The idea that personal investment decisions are informed by unconscious emotional feelings is beginning to play a significant role in how economists understand market activity. This new field, termed “affective finance” by its pioneers, is relatively undeveloped in both the academic and the commercial sectors. Its advancement in the coming years depends upon the integration of microeconomic research with insights from the humanities and the other social sciences. The development of a holistic approach to the question of finance and feeling promises a more rigorous understanding of the complicated networks of affect and behavior that underpin individual economic agency. It is against this background that Michael Genovese's excellent The Problem of Profit: Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature appears. By studying literary writing from a range of genres, Genovese crafts a compelling argument for the significance of fellow-feeling in the eighteenth-century economic imagination.

Genovese makes an argument for the construction of a communitarian yet distinctly capitalist version of profit in eighteenth-century literature. The implicit disjunction between these terms is resolved in the scrupulous introductory section, in which it is established how financial and affective intersubjectivity, or the sharing of feeling as well as profit, enabled the subjects of novels, poems, and essays, to negotiate the paradox of making a profit in a competitive market while simultaneously disapproving of the individualism it seems to necessitate. The book's five core chapters are committed to examinations of the different material components of profit, “labor, credit, trade, and bullion itself” (3), in relation to different clusters of examples from literary sources. In the coda, Genovese turns the argument to the necessary question of exclusion from these affective networks; his final paragraphs consider how enslaved and previously enslaved people were denied the opportunity to participate in “the communities their subjugation makes possible” (189), which ultimately exposes the fragile heart of sociable profit.

The first chapter gives a broad overview of the thinking from political economists that the remainder of the book relies upon. Some of Genovese's most important work is done here: Adam Smith's understanding of economic motivation is shown to be a radical departure from the work of his earlier eighteenth-century precursors, but Genovese claims that Smith's views have nevertheless disproportionately informed the direction of later thought. It is the idea of common profit developed in the work of “(among others) William Ames, Richard Weston, Dudley North, Charles Davenant, Samuel Fortrey, and even Thomas Mun” (20) that explains how the desire for increase does not have to be incompatible with the desire for community. This established, and Smith duly repositioned, chapter 2 makes the case for the georgic poem's promotion of a model of profitability that privileges sociable interactions and sympathetic economics, while resisting individualism. The close readings here are excellent and show Genovese at his dexterous best: the analysis is precise but never labored, and it teases from the poems the argument that the georgic is able to redefine economic relationships between individuals. The consequence of this careful but provocative pursuit is a new reading of mid-century georgics, in which they do not reinforce the superiority of the aristocracy, but instead remodel networks of economic dependency such that the form becomes radically communal.

The focus of chapter 3 is the source of sentiment in three periodicals (Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator, and Defoe's Review). Here Genovese continues to build upon his suggestion that eighteenth-century thought recognized a more nuanced model of self-interest than is commonly acknowledged. By examining the physical traces of affective sentiment and their representation in writing, including tears and trembling, he argues that the voices of the three periodicals “take advantage of the correlation of writing with feeling to invite readers to see past their disembodiment and approach them (and ultimately each other) affectively” (102). This displacement of financial relation onto (and into) the body creates a collective investment in imagining economics intersubjectively, a mode that shares more with Aristotelian oikonomia (distribution of resources within the household) than it does with the impersonal structures of state finance. The chapter ends with the acknowledgement that this exclusively personal sympathetic understanding is “poor at accommodating difference” (116), a turn in the argument which proves critical in shaping the second half of the book. The close case studies of Sarah Fielding's David Simple (1744) and Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) offered in chapter 4 make several important arguments: one is about how the novels place the pursuit of profit by women as “an attempt to survive the irresponsible self-interest of the men around them” (118); another builds to a broader critique of literary sentimentality and shows how it fails to take into account affective relationships between people. The final chapter traces a rejection of the eighteenth-century movement away from money's material forms towards disembodied value, in Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739; Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 1741; An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751), Johnson (Rasselas, 1759), and Sterne (A Sentimental Journey, 1768). In many ways this work represents a return to the methodology of chapter 1: the reading of Hume, and the return of Locke, see Genovese expanding his theoretical argument for the rise and fall of affective finance.

The particular success of The Problem of Profit is Genovese's navigation of quite disparate material in the creation of an argument that not only explains how affective finance is represented and remonstrated with in literary writing, but also goes some way to advance an understanding of sentimentality in the context of dramatic eighteenth-century economic change. It is the close readings that are outstanding throughout the book; the momentary turn in the coda to Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) works with a graceful economy (of style, here) to show how the relationship between affect and finance lies in language itself. Genovese makes a convincing argument for the rejection of intersubjective finance in favor of the autonomous interaction with the market that today's economists are beginning to examine in terms of feeling. This timely and important study makes valuable reading for historians and literary scholars alike.