Etymological Investments: The Political Economy of Language from Carlyle to Ruskin

Abstract

Examines how the emerging field of “new philology” shaped the nineteenth- century critique of political economy advanced by Carlyle and Ruskin. Argues that Carlyle viewed the systematic rhetorical conventions of political economy as a threat to all forms of discourse; in On Heroes and Hero-Worship he sought through rhetorical eccentricity and linguistic innovation to resist the mechanization of language as a source of cultural meaning. Demonstrates how Ruskin, writing amid very different philological debates later in the period, developed Carlyle’s implicit critique into a direct attack on political economy in Unto this Last, but, in attempting to reform rather than resist the discourse, deployed a systematic rhetoric that could only duplicate the machine of language.