ABSTRACT
Michael Roberts The absence of anything resembling a concept of ‘marital economy’ in modern Economics has recently been addressed from several directions. It is clear that we stand to gain from a better understanding of the way in which economic decisions and processes within the household impinge on and interconnect with those of the wider economy.1 Yet Economics did not emerge as a fullyfledged academic subject in the nineteenth century well equipped for such a task. Indeed its claims to authority were based in large part on its mastery of the system as a whole, on the aggregated patterns of production, trade and consumption, rather than on the cultural, emotional and psychological experiences which determined needs and satisfactions at the individual or household level. One result has been a certain absurdity in the way in which market analysis has latterly come to be applied in such areas.2 To treat everything as economic in the narrow sense loses sight of a concept central to Adam Smith’s founding analysis, the unintended consequences of human action.3 We stand to gain most from re-adopting this aspect of his approach, allowing for the unexpected both in terms of what happened, and in terms of where we look for causes and explanations. One of the least explored yet most intriguing of the questions that arise concerns the way in which early Political Economy came to shed those attributes which in sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury Britain were making a fully-fledged ‘marital economics’ seem necessary and possible. These included attention to language and vocabulary, to gestures and the expressive accumulation of symbols and commodities. Over the course of the period the languages of commerce and labour on the one hand, and those of sentiment and companionship on the other hand were increasingly channelled in different directions.
