Friedrich Hayek: Economist? Check. Political philosopher? Check. Writer of “violent and more or less erotic” tragedies?
“It’s a commonplace that people often dreamily aspire to be musicians, artists, poets, and so on,” says Dominic Walker, a 2024-25 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar. “But perhaps surprisingly, a disproportionate number of influential, scientifically minded economists not only wanted to be writers, but actually published works of fiction, poetry, plays, and literary criticism.”
Indeed, as Dominic has been discovering, the very same people who constructed indifference curves and formulated trade theories—from Menger to Fisher, Walras to Samuelson—published novels, collections of poetry, or, in some cases, had boxes of unpublished literary work destroyed on their behalf to a far greater extent than their counterparts in comparable academic fields (or indeed their classical predecessors).
“Marx passionately wanted to be a writer, as did Léon Walras—until their fathers (surprise, surprise) had something to say about it—and Walras was a published novelist! Lionel Robbins planned to publish his work but never did, writing ruefully in his Autobiography that all he ever wanted to be was “an effective poet.” What if we took claims like this seriously? What would economics look like?”
A Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and an affiliate lecturer at Magdalene College, Dominic is probing the origins and implications of the affinity for literary writing that many of the great economists had.
“Reading Deirdre McCloskey’s work on rhetoric and narrative, I thought there must already be proven instances of influence of literary texts on economic ideas, but it never occurred to me that so many major economists might have written and published literature themselves, only to give up in the end—sometimes wistfully, sometimes scornfully, sometimes merely forgetfully.”
More generally, Dominic, who holds a PhD in English from the University of Sussex, is exploring four kinds of literary engagement among a dozen or so prominent economists, including Menger, Hayek, and Samuelson, whose papers are housed at Duke, as well as Joan Robinson, Joseph Schumpeter, and Kenneth Boulding, among others.
The most significant kinds of engagement are the composition of literary works themselves (published or not) and the influence of literary works on their economics. Less significant but still within Dominic’s purview are quotations and allusions to literary texts that appear in their economic work and stylistic choices that distinguish their economic writing as literary artifacts.
“Most of the economists I’m looking at claimed to be deeply skeptical of the written word, especially when compared to what they saw as the precision of mathematics. But was their skepticism consistent with their methodological commitments as economists? And what do their literary practices reveal about the ideological content of their economic theories?”
As Dominic points out, their literary work often formed the foundation of their economic work. “William Jaffé, Walras’s great interpreter and translator, pointed out that one of Walras’s short stories contained his marginalist approach ‘in embryo’, fifteen years before he wrote his Elements of Pure Economics.”
While at Duke, Dominic will dive into the papers of Menger, Hayek, and Samuelson and see just what kinds of literary works are there to be found. Menger published two feuilleton novels, one titled Der ewige Jude in Wien (The Eternal Jew in Vienna), the other, Die Bettlerin von St. Marx (The Beggaress of St. Marx). At least one of Hayek’s ‘several’ tragedies—an adaptation of Euripides’s Andromache—is extant if inchoate. And it is known that Samuelson as a young man wrote fiction, which he saw fit to publish, and poetry, which he reserved only for his diaries.
Dominic’s next order of business will be to finish two articles, both of which address correspondences between Hayek’s literary disposition and his economic thought—albeit in very different ways. The first of these, in preparation for HOPE, contrasts the “do-nothing” fatalism of Hayek’s abortive adaptation of Andromache with the “do-something” pragmatism of Keynes’s evolving critical writing about tragedy in general and Ibsen in particular. A second, more speculatively literary article identifies Hayek’s semiotic price system with the so-called gossip economies of Jane Austen, whom Hayek names as one of his favorite novelists.
Dominic, whose doctoral dissertation was on the thematization of economics in the work of Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett (of Waiting for Godot fame), is currently writing a monograph about the literary output of, and literary influences on, a series of significant economists from the marginal revolution to 1950s.
“My hope is that the literary engagements of preeminent postclassical economists can become a new body of important source material for historians of economic thought and for intellectual historians in general.”
Dominic will be at Duke until spring 2025.
