in Romance Studies is dedicated to the role of economics in French literature of the long 19th century, especially in the newly emerging medium of the novel. The investigations focus on the diverse possibilities and limits of economic knowledge in literary texts, as well as its literary (non-)representability.

With the French Revolution, the transformation of the institutions of social life in France took place much more radically than in England, for example. The second half of the 19th century and the Belle Époque in particular were characterized by important economic developments that found their way into the literature of the time. As a result, the French novel became a privileged place for dealing with pressing social issues.

The aim of the project is to investigate forms of reflection, doubt(s) and speculation in relation to economic knowledge in French literature of the long 19th century, i.e. to analyze how these are negotiated and negotiated in various scenarios in the face of growing autonomy of action in the context of liberal market laws, with particular emphasis on gender perspectives and social issues.

The project examines (1) the question of the perspective of economic knowledge using the example of selected scenarios in the context of the formal experiments of the 19th century novel and novella and (2) the mediation of a specifically female-coded economic agnosticism in texts by female authors and the search for new forms of addressing women as economic actors as well as the perspective of French female authors of the era as economists.

Sociological subsection

The part of the project carried out at the Institute of Sociology is dedicated to French sociology, which was concerned with the significance of the social upheavals triggered by industrialization and in this respect showed an increased interest in macroeconomic processes and their consequences.

To this end, investigations (1) are carried out in the context of Frédéric Le Play's 'économie sociale', which was concerned with empirical studies of the working class and its budgetary and housekeeping practices. Furthermore, (2) the circle around Èmile Durkheim, whose members, above all François Simiand, also referred to economic issues in the formation of a general sociological paradigm and saw them as a key to the sociological understanding of contemporary society, will be examined.

While the two approaches differed significantly in terms of their political thrust and the place they each assigned to social research, they had important similarities and complementarities for the project. Both Le Plays and Durkheim's circle worked in cooperation with government agencies and formulated the claim of collecting, expanding and deepening social science knowledge.

Both excelled in the establishment of publication organs that served to establish their own social science point of view and methodology. Since the founding of the Société d'economie sociale (1856), Le Play published the book series Les ouvriers de deux mondes, which not only presented comparative studies on the working class in Europe and the USA, but was also intended to popularize the 'monographic method' founded by Le Play. With the first series of L'Année sociologique (1896-1912) and Notes critiques - sciences sociales (1900-1906), the Durkheim circle launched periodicals that were to represent the positivist sociological approach through reviews, sociological readings and critiques.