A dynamics of value, a pragmatics of culture: Marginalist economics, antitrust law, and American literature

In this project I examine late nineteenth century American culture by way of literary, economic, and legal discourses. I focus upon the marginalist revolution and the creation of antitrust law. Through the lens of marginal utility theory the value of an object was no longer seen as an intrinsic quality, but rather as a structural effect of market relations. No longer tied to any essentialist foundation, value became a volatile, even capricious, social entity. Faced with this regime of social and economic dynamics, American culture was challenged to manage the positive effects of increased economic contingency without letting such contingency descend into chaos.; Transposed into the terms of literary theory, the challenge facing the culture was that of how to keep a signifying system "open" and subject to reinterpretation, while at the same time keeping intact the system's ability to signify. Too much contingency risked pushing the system into chaos, with each signifier perversely (and poetically) exercising its material, rather than referential, character. Too little contingency risked reducing the system to a monological determinacy in which the potential for signifying differently would be foreclosed. In other words, the economic issues facing late nineteenth-century America can be described not just in terms of capital versus labor, but also in terms of poetics. Could America create the cultural space in which the form of (economic) signifying was both refreshingly open and capable of meaningful content?; The culture's response to those questions took form, I argue, in the discourse of antitrust law. I read antitrust as an attempt to preserve the contingent qualities of the free market while at the same time containing that contingency within normative limits. I suggest that parallels can be drawn between the pragmatic tradition in American philosophy and the antitrust solution to the contingency of value in the market; both maintain contingency by, somewhat paradoxically, regulating it. The writings of Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry James, and period economists, along with early antitrust jurisprudence all serve to illustrate and interrogate the historical narrative that I construct.