ABSTRACT
To speak of an economy of art, as we now often do, we have had first to exhume its economic base; by this I mean not simply that we have uncovered the material production and exchange of literature, but that we have detected a symbolics of this production and exchange. This symbolics emerges as an aesthetic already inscribed in an economic mode of symbolizing. One odd but telling instance of this-what Jean-Joseph Goux (1990:125) has called the “ritual dimension” of the economic act-centers on the career of James Thomson, who died in 1882, and involves the still powerful romantic conception of the laborer in the late nineteenth century.
