How Can Economics and Law Help Literature. Inversion of Utilitarianism in Economic and Legal Poetics

The complex and ambiguous relationship between literature, economics, and law is the focus of the current work. In rejecting the humanities (jurisprudence and economics to be more precise) in the uninhibited use of literature when the later remains in the position of a victim (since for scientists, literature oft  turns out either to be a convenient tool for illustrating the course of one’s thoughts or an opportunity to display individual cultural baggage), the author insists on the epistemological subversive character of literary experience. Comparing the concepts of Honoré de Balzac and Thomas Piketty as well as Charles Agustin de Sainte-Beuve and Marcel Proust, the author depicts how literature and, in particular, literary characters produce conceptual inversion, projecting economic values onto literature and literary values onto economics. Such an inversion, multiplied by the subjective inversion of characters, allows a writer to criticize existing economic concepts. For example, Proust refutes Sainte-Beuve who claimed that “industrial literature” is the literature that inverts values produced by material economic interests. In turn, Marquis de Norpois’ veiled sexual inversion In Search of Lost Time complicates the difference between good and evil, which is very important for Sainte-Beuve in his criticism of industrial literature. In such a manner, Proust demonstrates how unfounded Sainte-Beuve’s fears were. He also shows that this literary critic attached too much importance to economics while simultaneously underestimating the cognitive abilities and intellectual tricks of literature, which, being in a state of competition with trade, was forced to be evasive, deforming values and institutions of economics and law.

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