The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics

By Richard Bronk; Cambridge University Press, 2009, 382 pgs. Review by Christina Root

Richard Bronk, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, spent seventeen years working in international business in the City of London; in his study The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics he combines the practitioner’s experience of how economists think with the historian’s knowledge of how things came to be the way they are. A neglected aspect of history that he considers most important is the Romantic reaction to the rise of industrialism and against utilitarianism, with its reductive vision of the human being as homo economicus. Generally, the Romantics are regarded as having stepped off the road toward progress, and, therefore, as having inevitably been left behind by history. Bronk disagrees vehemently with this assessment and seeks to recover both their critique and their alternative vision in order to apply them to present debates in economics.

His book, published in February of this year, is particularly timely. The urgency of the global financial crisis provides an opportunity to rethink business as usual, and Bronk’s book provides a thoughtful and provocative place to begin that process for economists and laypeople alike. In an article written since the book was published, Bronk argues that the present crisis stems, in part, from the entrenched refusal to recognize that the imagination, the faculty most prized by the Romantics, determines the future in ways that can’t be foreseen or measured no matter how sophisticated the methods of analysis and prediction.* The activity of imagining guarantees that the future is always essentially unknowable because as yet uncreated. According to Bronk, failure to recognize the role the imagination plays got us into the crisis, but understanding and appreciating the imagination can help get us out of it. He calls for a new breed of thinker—the Romantic Economist—whose creativity will help transform the economic realm into one that embodies human possibilities more fully, with a broader perspective and greater humility.

* Rorotoko, May 22, 2009. http://rorotoko.com/interview/20090522_bronk_richard_romantic_economist_imagination_economics/

Using the Romantics to deepen our understanding of the imagination is the book’s central focus, but Bronk provides other equally compelling reasons for turning to Romantic thinkers. He distills from Romantic thought a number of different ideas which together constitute a radical rethinking of the role economics should play in society.

The very fact that he is treating the Romantics as practical guides to solving real-world problems will startle those readers who are used to thinking of Romanticism as defined by an otherworldly rejection of commercial enterprises in favor of nature and private, individual experience. Though Wordsworth famously stated “the world is too much with us late and soon/getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” he and his contemporaries remained fully engaged in that world and tried hard to influence debates over the accelerating pace of industrialization.

Bronk acknowledges that the eclectic group of thinkers he draws on, among them Wordsworth, Burke, Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt in England and Herder and Kant in Germany, never thought of themselves as forming a movement; nevertheless, as Bronk shows, together their ideas constitute a coherent critique. One of the great strengths of the book is his ability to explain a variety of Romantic positions without distorting or oversimplifying them, with due consideration of their original context as well as their current usefulness. Though he doesn’t mention Goethe, the book should be of particular interest to those engaged in recovering Goethe’s science, since the ideas explored by Bronk are exactly those that make Goethe also so contemporary.

The aspects of Romanticism Bronk explores most fully are, first, the Romantics’ commitment to an accessible style. Bronk stresses Wordsworth’s desire to write in the language “really spoken by men” as a guide to how economics should also proceed. He quotes the economist Alfred Marshall who argued, following the Romantics, that mathematics should be used sparingly and side by side with other ways of explaining methods and policies.

Second, in addition to the Romantics’ democratic attitude toward language, Bronk thinks we have much to learn from their hyper-awareness of the role language, particularly metaphor, plays in shaping our sense of reality. They were critical of the Enlightenment’s reliance on the language of physics as the foundation for understanding processes in nature and society. They argued that organic rather than mechanical metaphors come much closer to capturing how societies actually function and effectively remove the false expectation of equilibrium from economics.

Perhaps even more important than their recommendations of particular kinds of metaphors is their insistence on the constitutive nature of figurative language in general and the necessity of experimenting with different kinds of metaphors to cultivate multiple perspectives on particular issues.

That we “half-create” what we see and describe in language leads the Romantics to a pluralism that is Bronk’s third area of focus. The Romantics were convinced that there are no universal answers to the ethical or practical problems of life and that, therefore, no one method of proceeding or one theory can purport to explain all situations. They were interested in particulars, in the local, in the uniqueness of circumstances rather than in the ways they might fit into a theory. Herder, for example, argued that each country or region develops in a unique way depending on its particular history and language. The economics of a country should emerge organically out of its culture rather than be imposed from without, as was (say) the Washington plan implemented in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. While different cultures or nations may develop incommensurable visions, those visions would not, to the Romantic mind, be therefore unintelligible. To Bronk, this insistence on pluralism provides an important corrective to the tendency in modern politics and economics to assume that one size fits all, and that if an idea works in one place, it will work everywhere.

Bronk uses Keats’s famous exploration of “negative capability” as a model for developing the capacity to live in uncertainty “without irritably grasping after fact and reason.” That openness means not assuming that the answer will come from the past. Instead, it leaves a space for the imagination to begin to create a new vision.

In keeping with this pluralism and this awareness of language’s constitutive role, economists, according to Bronk, should borrow metaphors from other disciplines as often as they can in order to see how other ways of looking at the world enlarge and complement their own. Even if various discourses remain to an extent incommensurable and don’t add up to a full and seamless picture of the world, this practice of comparison will help keep the languages of different disciplines in dialogue with one another, without the expectation of any grand synthesis.

These various Romantic correctives to theorizing in isolation lead Bronk to argue that we should have a broader notion of what we hope to gain from knowledge. The truth of a theory should not lie in its predictive value alone. Meteorology, for example, offers a good analogy for economists: while we can’t predict the weather very far into the future, we can nevertheless learn a tremendous amount by studying weather patterns. One of the most radical aspects of the book is the degree to which it asks economists to scale back what they can with confidence predict.

Bronk puts Kant squarely within the Romantic camp, and says it was from Kant that the poets learned that we “half-create” the world we see and experience, and that what we understand of the world is always partial. The Romantics’ fondness for fragments and aphorisms reflects this view, since the forms themselves suggest an incompleteness of thought and the sense that “we see by glimpses.” This is one area in which anthroposophical readers might disagree with Bronk’s assessment of Romantic thought, i.e., that they believe “what exists is brute and nameless” (262), and that the human mind orders that chaos according to its own necessities, for example, through the filters of time and space. Bronk doesn’t highlight the ways many Romantics differed from Kant, i.e., in believing that reality is in fact knowable on its own terms, but demands a spiritual training on the part of the observer to meet the challenge of participating in and thinking along with world processes. (This is an area in which Goethe would have been particularly helpful.) Nevertheless, emphasizing Romantic skepticism about conventional attitudes toward perception is salutary. Romanticism’s insistence on a multifold language moves us in a fruitful direction.

The first part of the book offers a fascinating history of challenges to standard economics not only from Romantic thinkers but from some of its purported champions, chiefly Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Their thinking was much less disciplinebound and much more open to other approaches than we tend to assume. Similarly, he draws on economists whose thinking resonates with the Romantics, notably Alfred Marshall, George Shackle, and recent economists who are employing ideas from complexity theory. These thinkers flesh out a context that supports the Romantic critique and bolsters it.

As a Romantic scholar, I was gratified to see these thinkers valued as they themselves hoped to be, as having contributions to make not only about individual experience, but also about how we relate to and see ourselves within society. Bronk’s writing is clear and accessible; he holds himself to the Wordsworthian standard he wishes economists would follow of being understandable to a broad audience.

However practical Bronk makes the Romantics sound, at heart what he and they offer is an ethics: the ideal of developing flexible thinking, of using the imagination and feeling as the means of empathizing with perspectives very different from our own. Globalization, undertaken Romantically, would look very different from any models currently under consideration; it would appreciate difference and not regard other ways of being as unintelligible or primitive.

Anthroposophists may finish the book wishing that Bronk had gone even further in envisioning different ways of structuring economies, but he has made an excellent start at thinking about how to reorient how we consider embedding economics within larger philosophical social and political contexts, and he proceeds so cogently and reasonably that he may lull some people into not noticing that he is actually advocating a full-scale reevaluation of the way we approach the economic sphere. Readers who are convinced of the helpfulness of his ideas will have come a long way toward readiness to entertain the more radical ways of doing business that Steiner’s Threefold Social Order advocates.