the passions of learning in tight circumstances: toward a political economy of the mind (annotated)

7/30/2019 The Passions of Learning in Tight Circumstances: Toward a Political Economy of the Mind (annotated)

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The Passions of Learning in Tight

Circumstances: Toward a PoliticalEconomy of the Mind

RAY MCDERMOTT

Stanford University

Economies make their demands, and by necessity, people adjust, learn,and survive. People adjust to tight circumstances with passion and inge-nuity. Necessity and its passions are the stuff of reality and generally morethan schools or educational research can handle. Mainstream theories of learning have captured economic constraints only statistically and symp-tomatically (as if being short on money means being short on ingenuity). A focus on the demands of necessity promises a more grounded view of educational possibilities. 1 It can deliver portraits of what people in trou-ble can do, rather than what they cannot do, and it promises researchbetter tuned to the work of democracy.

To illustrate the case, I invoke the power of novels to capture both thepress of circumstance and the ingenuity of people facing difficulties. I doso in five sections: one on why novels are attentive to economic necessity;a second on political economies as learning environments; and three sec-tions on the passions of necessity in three novels that stretch the usualborders of research on learning. I am not asking learning researchers to write novels Deus avertat! but to reduce the limitations of educationalresearch by modeling the success of fiction at imitating and expandingreality. Careful empirical studies of learning can profit from the attentionof novelists to the nuances of necessity. 2

National Society for the Study of Education,Volume 109, Issue 1, pp. 144159Copyright by National Society for the Study of Education, Columbia University


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Political Economy of the Mind 145

THE QUESTION

How do novelists develop enriching portraits of people at the bottom endof social structurethe poor, the hungry, the tired, and far too many of them women and childrenwhile so much social science, psychology,and educational research answers to the description of what is wrong withthem?

For one answer, consider that educational research relies on narrow streams of evidence, but novelists portray potentially whole persons withthick lives. Fictional accounts of economic matters are peripheral to insti-tutionalized educational research that speaks from inside current cate-gories, to current conditions as the only possible reality, and in terms of received measures of evaluation. Freed of a duplicitous commitment tothings as they are, fiction can tell us more about what we should appreci-ate and emulate. Whether in fiction or reality, the more known about characters, the more they make sense. Fictional and empirical make aforced contrast set. The terms are better pairedand paredby theircommon enemy: work that hinders imagination and distorts the inner-most powers and virtues of those it describes.

Characters in great novels are more than just flawed or maimed, but flawed or maimed in relation to others, in circumstances engaged andmanipulated by others, and precisely so, one page of detail after another.Every account of either growth or decline must be delivered as if in theflesh. If novelists are to capture an audience, they must develop charac-ters from multiple points of view; detail, locale, direction, tension, neuro-sis, and struggle make good reading. Characters must interact, sleep,fight, and get interpreted with each otherenmeshed, embedded,embroiled, and embellishedand every step is complex with passion andingenuity. Even in novels that focus on a single person ( Crime and Punishment ) or that take place across a single day ( Ulysses ) or in a singlesetting ( Tristram Shandy )even in novels focused on persons defined by the negation of others ( Watt )characters must be situated deeply (fromtheir senses into their selves), widely (from their senses out to others),and hierarchically (from their senses hammered by conditions not of their own making). Every voice must be tuned to the received circum-stances, coordinated agendas, and overlapping imaginations that feedthe passions and give occasion to learning. 3

In a preface to his early novel, Oliver Twist , itself a response to the dra-conian Poor Laws of 1834, Charles Dickens (18121870) set perhaps thefirst rule for practice-driven theory in a society that promises equality but delivers a population divided by class, race, gender, or other arbitrary markers and makers of unjust hierarchy. Dickens demanded that novels


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146 National Society for the Study of Education

display the disenfranchised both caught in miserable reality and guidedby the principle of Good surviving through adverse circumstance, andtriumphing at last (1841/1993, p. 3). As if he were no less than an ethno-grapher with a rich imagination, Dickens portrayed injustice in what peo-ple undergo and celebrates what they accomplish against the odds. Incomparison, educational research stresses the deprivations of poverty,forgets to celebrate what people can do, and avoids confronting those who create, measure, and profit from the problems.

Dickens heads a long list of novelists who have known better thandeprivation theorists. He highlighted the Good, but he deliveredequally on fluency, intelligence, competence, curiosity, and learning. Sodid Daniel Defoe (16601731) and Zora Neale Hurston (18911960). A century before Dickens, Defoe wrote a preface for Colonel Jack,his novelabout an adolescent pickpocket who turned into a calculating and some-times successful merchant: Though circumstances formd him by Necessity to be a Thief, a strange Rectitude of Principles remaind withhim, and made him early abhor the worst Part of his Trade (1722/1989,p. 1).

Young Jack did what he had to and learned along the way. A century after Dickens, in Their Eyes Are Watching God , Hurston delivered people

silenced by their situation until they migrated to a rough and tumble new place of possibility. Educational researchers might share Hurstons initialaccount of people ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor(1937/1990, p. 125), butthe world being easier to change in fictionthan in realitythey rarely portray the same people transformed in moreproductive conditions. Educational policy usually ends where it begins: wallowing in intractable problems. Like Defoe and Dickens, Hurstoninstead delivered people transformed in new settings, people who findout about livin fuh theyselves (p. 187): Blues made and used right on

the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losinglove every hour. Work all day for money, fight all night for love (p. 125). What happened to their cultural deprivation, their at-risk developmen-

tal traits, their impaired cognitive growth? What happened to their lim-ited knowledge, vocabulary, work skills, or motivations? Under new conditions, those previously thought to be unable became, in these nov-elists accounts, suddenly able.

POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF LEARNING

The first fact, not enough attended in education, is that economic condi-tions organize what has to be learned. The claim invites little argument


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capitalists and socialists agreebut educational research inscribes mostly the symptoms and hides the loaded systems of reward and benefit that create and legitimate the results. Schools develop a limited version of theknowledge needed in life. The greater learning is organized and madeconsequential in tune with economic necessities.

Three data points over 200 years can only suggest a pattern of novelstrumping learning research for an appreciation of those caught in what-ever version of the Achievement Gap that was once current. The threeeconomiesDefoe in early-18th-century merchant capitalism, Dickens inmid-19th-century industrial capitalism, and Hurston in post-Depression20th-century welfare capitalismare different enough to allow a mini-mal outline of how learning is coordinated with the demands of survival. 4Passions are central to a political economy of minds in action. Dickensrecommended them to economists: Political economy is a mere skeletonunless it has a little human covering and filling out, a little human bloomupon it, and a little human warmth in it (1854/1990b, p. 296).

All novels can be read for the economic conditions they assume, repre-sent, or reveal in their displays of human bloom and warmth. 5 Somenovelists have dealt directly with political economy in their fiction(Honor de Balzac with money dealings every few pages in Pere Goriot ). A few have written their own economics (Defoe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,and the poet Ezra Pound), and at least one (Andr Gide) shared the task with an uncle (Charles Gide, the economist). Of our three, Defoe stagedmoney struggles throughout his novels and advice books, Dickens less so,and Hurston only occasionally, but none of their characters makes senseoutside the prevailing political economy.

The second fact is more specific to ideologies of learning. How learn-ing is conceived, taught, assessed, and used to position people in society fits not just economic conditions, but the economic theories developedat the same time. Ideas about production, consumption, and exchange,about profit, capital, and investment, and about survival, greed, andresponsibility all circumscribe concerns for and consequences of learn-ing. Defoe can be readroughly, suggestivelywith Bernard Mandeville(1732/1924), Dickens with Karl Marx (1859/1982), and Hurston with John Maynard Keynes (1936/1997). 6 Labor does not unilaterally deter-mine the ideas guiding earning and learning; rather, ideas about the workings of money and the play of minds are developed from the samesocial predicaments and conceptual materials. 7 In situations real andimagined, novelists and economists have portrayed peoples predica-ments and concepts with a thickness that has kept the necessity and pas-sions of learning in full view.


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THE NECESSITY OF LEARNING IN DEFOE (AND MANDEVILLE)

All Defoe characters are put upon by difficult circumstances. Survival istheir issue. Defoe did not create individuals with deeply divided motives(Birdsall, 1985; Roberts, 1990; Dickens found Defoe without emotion).Depth psychology is hardly necessary in a one-up/one-down, have/havenot world. Reality has limited their choices. 8 Moll Flanders has to stay out of the poorhouse, Col. Jack has to stay out of jail, and Robinson Crusoehas to create a social world from remnants. When necessity calls, con-science and style are extras and figure only enough to make Moll, Jack,and Crusoe attractive rascals. We love them because they adjust adroitly to how the world unfolds, not because they transform society. The worldaround them was unfolding wildly: Capitalism was on the rise, and most things were getting a price tag. Greed was redefined: from an occasion of sin to a virtue (Dean, 1991; Hirschman, 1997; Webb, 1981). Individuals were commodified, even intellectuals: Genius was changing from amedium of inspiration to a kind of person (McDermott, 2004), and cre-ative work was shifting from a contribution to a copyrighted possession(Woodmansee, 1984).

Most of Defoes characters turned to the high seas to escape charges orto venture high-stakes commerce. Colonialism was central to the emerg-ing world, but Col. Jacks list of productsconsumer extras, reallyshipped from Virginia confirms that the English economy was still local(1722/1989). Success was personal. Double-entry account booksforMax Weber (1904/1998) the site of rational planning for costs and prof-itswas, for Defoe, more a way to look good. He warned that a shop-keeper who does not keep an exact account of what goes out and comesin, can never swear to his books, or prove his debts, if occasion calls forit (1726/1987, p. 188). Occasion always called for accounts in merchant capitalism. Defoes characters were rarely more than their next businesspartner, spouse, lover, or lender could afford. The economy was at hand.Failure threatened. Everyone was replaceable. Learning was alwaysnecessary.

Defoe shows how Jack is acquired by the system. A street waif, he begsfor food by day and sleeps over a glassworks at night. Recruited by pick-pockets, he gets more fully appropriated by the money economy. Whenhe obtains a fist full of money, he is baffled and loses sleep until he buyspants with pockets. In a stunning passage, he joins passion and learningto the work of getting enough money to buy what is needed to meet thedemands of money.

This was enough to let anyone see how all the Sorrows and


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Anxieties of Mens Lives come about, how they rise from theirrestless pushing at getting Money, and the restless Cares of keep-ing it once they have got it . . . I knew not what Money was,or what to do with it; and never knew what it was not to sleep, tillI had Money to keep, and was afraid of losing it. (1722/1989,p. 40)

Jack was acquired by a money system that defined his needs, deeds (of both kinds), and misdeeds (of many kinds). Narrow escapes and occa-sional success followed. 9 Moll says, moneys virtue, gold is fate (Defoe,1722/1996, p. 72).

About the time Defoes characters were learning the new marketplace,Bernard Mandeville (16701733) was building theory for a dog-eat-dogmerchant economy. 10 In a 1705 poem and then in theoretical tirades untilhe died, Mandeville compared human society to a Grumbling Hive:

Fraud, Luxury and Pride must live, While we the benefits receive:Hungers a dreadful Plague, no doubt, Yet who digests or thrives without? (1732/1924, p. 36)

Societies driven by aggressive self-concern, not virtue, are efficient andproductive. Bees would not waste their time being good, making believethey were good, or telling others how to be good. Bees work and get oth-ers to work. Charity is a waste. The poor are more unwilling than unable.In Defoes novels, he was sensitive to the plight of the poor, but in policy pamphlets, he sounded like Mandeville: Down with charity! Up with PoorLaws! (Defoe, 1704/2004; also Dean, 1991). Policy is more abstract anddistant from reality than fiction. For Mandeville and Defoe, there isalways work to be done, and the poorthe worker beesshould do it:

There is no Intrinsick Worth in money but what is alterable withthe Times, and whether a Guinea goes for Twenty Pounds or fora Shilling, it is . . . the Labor of the Poor, and not the high andlow value that is set on Gold or Silver, which all the Comforts of Life must arise from . . . we have hardly Poor enough to do what is necessary to make us subsist. (Mandeville, 1732/1924, pp.301302)

The poor work because they have to survive. Mandeville (1924) echoesDefoe on the primacy of economic necessity: If no body did Want nobody would work (287).


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For Defoe and Mandeville, what counts is what can be counted: onboth sides of exchanges unmediated by undue concern for others. Therule of gold trumps the golden rule. Real learning happens while doing what has to be done. Book learning is valued, said Defoe, if it affords con-trol over ones situation (but not for the poor, said Mandeville 11). Ideasabout survival and greed circumscribe learning and its consequences.

Its pockets all the way down.

THE DEGRADATION OF LEARNING IN DICKENS (AND MARX)

In Hard Times , Dickens (1854/1990a) opens with a tortured classroom where students are crammed with gallons of facts poured into them by Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. MChoakumchild. No fantasy is allowed, nor any real knowledge. A definition of a horse requires species specifics from thedictionary, and the child who knows real horses from work at the circusis taunted for her ignorance of dictionary facts. Learning is all abstrac-tions on sale for a particular kind of economy: laissez-faire in the serviceof those who fit closest to dictionary definitions.

The economy is hard on everyone in Coketown. School learning only delays ruin. The opposition of school and real learning at one level gives way to connections between them at another. Dickens identifies his audi-ence, not the one he aims to please, but the one he confronts: utilitar-ian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact,genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dogs-eared creeds(Dickens, 1854/1990a, p. 123). He tells them to take care of their poor:Before they and their bare existence stand face to face, Reality will takea wolfish turn, and make an end of you (123). Concern for the poor washigh fashion (Tobin, 1995), and behind it was a reaction to the rampant competitiveness of the economy. Dickens lampoons the latter with a man who apologizes for giving his own mother, already in a poorhouse, a half-pound of tea a year, when his proper duty was to self-interest:

His only reasonable transaction in that commodity would havebeen to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it foras much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascer-tained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of mannot a part of mans duty, but the whole. (89)

It not only pays to be calculating, it is a moral requirement. So preachesGradgrind to his students. By the end of the book, Dickens has reversedthe situation: Gradgrind has been made painfully aware of his foolishstand, circus girl has grown into a decent person, and dictionary master


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accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why dont you go and do it? (Dickens, 1854/1990a, p. 90)

Learning was fitted not just to industrial capitalism, but to its economictheories (Lave & McDermott, 2002).

Its sausages all the way down.

INVESTMENT AND LEARNING IN HURSTON (AND KEYNES)

In Their Eyes Are Watching God , the passions of learning are tied to the pas-sions of Janies relationship with three men, in sequence, across decades.Each relationship exists in a different economy (or more accurately, inthree different situations inside early welfare capitalism). Janie is tied toher first husband by her grandmother, who thought that a put-upon mandoing put-upon work on his own sixty acres could ensure survival. Thesecond husband promises relief and prosperity and makes good by becoming land baron, general store owner, and mayor of a small African American town. Janie runs the store and serves her dominating husband.New kinds of learning become possible, but against a more invidiousrange of constraints. With a focus on money and power, Mayor Joe isequally tuned to what others do not, cannot, and should not do; he keeps Janie quiet and on guard for mistakes he is anxious to find. She particu-larly hates the mathematical dilemma that comes with running a store:

Maybe cheese was thirty-seven cents a pound and somebody came and asked for a dimes worth. She went through many silent rebellions over things like that. Such a waste of life andtime. But Joe kept saying that she could do it if she wanted to andhe wanted her to use her privileges. That was the rock she wasbattered against. (Hurston, 1937/1990, p. 51)

Janie was the mayors high-status wife with an expanding bank account,but at the price of losing her self, her tongue, and her learning. Whenthe mayor dies, Janie sent her face to his funeral, and herself went rol-licking with the springtime across her world (pp. 8485).

The third man, Tea Cake, brings her to a high-risk/reward economy inthe Everglades where Janie experiences life with more delightful emo-tions, more productive emergencies, and new learning tasks. She leavesbehind the general store and much of her money for the promise of TeaCake and the swamp. Tea Cake is a leader, a gambler, and a relentlesslover of Janie. Hard work is necessary, risk everywhere; and so too learn-ing: necessary and everywhere. Problems come up, problems get


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solvedor not. Either way, there is much to be achieved, much to belearned. With the mayor, life was a mix of profit and repression; with TeaCake, life is a match of problem-solving, risk, suffering, and gleeful suc-cess. Together they find out about livin fuh theyselves (p. 187).

Michael Tratner (2001) has tied Hurstons novel to the economics of John Maynard Keynes (18831946). Their Eyes and Keyness (1936/1997)General Theory were published only one year apart, and both in the midst of the Depression, but two projects could not be less alike in appearance.Keynes was trying to save capitalism by discovering the basic logic of thesystem and applying it to national policies. His goal was nothing less thanrelieving countries, particularly their unemployed, from boom and bust cycles and establishing the more stable and dynamic economies essentialfor democracy (fortunately, Roosevelt was listening). Janie, on the otherhand, was trying to find a balance between love and security in a brokeneconomy, in a harsh environment, and in a gender- and race-dividedcountry with most of the population rooting in principle for her failure.Tratner takes the key terms of their shared project to be demand andinvestment. From its earliest speculations, economics had been focusedon production, then consumption: so much in and so much out. ForKeynes, the system was more delicate, and the ins and outs of productionand consumption, or costs and profits, were tied to the ups and downs of the overall system. He called attention to the marginal efficiency of cap-ital, which he definednovel readers bewareas being equal to that rate of discount which would make the present value of the series of annuities given by the returns expected from the capital-asset during itslife just equal to its supply price 13 (p. 135).

This is more than a double-entry account book can handle. Complexity is the point. The system has grown too entangled for a laissez-faire ratio-nale. Bottomed-out can stay bottomed-out without a careful program of intervention. Good policy can stimulate the twin powers of capitalismeffective demand and the sufficiency of the inducement to invest(Keynes, 1936/1997, p. 358).

Neither Hurston nor her Janie was reading Keynes, but they were eachdealing with related problems in related ways. The world around them was unfolding for the worse: Capitalism was on the decline, and thingshad price tags few could afford. Greed was repressed in the terrible sensethat investment had disappeared. High risk and unemployment were not just possible everywhere; they were systematically everywhere. With herfirst husband/economy, Janie had no voice, no love, no learning, noprofit, and no self-calculated risk. With her second husband/economy, Janie had no voice, no love, little learning, and profits with savings, but no self-calculated risk. With Tea Cake, she takes risks, makes investments,


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and gains voice, love, and learning (Gates, 1990). Every day brought anew desire, a new awareness, a new skill, and, sometimes, a new gain. Farfrom the saddening crowd, from the mainstream economy, from Whitepeople, from unnecessary constraint, from pent-up desire, Janie (withand without Tea Cake), with a bank account and insurance policy at herback, found a new way to join effective demand and an inducement toinvest in the fields, in conversations, in card games, and in the bedroom.

Its the best played plans all the way down.

CONCLUSIONS

Take it that the world is a system of signs. Individual minds, like com-modities, are a fast action nexus for signs being recognized, combined,adjusted, and directed to particular ends. Schools monitor the minds,stock markets monitor the commodities, and, together, the SAT, Nasdaq,GPA, Dow Jones, and NAEP keep tabs on their intercourse. Research onlabor and learning lives in, lives on, and lives out the material and sym-bolic resources that organize signs into systematic and consequential pat-terns. Sub-rosa tight ties between economic theories and arbitrary measures of knowledge have helped commodify and alienate learning tothe point that fiction has become an essential alternative to educationalresearch. If test scores record the lucre of the mind, fiction attests to thelives that resist crude simplifications.

The wonders of learning in the face of necessity suggest alternatives tothe deadening definitions of learning that currently dominate schoolsand their often discounted public. Inquiries into productive lives in othertimes and places, delivered through various genres, consistently offerportraits of complex adaptations and learning by everyone from insidethe particulars of their situation. Trying to change lives from inside a per-sons head while systematically ignoring his or her circumstancesthesame circumstances that educators help to build and that evaluators useto define and display their expertiseseems a defeating call to arms andharms. Where novels deliver life, schools deliver life for only the seemingbest and a disappreciation for the rest. The very coinage of the brainthat Shakespeare used as a metaphor for imagination ( Hamlet III.4.143;and Dante, Purgatorio , XVII, 32) has become the ideological and bureau-cratic center of educational policy and assessment. The very coinage of the brain turns out to be exactly that: money itself intertwined with intel-lectual coinage, or degrees, hard pressed in schools and inscribed withaptitude measures and test scores. Like money, displays of knowledge get unevenly distributed through society.

The mainstream image of learning is overly commodified. Once a term


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for the progress people make with problems over time, learning has beenabstracted to death, quantified, and put up for sale. The overlap between what and how we learn and what we call learning has grown small.Everyone is learning all the time, but most of it goes unacknowledged,unaccounted, and unexplained by learning specialists. What counts, andaccounted, is a particular kind of learning, not just the kind that comesfrom books or shows up in school, but the specific kind that gets mea-sured by tests, norm-referenced tests with little articulation to contexts,purposes, kinds of learners, and consequences. Global norming reignsand with little accountability. Validity, Hurston might have said, is thekind of rock we have arranged to batter our heads against.

Paolo Virno (2008) complained that money is a dizzying abstraction,compared to which the theorems of symbolic logic seem do-it-yourself stuff. With money you can buy any consumer goods you like (p. 42) (orMarx, 1867/1976). He could have included learning and educationaldegrees. As the ultimate commodity, money makes abstractions real andturns the real objects it can be exchanged for into ideas or desires; as anew commodityrhetorically pivotal in an information-paced societytest scores turn aptitudes and grades into realities and turn real learninginto something distant, incalculable, and perhaps invisible. 14 School turnsreal learning into mere do it yourself stuff, so available, so right under your nose, that it is hidden from view by your own activities.

For every old currency, there is a numismatics. A currency makes every-thing, in varying proportions, equivalent to everything else.Numismatists restore life to old currencies by recovering their functionsin the contexts of their time. Their job, said Virno (2008), is to recoverthe activities that once brought a currency to power. Educationalresearchers must do the same for learning. Researchers must make con-crete, that is to say sensual and temporal, all that is constrained by todaysdominant real abstractions (p. 44). Test scores have become a domi-nant real abstraction: dominant in the institutional discourse of schools, real in consequences far beyond what should be claimed forthem, and an abstraction in the sense of ripped from its relations toongoing events. Test scores have become the false coins of the realm.

There is good news. When educational researchers struggle empirically to recover the sensual and temporal lives of learners, they can turn tonovelists for artfully crafted guidance on the partial, but always in fullplay, wisdom of the people involved. Novelists have generally shown thepoor to be virtuous, articulate, smart, skilled, open, and informed in pro-portions organized more by moment than by fixed traits. They reveal what William James (1902/1982) called the individual pinch of destiny . . . where we catch real fact in the making (pp. 429, 431). 15 Mainstream


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educational research has made things worse by focusing on the symptomsof the systemindividual kids, parents, teachersinstead of challengingthose on the make and take with the lives of the left out and left behind.

Acknowledgments

Brian Edgar, Alicia Grunow, Bronwen LaMay, Kathleen OConnor, and Daniel Steinbock helped shape these ideas with me. Eric Bredo, Elliot Eisner, Shelley Goldman, and Roy Pea helped constrain a text trying to say everything at once. Richard Blot directed me to Raymond Williams on Hard Times .

Notes

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754/1984) on the passions underlying human under-standing: It is by the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself; we seek to know only because we desire to enjoy; and it is impossible to conceive a man who had neitherdesires nor fears giving him the trouble of reasoning (p. 88). And one page later, on neces-sity: It is impossible to conceive how any man acting by his own faculties alone, and with-out the help of communication or the stimulus of necessity , could bridge so great a gulf asthat between pure sensation and the simplest knowledge (p. 90, italics added).

2. Ties between science and literature are multiple and various. Empirical studies by linguists and ethnographers can surpass novels for fine detail set roughly in the context of economic pressures (for an example from educational settings, see Rampton, 2007). In theother direction, the last generation of cultural anthropologists has paid more attention toriches of fiction (perhaps nothing better than Plath, 1980). Literary critic Hugh Kenner(1974) described an empirical novelFlaubert, Joyce, and Beckett, for examplethat declines to be a Muses song, or even a mans intervention; it aspires, or feigns to aspire,to the truth of history, of scientific history (p. 70).

3. Mikhail Bakhtin: The novel can be defined as a diversity of speech types . . . a diver-sity of individual voices, artistically organized . . . The novel orchestrates all its themes, thetotality of the world of objects and ideas depicted in it, by means of the diversity of speechtypes . . . and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions (1981,p. 263).

4. All efforts to differentiate people across cultures or historical eras are overstated,

dangerous, and still necessary; ignoring differences confuses the specifics of the present with the universal and invites arbitrary and unjust measures of excellence. The challenge isto use contrast sets as ways of seeing, not as stable realities.

5. For theory, see Shell, 1982; Goux, 1984/1994; Vernon, 1984; and Tratner, 2001. Also, see specific studies on the economics of, for example, Austen, Goethe, Poe, James,Trollope, Joyce, Hemingway, and William Carlos Williams.

6. So too, I think: Oliver Goldsmith with Adam Smith, Jane Austen with David Ricardo,Edith Wharton with Thorstein Veblen, Toni Morrison with John Kenneth Galbraith.

7. Educators can inquire into the contradictions of their own economic situation with-out accepting a blinding economic determinism. Marxs nuanced position (see Williams,1977) should be less terrifying to educators than a confrontation with how they profit eco-nomically from reproducing the school problems they set out to solve.

8. Defoe even gives Molls momentary good fortune a sudden blow from an invisiblehand (1722/1996, p. 166); see Rothschilds (2001) history of the invisible hand inShakespeare, Adam Smith, and 20th-century economics. Defoe also stressed Marxs point


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that money gets money (Kibbie, 1995).9. Defoes overstatement of the power of money has been echoed by anthropologists

studying traditional societies transitioning to currency economies. Paul Bohannon called

money one of the shatteringly simplifying ideas of all time, and like any other new andcompelling idea, it creates its own revolution (1959, p. 503). As a generalized equivalent(Goux, 1984/1994; Marx, 1867/1976), money put the Tiv moral order on sale in West Africa. Since then, Bohannons strong language has been respecified by accounts of kindsof money, and ideologies of money, within and across multilayered societies (Bloch & Parry,1989; Guyer, 2004; Maurer, 2005). Hurston (1934/1995) stumbled to the same point in apaper on Negro expression as a correlate to currency formation; for Hurston, saidMichael Tratner (2001), the development of linguistic detachment is supported by andhelps support in turn the development of economic detachment (p. 177; see also Hurston,1934/1967).

10. Even as early apologists for individualism and capitalism, Defoe celebrated the wis-dom of those on the bottom, and Mandeville scorned moralistic and self-congratulatory elites.

11. Mandeville: every Hour . . . the poor People spend at their Book is so much timelost to Society (1732/1924, p. 288).

12. Raymond Williams: All virtues of an alternative radicalism, of a central human vision of goodness and kindness and fullness of life which then creatively transcends, ismade to transcend and surpass, the expositions and rationalizations of temporary inter-estsa movement, one might say, of conversion rather than persuasion, and of acts of tran-scendence rather than of conclusionare to be found in Dickens (1970, p. 87).

13. An easier formulation: A relatively weak propensity to consume helps to cause

unemployment by requiring and not receiving the accompaniment of a compensating vol-ume of new investment, which, even if it may sometimes occur temporarily through errorsof optimism, is in general prevented from happening at all by the prospective profit fallingbelow the standard set by the rate of interest (Keynes, 1936/1997, p. 370).

14. John Dewey on real learning: The more human the purpose, or the more it approximates the ends which appeal in daily experience, the more real the knowledge(1916, p. 198).

15. James was describing religion; see also Geertz (1999) quoting James and appreciat-ing a more cultural approach to religion.

References

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morality of exchange (pp. 131). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Bohannan, P. (1959). The impact of money on an African subsistence economy. Journal of

Economic History, 19,491503.Dean, M. (1991). The constitution of poverty . London: Routledge.Defoe, D. (1987). The complete English tradesman . Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton.

(Original work published 1726)Defoe, D. (1989). Colonel Jack . London: Oxford University Press. (Original work published

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RAY MCDERMOTT is a professor of education at Stanford University. For40 years, he has used the tools of cultural analysis to critique how chil-dren learn, how schools work, and why Americans have invested so heav-ily in the institution of school failure. Recently, he has been working onthe intellectual history of American ideas about learning, genius, andintelligence. He is the author (with Herv Varenne) of Successful Failure: The School America Builds (1998).

the passions of learning in tight circumstances: toward a political economy of the mind (annotated)

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