Personifying capitalism: Economic imagination, the novel, and the entrepreneur (Honore de Balzac, France, William Faulkner)

Tales of the transition to capitalism often speak of depersonalization, increased systematicity, and abstraction. Honore de Balzac and William Faulkner are typically read as heralds of new capitalism in all its rapacious and impersonal forms: Balzac for post-Napoleonic France, and Faulkner for the post-Reconstruction American South. Yet for all this culture of impersonality, texts written during transitions to capitalism unexpectedly, and insistently, foreground personality. The rapacious capitalist, the cold-blooded speculator, the shrewd profiteer: singular and charismatic entrepreneurs abound in the culture of capitalism. Why does the story of the transition to capitalism insistently feature a few singularly memorable businessmen as protagonists? and why are the movers and shakers of capitalism systematically cast as expertly controlling, supremely powerful, and inscrutably mysterious?; Entrepreneurs' exceptional personality results from the complex conceptual and narrative role they play in imagining economic culture. The entrepreneur is articulated as a personification of economic structure---in the economic theories of Say and Schumpeter, in July Monarchy statistics and insurance, and in popular representations of corporate corruption. Balzac and Faulkner's novels, in turn, project economic structure through the entrepreneur's opaque and unattainable point of view. The entrepreneur is represented paradoxically: in contrast to his uncanny ability to see and judge clearly, he is inscrutable, opaque, and mysterious to others. The entrepreneur's representation as both knowledgeable and unknowable is precisely what articulates the transition to capitalism: intentional but invisible, the transition is built on a disparity of knowledge and a narrative break.; Using character to imagine and rhetoricize the economic, Balzac and Faulkner transform economic and historicist questions into narrative ones. Their uses of the entrepreneur defy canonical views of omniscient realism and modernist dialogism. Instead, both authors present a literary knowledge that is also its own form of social science. My dissertation sketches the genesis of a social scientific method generated by literature itself, and suggests a historical process by which social science and literature have evolved a shared narrative vocabulary. The entrepreneur as an interdisciplinary figure for economic knowledge permits us to trace a narrative and literary history of cultural forms, social scientific knowledge, and the transition to capitalism.