Skip to main content
University of Michigan Press
Fulcrum logo

You can access this title through a library that has purchased it. More information about purchasing is available at our website.

Share the story of what Open Access means to you

a graphic of a lock that is open, the universal logo for open access

University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.

  1. Home
  2. A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Supritha Rajan 2015
Restricted You do not have access to this book. How to get access.
No questions are more pressing today than the ethical dimensions of global capitalism in relation to an unevenly secularized modernity. A Tale of Two Capitalisms offers a timely response to these questions by reexamining the intellectual history of capitalist economics during the nineteenth century. Rajan's ambitious book traces the neglected relationships between nineteenth-century political economy, anthropology, and literature in order to demonstrate how these discourses buttress a dominant narrative of self-interested capitalism that obscures a submerged narrative within political economy. This submerged narrative discloses political economy's role in burgeoning theories of religion, as well as its underlying ethos of reciprocity, communality, and just distribution.

Drawing on an impressive range of literary, anthropological, and economic writings from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, Rajan offers an inventive, interdisciplinary account of why this second narrative of capitalism has so long escaped our notice. The book presents an unprecedented genealogy of key anthropological and economic concepts, demonstrating how notions of sacrifice, the sacred, ritual, totemism, and magic remained conceptually intertwined with capitalist theories of value and exchange in both sociological and literary discourses.

Rajan supplies an original framework for discussing the ethical ideals that continue to inform contemporary global capitalism and its fraught relationship to the secular. Its revisionary argument brings new insight into the history of capitalist thought and modernity that will engage scholars across a variety of disciplines.

 

 

 

Read Book Buy Book
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-12094-9 (ebook)
  • 978-0-472-07255-2 (hardcover)
  • 978-0-472-05255-4 (paper)
Subject
  • Literary Studies:19th Century Literature
  • Economics:History of Economic Thought
  • History:European History
  • Literary Studies:British and Irish Literatures
Citable Link
  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part I
    • CHAPTER 1 - Economies of Sacrifice
    • CHAPTER 2 - Circular Economies, Sacred Economies: The Sacrifice of Labor in John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy
  • Part II
    • CHAPTER 3 - Rational Agents, Ritual Actions
    • CHAPTER 4 - The Visible Hand: Models of Communality and Economic Information Systems
  • Part III
    • CHAPTER 5 - The Making of Household Gods: Value, Totems, and Kinship in the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel and Victorian Anthropology
    • CHAPTER 6 - Household Gods Revisited in George Eliot and Anthony Trollope
  • Part IV
    • CHAPTER 7 - Magical Technologies: Forces of Interest in Rudyard Kipling and Marshallian Economics
    • CHAPTER 8 - Electric Kim and the Ludic Rituals of Empire
  • Coda
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
37 views since November 15, 2018
University of Michigan Press logo

University of Michigan Press

Powered by Fulcrum logo

  • About
  • Blog
  • Feedback
  • Contact
  • Contribute
  • Accessibility
  • Preservation
  • Privacy
  • Terms of Service
  • Log In
© University of Michigan Press 2020
x This site requires cookies to function correctly.