The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel by Gallagher Catherine

Author:Gallagher, Catherine [Gallagher, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Therefore, despite the fact that the labor theory of value seemed indifferent to the biological significance of commodities, numerous other facets of political-economic theory continually raised the issue of the food supply. The theories of rent, of the wages fund, and of the falling rate of profit, in addition to the population principle, all demonstrate political economy’s perennial preoccupation with the physiological preconditions of labor and with the extent to which commodity production and exchange are grounded in transfers of biological energy. To be sure, those issues were most urgent in the late 1830s and early 1840s, in the heat of the anti-Corn Law agitation, but they never entirely disappeared.12

So when Ruskin harps on grain in the early 1860s, he is echoing major themes of political economy. Imagining a society that increasingly diverts its efforts away from the production of life-sustaining yields toward the manufacture of gunpowder, for example, he asks us to suppose that

an increasing number of labourers, giving what time they can spare to this branch of industry, bring increasing quantities of combustibles into the store, and use the general orders received in exchange to obtain such wine, wool, or corn as they may have need of. . . . But the corn and wine gradually vanish, and in their place, as gradually, appear sulphur and saltpetre; till at last, the labourers who have consumed corn and supplied nitre, presenting on a festal morning some of their currency to obtain materials for the feast, discover that no amount of currency will command anything Festive, except Fire. (224–25)

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