ABSTRACT
If there is an assumption that aesthetics and economics are incompatible, then the historian needs to investigate the historical conditions for that assumption.1 It is necessary to look at the borders of separation, to gain some idea of where the divisions are sharp and where the delineations between these two disparate elds begin to crumble. e following section, therefore, will touch upon some of the more curious nodes in the history of this separation from the later eighteenth century and nineteenth century. However, it will look particularly at where the separation has been less than successful, because points of con uence have occurred, noticeably in economic theorization and periodical practices. Exclusion of the moneyed interest appears in the aesthetic theorization of Kant, and its repercussions ow directly into Adorno and Horkheimer’s accusations of 1944. But at the centre of economic theory, bound to the division of labour, is the bene t that derives from the stimulation of creative innovation brought on by increased specialization or division of labour; creativity being a key concept to the arts. In terms of practice, too, or rather in terms of nineteenth-century publishing praxis as opposed to twentieth-century scholarly discourse, the British Victorian book trade remained deaf to the discursive split and stubbornly continued to compound aesthetics and economics, publishing combinations of political science and prose ction within its daily pages.
