The Representation of Business in English Literature. Группа авторов
whereas his equally able peer who is out to change things will see an intellectual rather than scholarly route as “a means rather than an end, a path to exactly that kind of wide influence which the professional intellectual exercises.”
Hayek concludes this section by asserting that there is no greater propensity to what he calls socialism among the more intelligent in society than to any other “ism.” If one gets that impression from the pulpit or in the classroom or from the television or in novels then it is simply because “among the best minds” there is a higher propensity among the socialists than among, say, the capitalists to “devote themselves to those intellectual pursuits which in modern society give them a decisive influence on public opinion.”
Should those concerned with the intellectual climate in which business operates be concerned about these scribblers of novels? How should they respond?
The power of fiction to convey a message is beyond question. As Hayek wrote The Intellectuals and Socialism, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BCC) was busy establishing a daily fifteen-minute wireless soap opera set in the mythical country village of Ambridge. Its purpose then was to teach farmers good, new agricultural techniques to get the most out of the land in highly rationed post-World War II Britain. Today it is more likely to feature a politically correct lesbian couple on an organic hobby farm wanting to adopt a baby than an ordinary landowning farmer off to market.
Another BBC offering, the combined thirty-eight episodes of Yes, Minister, and Yes, Prime Minister by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, are not so much comedy as deeply insightful, highly educational, powerful training movies which have completely altered the way a generation looks at its government. Jay and Lynn’s programmes, which were recently voted ninth in a compilation of the one hundred best TV shows for the British Film Institute, removed our blinkers.
In the U.S., commentators from John Chamberlain on (“The Businessman in Fiction,” Fortune, November 1948, 134-48) have credited “to some extent” the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act directly to Upton Sinclair’s depiction of the slaughterhouses of Chicago in The Jungle. Chamberlain wondered why, in the face of the incredible impact of his novels, Upton Sinclair continued to write as if nothing had changed, either on the part of the businessman or on the part of the legislators.
Surely the answer is very simple and has close parallels with the so-called “environment movement” of today. Neither Sinclair nor the leaders of today’s “environment movement” are at all, not remotely, interested in improvement. The idea of a new, improved, kinder, gentler capitalism is utterly alien to them. They want to tear it down and destroy it: the novel or the “environment movement” is simply a means to an end, the outright destruction of business, the total demise of capitalism.
In both cases—the novelist and the environmentalist—appeasement has never worked and will never work. Legislation directly addressing Upton Sinclair’s worries did not slow him down one jot in the opening decades of the twentieth century and likewise with the environmentalists in the closing decades.
So how would I reply to the businessman who says, “Look, John, we are getting a real bad press here with these writers of fiction. It isn’t funny and over the long haul it is damaging our ability to provide our customers with quality products at a good price while simultaneously paying the pension funds who own us a good return. What should we do?”
First, I would urge patience and caution. Three centuries of bad press will not be fixed overnight, and throwing millions of pounds at problems such as this by, say, endowing an Oxbridge Chair of Literary Capitalism is not only futile but also self-defeating, as such resources will immediately be captured by the anti-capitalists.
Second, I would say that education is important and I would start a very modest programme of outreach to brand-new emerging talent. A day spent visiting a factory or similar capitalist institution would be a positive eye-opener for most, if not all, such talent.
Third, my still modest outreach programme would extend to current leaders, both market-place practitioners and academic theorists, to engage them in whatever way possible.
Lastly, I would argue that incentives do matter, and I would seek to find ways of financially rewarding fiction writers above all who treat business as an honourable, creative, moral and personally satisfying way of life. Some of the pounds spent on appeasing might be better spent on encouraging and rewarding.
Finally a word about the origins of this book. They go back some years now to a series of conversations I had with Fiona Davis, then a policy analyst with the Confederation of British Industry. Fiona was a regular attender at IEA events and had a degree in English literature from Oxford University. My knowledge of the American literature in this area mentioned above but also including “The Capitalist as Hero in the American Novel” by John (“Jack”) R. Cashill (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Purdue University, August 1982; printed by University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985) led us to discuss the idea of an IEA publication on how business has been treated over the centuries in English literature. Pressures from other commitments stalled Fiona’s progress, but serendipitously a favourable reference to Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South in an American magazine brought the name of Professor Arthur Pollard to mind and he caught the baton just in time.
As always, the views expressed in Readings 53 are those of the authors, not the Institute (which has no corporate view), its managing trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.
GEOFFREY CARNALL is an Honorary Fellow of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a former Reader in English Literature there. He is the author of Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind (Clarendon Press, 1960) and, with John Butt, The Mid-Eighteenth Century, vol. 8 of the Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford University Press, 1979). He has edited a volume of essays on the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1989) and a history of Quakers in India written by Marjorie Sykes titled An Indian Tapestry (Sessions Book Trust, 1997).
ANGUS EASSON, formerly professor of English at the University of Salford, in Salford, Greater Manchester, England, is now an Honorary Fellow of the university’s European Studies Research Institute. He has edited many titles on Victorian fiction, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Dickens’s Little Dorrit (C. E. Tuttle, 1999), and is currently editor of the supplements to the Pilgrim-British Academy edition of Dickens’s letters.
JOHN MORRIS is Professor Emeritus of English and of Contemporary and European Studies at Brunel University, in Uxbridge, West London. He is the co-author of Writers and Politics in Modern Britain (Holmes and Meier, 1977) and has contributed essays to The First World War in Fiction (ed. Klein; Macmillan, 1976). He is also the author of Time Lines: Tales of the Absurd (Blaisdon, 2003).
ARTHUR POLLARD (1922-2002) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Hull, in Hull, East Yorkshire, England. Among his principal scholarly interests were nineteenth-century and Australian literature. His publications include works on Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, the Brontës, and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as the three-volume Complete Poetical Works of George Crabbe (with Norma Dalrymple-Champneys, Oxford University Press, 1988).
ALLAN SIMMONS is a Reader in English Literature at St. Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, England. He teaches various courses on modern and contemporary literature in English and is general editor of the Conradian, the journal of the Joseph Conrad Society. His publications include Joseph Conrad (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2007).
W. A. SPECK is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Leeds, in Leeds, England, and is Special Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, in Nottingham, England. He is the author of Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology, Politics, and Culture, 1680-1820 (Longman,