30 Economics, Culture and Cultural Economic: A Review Article Sukumar Nandi In the popular perception economies is too dry a subject to handle a soft subject like culture. But economics has embraced many areas of social sciences without compromising its basic tenets. The literature has grown and Professor Throsby has written a book on culture and economics This is a review article placing the central theme of the book in the proper perspective of the literature. HE diversity of various cultures in different parts of the globe is in the league of endangered species and the onward march of the industrial society is making the rich diversity of different cultures coterminous. Modern urbane citizens have kept the specimen of their ancient culture in air-conditioned museums where the present generations feel how much material welfare the industrial society has given to them. Meanwhile, the march of industrial society continues. Thus a jeans-clad youth with a Cola can in hands enjoying pop music in holiday mood is a common scene either in Tokyo, or in Bangkok or in New Delhi. Places vary but the “picture” remains the same. It can be called homogenisation of the global culture or the defusion of a particular culture all through the globe. Some may even call it cultural invasion in the age of globalisation. If one perceives the latter as the result of the economic compulsions at the global level, one is to see the role of economies behind the profound changes at the cultural level also. This consideration binds economics and culture together, though at the independent plane one may wonder what economics has to do with those finer things, people generally think belong to culture. David Throsby has written a small beautiful book, Economics and Culture, published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. The book deals with the inter-relation between economics and culture and sometimes the discussion has centered on the economics of culture. With a span of 9 chapters both the culture of human civilisation and the economics as a discipline have been placed in a historical perspective. Economics as a Science Economies asa discipline developed in the late 18th century and acquired an organised body of thought with the publication of the famous book of Adam Smith (1776). Though Smith demonstrated a strong awareness of the cultural matrix of economic phenomenaECONOMICS, CULTURE AND CULTURAL ECONOMICS 31 and the importance of moral sentiments in the economic behaviour of human beings, his two immediate successors ~ Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx, stripped economics of its cultural moorings. Bentham was a political reformer and he possessed all the qualities to be the forerunner of Karl Marx ~ the urge for rationality, no artificial division in society in caste or classes and a supporter of radical egalitarianism. But the experiences of French Revolution and its aftermath made him a supporter of the institution of private property (Marshall, 1920). Bentham believed that culture, custom and tradition were not relevant to economic analysis as these were irrational and were supposed to interfere with application of pure reason in the maximisation of utility. One implication of this line of thought had been that aesthetics was affected, The new aesthetics, combined with the emphasis of Bentham on functional utility, had the implication that the application of artistic effort to contribute beauty of form to the function was rejected as it was thought to be irrational. The new aesthetics reached its logical conclusion in the development of the theory of consumer behaviour in which finer elements of life like design or taste are not considered as factors. Even the consumer is a prototype, non-descript and malleable (Schumpeter, 1968) Karl Marx was the direct heir of Bentham and he successfully used his economic reasoning to reach perfect egalitarianism through the political means of violence. Later generation of economists had tried to reach a balance (Scitovsky 1972; Boulding 1972) though the mainstream of economic science has reached a stage where economics is placed on the logical foundation. The consensus in the literature is that modern economics as a subject is characterised by formal precision, theoretical abstraction helped by mathematical analysis and also its. dependence on objective scientific method in testing the hypothesis about how economic systems behave. This description of economics leaves little room in its connection to culture as the protagonists claim it to be value free. The radicals in the discipline argue that economics cannot be value free and the intellectual environment of economics cannot be bereft of culture. Through its evolution during the last one hundred years economics has developed a paradigm that has provided a comprehensive analytical framework for explaining the behaviour of individuals, firms and markets. Also economics has yielded a large number of testable hypotheses that have been subject to an extensive empirical scrutiny. Also the subject has embraced a large space in the area of human behaviour that, has made it possible to make a more than tangential contact with the concept known as culture. We also get something more than an inter-disciplinary approach that explains the inter-relations between culture and economics. Sometimes it is argued that there remains a basic harmony between literature and nces and on this Wordsworth wrote other social s32 FOREIGN TRADE REVIEW “Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing... its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony; which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals...” (p. 938, Preface to Lyrical Balads, Wordsworth, 1908) Here the distinction between “is” and “ought” statement is essential, but it is not so important in any scientific inquiry that are relevant in society. But these two levels of discourses are fused in Wordsworth. The poets were not ready to see the possibility of any alternative and objective way of reaching conclusion about the role of man in a society. But the social thinkers at that time like St. Simon and Comte did not think that way. They tried to study the role of man from a scientific angle. Perhaps the philosophers want to place the individual in an overall societal perspective than simply in the midst of poetic beauty. Every person has an individualised position in the milieu of the society which he tries to discover. Poetry often touches that position of human beings in a society, but in a very unique way. One example is the following quote: “No work is here, neither any pain for enthusiasm, Nor the worries for new endeavour, No more excitement that torments the brain, Only the sound of the flies fills up the sad morning, This world seems to be a mystic land across the river” (Translated, pp. 59-60, Song of Leisure in Dhusar Pandulipi by J. Das, 1997) ‘The poet captures the particular moment of the individual who is facing a reality of his own, though he is not totally outside the economic system. Perhaps the poet is more interested about the poetic reality faced by the person! The difference with the scene of the jeans-clad youth as mentioned in the beginning of this paper is more of perception than actual substance. The Culture Poetry is one of the finest aspects of human culture. The original connotation of the world “culture” refers to the tillage of the soil. In the 16th century this literal meaning became transposed to the cultivation of the mind and the intellect. Even today this type of figurative use is very common, As for example, we refer to someone well versed in the arts as a “cultured person”. Since the early 19th century the term culture has been used ina broader sense to describe the intellectual and spiritual development of human civilisation. Later on this humanistic interpretation of culture was supplemented by a larger all- encompassing concept whereby culture was seen to embrace not just intellectual behaviour but entire way of life of the people.