A Herstory of Economics. Edith Kuiper
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she worked on, and these were added as a set of eight letters to the 1798 edition of her translation. These letters contain remarkable comments by a central figure in French society at the time, but it would take until 2008 for them to be fully translated into the English language (see Brown, 2008).
De Grouchy started her work on the Theory of Moral Sentiments after the death of her husband, the famous philosopher and mathematician Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet organized her salons and befriended radical thinkers such as Thomas Paine, whose letters and speeches she also translated into French. After the French Revolution broke out in 1789 and turned sour a few years later, her husband fled persecution, and moved to live in hiding. De Grouchy visited him in secret and they discussed his work on Sketch for a Picture of the Historical Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1822). After nine months of hiding, Marquis de Condorcet was arrested in 1794; he died in his cell a few months later (Brown, 2008). Sophie de Grouchy was thirty years old at the time, and it was in the years that followed that she focused her attention on translating Adam Smith’s treatise on moral behavior.
In her Letters on Sympathy (1798), de Grouchy entered into a conversation with her brother-in-law, P. J. G. Cabanis, about Smith’s ideas on the origins and nature of moral behavior and her own views on political economy. She criticizes Smith for not fully seeing his conceptualization of sympathy through. In her view, sympathy is not only a rational process of the imagination, but also has a physical basis; she describes the physical response and connection from one human to all other beings – men, women, children, and animals. Where Smith stops short of discussing policy implications in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, de Grouchy, a social reformer and feminist, points out that society should design its institutions in such a way that, instead of normalizing self-interested behavior, behavior based on sympathy should be supported by the way institutions are built. Social institutions, according to her, are built on the presumption of self-interested behavior, thereby supporting and condoning such behavior, which makes it hard to pursue a life of merit and sincerity. De Grouchy ends her last letter, Letter VIII, with a striking and timely attack on social institutions that create and reproduce class and other social divides, and argues that “by means of the unnatural needs institutions have created, they have weakened a powerful motive that can lead to upright conduct, namely the lure of domestic tranquility” (1798: 181).
Although constrained, due to their gender, women like Émilie du Châtelet, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet had the means and support enabling them to write, get their work published, and receive acknowledgment. Elizabeth Montagu may have provoked substantial criticism because of her outgoing personality, but her wealth and connections provided her with opportunities to make substantial contributions to cultured life in London and to the communities on her estates. For most women writers, however, including economic writers, life looked rather different. Some self-taught intellectuals, like Mary Hays (1759–1843), raised their voice against the gender hierarchy and the dark sides of capitalism that brought moral decay to thousands of women. Hays spoke from an economic and political position that was impacted by economic insecurity and poverty. Speaking to the better selves of those in power, she wrote an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798), arguing forcefully that women had little or no possibility of pursuing their ambitions and improving their own economic situation. She argued that women faced a limited set of professions that were, therefore, overcrowded and thus underpaid. As a result, “want of fortune, and want of appropriate employment, leave them open to the attempts of those who can afford to bribe them from the paths of virtue” (1798: 279). Hays is referring here to the many women who ended up so destitute that prostitution was the only way they could earn a living for themselves and their children. She stresses that the behavior of such women was driven by dire circumstances rather than by “moral weakness,” and she argues that, given their financial circumstances, these women were forced to pursue their economic self-interest in this way. Middle-class political economists, however, neglected these women and their circumstances and failed to include them in their academic economic theorizing, limiting themselves to making moral judgments and rejecting alternative arguments, such as those presented by Mary Hays.
Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), a contemporary of Hays, lived in better circumstances. She received a decent education and her social environment provided her with support and acknowledgment of her writing. Edgeworth wrote first with her father on education matters, and later, on her own, a number of novels. Famous for her writing and experienced in managing her father’s estate, the circle of people around the political economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), including Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), James Mill (1773–1836), and Jane Haldimand Marcet (1769–1858) (Heilbroner, 1999 [1981]: 86; Kern, 1998), opened up to her. Edgeworth engaged in an ongoing discussion and correspondence with Ricardo on the causes of rent increases, which she saw as based on lack of innovation in agricultural methods and mismanagement by landlords. Her most famous work, Castle Rackrent (1800), contains an entertaining story about the shift in culture from the patriarchal, agricultural setting, in which landlords had a moral obligation to their tenants, to a world in which relations became impersonal, and in which profit-seeking and personal enrichment became more important than moral obligations. Edgeworth describes here the era in which landlords left their estates to go and entertain themselves in cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London, appointing stewards in their absence. Often, these stewards, while their boss was away, would suppress and exploit the tenants and even manage to keep large parts of the revenues for themselves. In other words, it was a world where economic relations ceased to be modeled after the family, but became rational, transactional, and driven by self-interest and the pursuit of profits. Although an insightful description of the changing economic relations and morals of her time, Castle Rackrent did not address the shifts in gender relations that were part of this process.
The role of implicit moral and value judgments in economic theory was dealt with in various way by economists. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), for example, aimed in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) to stop political economists from making moral judgments by adopting, instead, quantitative reasoning. On the other hand, economists like John Stuart Mill (1806–73) described political economy as partly a positive and partly a normative science. Neoclassical economists like William Stanley Jevons (1835–82) and Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) explicitly claimed that their science was, or at least should be, a positivist one. According to Marshall, “political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life” (1890: 1) and economics should be based on observations, definitions, classification, induction, and deduction to “reach the knowledge of the interdependence of economic phenomena” (1890: 29). By basing themselves on rational reasoning and facts, economists were able to provide answers to policy issues and analyses of topics that were the subject of heated political debates, claiming scientific status and objectivity for their studies and solutions.
Other economists pointed out the particular morality implicit in economic concepts and theories that had long been taken for granted by economists. Women economic writers and economists can predominantly be found in this last group (see Madden, 2002). Feminist economists in particular criticized the implicit gender notions, male bias, and other value judgments that structure economic theorizing. Sandra Harding, a feminist philosopher, published “Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective?” (1995) in the first issue of the Feminist Economics journal. She made the point that value neutrality based on shared values do not make for an objective statement. The fact that these values are shared only makes them invisible. One way to counter the invisibility of shared values is by bringing in a wider and more diverse set of voices, as this introduces different views that will contest – and as such make visible – the formerly shared values. Taking a feminist perspective, for instance, brings to light patriarchal values implicit in mainstream economic thinking.
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