Weak Gods and the Happy System: Questions of Value and Literary Form in British Political Economy of the Long Eighteenth Century

This dissertation concerns how different philosophers, journalists, merchants, satirists, and novelists imagined and wrote about the role of human desire in economic activity from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century in Britain. To put it succinctly, my thesis states that economic thought in the period under consideration became explicitly concerned with how value was produced and distributed while also raising questions about why being productive was desirable. I argue that thinkers and writers engaged with economic ideas in the period under consideration questioned why productive activity was important, why it was desirable, and how desire operated within production, but at the same time such questions became increasingly more difficult to articulate explicitly within the discourse