Matter and form are two notions lying at the very heart of Aquinas’s broadly Aristotelian conception of reality. Aquinas inherits these notions from Aristotle (hyle and morphe in Greek), and his understanding of each is shaped to a large extent by the various uses to which Aristotle himself puts them. Even so, the precise nature of Aquinas’s hylomorphism, as well as its centrality in his thought, are of independent significance. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand Aquinas’s fundamental divisions of reality – including the division of God and creature, substance and accident, body and spirit – apart from his own particular conception of matter and form. It would also be impossible, apart from this same conception, to appreciate the elements of an explanatory framework that Aquinas deploys in almost all his writings – including potentiality and actuality, principles and causes, and the fourfold division of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final. In short, to acquire a familiarity with the details of Aquinas’s understanding of matter and form is almost to become accustomed to his distinctive vision of reality.

Origin stories of the economics discipline give considerable credit not only to philosophy, but also to poetry. And many canonical economists have reputations for polymathy. But interdisciplinary economic inquiry, like that which has become increasingly common since 2008, is often treated as both novel and ill-fated, in part because contemporary orthodox economists lack the commitment to pluralism necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. This chapter looks to a 2020 Climate Fiction (“CliFi”) novel, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, for models of interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, critical theorists, and climate scientists. In particular, Robinson centers an unlikely pair of Utopian thinkers – British economist John Maynard Keynes and American theorist Fredric Jameson – who at crucial junctures in their careers took seriously what is also the project of Robinson’s titular Ministry: treating future generations as a political constituency deserving of political representation in the present.

This chapter outlines the relationship between finance and postmodernism in the post-1970s United States. After laying out this shared narrative of finance and postmodernism, particularly in regard to the work of Fredric Jameson and in a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the chapter then argues that the presumed whiteness of both finance capital and postmodern aesthetics in Jameson and Ellis is decentered by Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). Bambara’s novel is set in Atlanta in 1979-1981, years during which the city was at once rapidly becoming a global financial capital and was simultaneously also the site of the abduction and murder of anywhere between thirty to one hundred Black children and youths. Bambara’s novel demands that this racialized violence be read as a part of any analysis of Atlanta as a financialized city, and shows us that there is no way of understanding finance and postmodernism without reckoning with the constitutive anti-Blackness of the US economy.

Thomas Aquinas was born to an aristocratic family in Roccasecca, near Naples, probably in 1226.1 At an early age, he was sent to be schooled by the Benedictine monks at the famous abbey of Monte Cassino.2 It seems that his family planned that he would one day become its abbot – a fitting position of honor and prestige for the youngest son of Italian nobility.3

The hubris of economists is astonishing. While they regularly look to other disciplines for topics of study, they all too rarely engage seriously with those fields. Building on the arguments in our book Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (2017), we contend that while economics is more important than ever, its glaring deficiencies are unnecessary. Most strikingly, even behavioral economists usually neglect culture, have a simplistic and unrealistic depiction of human behavior, and assume away genuine irrationalities. We offer an alternative: an economics that not only learns from literature, philosophy, and the other humanities, but also from history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science. Embracing those fields could lead economists to develop more realistic models of human behavior, recognize that they should not be so confident about their predictions, and produce more effective and just policies.

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).

Western thinking about original sin gets its gravity from Augustine. Some orbit him. Others blast against him till they achieve escape velocity. Aquinas was in orbit, but in a distinctive path. I now explore Aquinas’s views. Aquinas believed in a historical Adam and Eve, and treated the Genesis account of the fall as literal, fly-on-the-wall, accurate history. To ease exposition, I speak within these assumptions.

This chapter examines literary representations and critiques of postcolonial capitalism, a form of capitalism that is practiced, rationalized, and imagined with respect to a historical and geopolitical consciousness of colonial subordination. Recognizing the significance of postcolonial capitalism as its own distinct formation, the essay argues, is important for rethinking dominant approaches to critical studies of capitalism. The essay examines how literary texts take up themes of postcolonial capitalism such as racial and historical difference as a form of cultural and social capital, subaltern capitalism, capitalism as redress for historical injustice, expressions of economic solidarity, and new configurations of power. Authors under discussion include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh, and Derek Walcott.

The development of a scientific economic discourse and the expansion of the financial system and markets across the nineteenth century and through the British Empire proved to be rich sources of inspiration to novelists and poets. Fictional writers not only explored the themes of stock market crashes, imperial investments, industrial expansion, gambling and risk taking, fraudulent currencies, and bank failures, but also the failure of political economy to account properly for the inadequacies of the economic system and the people who fell victim to those failures. Examining the interplay, interaction, and coconstitution of literary and economic discourses in the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates the celebratory and critical ways economic writers, essayists, novelists, and poets represented and responded to political economy’s evolution. Reading the history of economic thought alongside the literary texts of the nineteenth century – this chapter argues – reveals their shared investments in value, representation, and human desires.

Aquinas’s writings on normative ethics are vast, with 1,004 articles on virtue ethics and related matters in the Summa theologiae (ST) alone. These writings constitute an extraordinarily intricate picture of the kind of human life that Aquinas considers normative, but they also contain plenty of surprises, especially for those who assume that Aquinas is guided principally by the virtue ethics of Aristotle. Arguably the greatest of these surprises is that Aquinas’s writings on virtue ethics are not, in fact, simply about virtues. Instead, Aquinas’s virtues in the ST are integrated into a fourfold system of perfective attributes, namely virtues, gifts, beatitudes, and fruits (VGBF). In this chapter, I present a brief summary of this system and my interpretation of its meaning in the light of recent research.

Britain in the “long eighteenth century” was the stage for some of the most momentous phases in the emergence of modern capitalism, from the founding of key financial institutions to stock market crashes, rapid urbanization, the beginnings of industrialization, and the expansion of empire. This chapter traces the often-formative role of imaginative writing in conceptualizing monetary and socioeconomic transformation. Prior to the division of disciplines, figures such as Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville moved between modes now differentiated as “literary” and “economic” while, at the end of the period, even exponents of emergent political economy such as Thomas Malthus and Jane Marcet felt called to answer the representations of a poet, and a verse satire helped to shift government economic policy. The chapter examines by turn the place of literature in framing and contesting the new centrality of credit, the defining metaphors that marked the route to a “de-moralized” economic science, and how the focus on landed property and wealth inequality in the work of realist and Gothic novelists relates to heterodox traditions, outside neoclassical economics.

Since the 1960s, structural shifts in the publishing industry and the wider economy – commonly denoted by the term “neoliberal” – have expanded and intensified the commercial pressures on the literary field. This chapter’s first section identifies the specific forms that neoliberalism has taken in the world of publishing and bookselling. The second section examines how recent novels by Kate Zambreno, Eugene Lim, and Jordy Rosenberg self-consciously negotiate the publishing industry’s simultaneous yet conflicting demands for novelty and familiarity, especially as they relate to expectations surrounding representations of femininity, race, ethnicity, and trans identity. The concluding section reads recent fiction by Helen DeWitt and Rachel Cusk as meditations on how, rather than simply decrying, or capitulating to, the growing power of literary marketing and promotion, the “serious” contemporary writer might – at least in principle – utilize that power precisely in order to stimulate consumer appetite for seriousness as a desirable literary quality.

Grace is a gratuitous divine gift that exceeds our human nature and allows us to obtain a supernatural, eternal good. Thomas Aquinas, who attempts to formulate the orthodox Christian teaching on grace, understands by it in one sense a stable disposition (habitus) infused by God into the soul that lifts human nature so as to partake in the divine nature. It is thus a created reality, not simply the fact of enjoying God’s favor. In a second sense, he understands by grace an aid (auxilium) of God moving us to know, will, or do something. While Aquinas’s terminology varies, scholars call the first kind ‘habitual grace’ and the second ‘actual grace.’1