A Cautious Register: Emily Hasler charts an unusual hybrid between Economics and Romanticism

Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist, Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780521513845. £17.99

There are no soap operas set on the London Stock Exchange. While millions of people with no medical knowledge tune in to watch endless dramas about A&E wards, no one has yet devised a long-running primetime programme that involves a set of characters in The City, that invokes their lives, loves and — albeit as the backdrop — their work. I want people everywhere to be tuning in to an awful love-triangle episode with a sub-plot about short-selling, because at least this would suggest we’re allowed access to that world and that the people in it are not so totally unrelated to ourselves.

Invisible hands might as well be sleights of hand. The City is akin to the Magic Circle; no one discloses the secrets of producing money out of thin air, or of making it disappear again. But, suddenly, what Thomas Carlyle called ‘the dismal science’ seems relevant, urgent and interesting. There’s an onslaught of computer generated graphs whizzing up and down the screen, an ongoing debate about what shape the recovery will take and a continuing recourse to visual metaphors involving presenters riding on miniature railways or holding footballs labelled ECONOMY. And, when it’s not dumbed down to that level, it can feel as if the jargon, all the terms and concepts we aren’t privy to, are there to stop us from acting or reacting in any form other than panic. Yet all are economic agents of some sort, scooping water with leaky buckets from the same leaky boat.

So while it’s not exactly beach reading, I recommend Bronk’s The Romantic Economist, since you probably can’t afford to go on holiday this year. It is accessible but it should be stressed that it also serves as a university textbook, so while the writing is clear, concise and often enjoyable, it does have a certain cautious register that comes with the academic genre.

The book is more economics than Romanticism, but in fusing the two, Bronk demonstrates a complex and subtle view of a period which is continuing to open up exciting new avenues of scholarship and debate. For Bronk, Romanticism is an umbrella term. It is Romanticism’s very complexity and contrariness that are its strength, and that make it the basis for Bronk’s proposed alternative to economics as it is normally studied and analysed. The Keatsian idea of negative capability underscores this; we are limited, we can never know all the truth and only see glimpses of it — but Bronk doesn’t suggest we stop searching for truth. In fact he insists we keep our eyes open to new ideas, new factors, new models for seeing and describing the economy and its agents. This is done by constantly exercising that great Romantic organ, the imagination. For the Romantics, and Bronk, imagination is not antithetical to reason, but actually, as Wordsworth wrote, “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And reason in her most exalted mood”.

As with the Romantics, the imagination and the language and metaphors we use to express the world are a lamp not a mirror, as MH Abrams famously concluded. We half-create the world we live in by seeking to describe it, so it is important to be aware and able to adapt to this, constantly searching out new metaphors, lest we blinker ourselves by always looking at the matter from one angle. Another important facet to Bronk’s argument is that the language used to discuss economics should be that of the economic agents. It’s akin to Wordsworth’s idea of representing people in and therefore by their own language, but Bronks moves even further, I’d argue, toward a Wittgensteinian concept of language as a game.

Finally, Bronk takes from the Romantics the idea that individuals are feeling beings driven by any number of factors, not simply personal gain, but a whole range of emotions and imperatives both positive and negative. Bronk strongly believes these ideas should be a part of how we think about any area that is shaped by people, including economics-which is traditionally studied on a basis that reduces the individuals and groups involved down to a mechanism. The book challenges the prevalence of thinking in economics based purely on mathematics or mechanistic models of behaviour derived from physics, by “developing models of the behaviour of economic agents that recognise the vital roles played by imagination and sentiment as well as reason …”. Bronk makes it plain that his work is a gathering together of existing ideas and movements. There have been stirrings within the discipline of economics for some time; thinkers demanding a more holistic view of the subject. The ideas here are exciting and will be new to most readers, but overall the book acts as a champion of an existing cause, a unifying rallying cry.

Bronk proposes a new type of thinker: the Romantic Economist. The term is a hybrid — not an emphasis of one approach over the other but a synthesis of both, whereby the intuitive works with the rationalist to give a third way between the ‘economic man’ of textbooks who is motivated only by self-interest and acts in rationally foreseeable ways; and homo romanticus who has emotions, sentiment, intuition and above all a capacity for imagination.

So often, our desire is for the economists to tell us what will happen. It is only when something goes wrong we want to hear from them. Like doctors, we wish them to understand what we cannot and to be able to fix the problems we don’t even comprehend. For Bronk, “The capacity to make predictions cannot be the holy grail of good economic theory,” and so some will find the lessons he teaches us ultimately unsatisfying, as his thinking is based on the idea of uncertainty. But for me the book helped me to understand a science I’ve always felt excluded from, as well as explaining the reasons for that feeling of exclusion. It’s a difficult book because it offers a complex and subtle view, but one that excites new thinking and encourages a widened debate while it maintains a clear and entertaining style.