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"MAKING money is a dirty game," says the Institute of Economic Affairs, summing up the attitude of British novelists towards business. The IEA, a free market think-tank, has just published a collection of essays ("The Representation of Business in English Literature") by five academics chronicling the hostility of the country's men and women of letters to the sordid business of making money. The implication is that Britain's economic performance is retarded by an anti-industrial culture.
Rather than blaming recalcitrant workers and incompetent managers for Britain's economic worries, then, we can put George Orwell and Martin Amis in the dock instead. From Dickens's Scrooge to Amis’s John Self in his 1980s novel "Money", novelists have conjured up a rogue's gallery of mean, greedy, amoral money-men that has alienated their impressionable readers from the noble pursuit of capitalism.
The argument has been well made before, most famously in 1981 by Martin Wiener, an American academic, in his "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit". Lady Thatcher was a devotee of Mr. Wiener's, and she led a crusade to revive the "entrepreneurial culture" which the liberal elite had allegedly trampled underfoot. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, sounds as though he agrees with her. At a recent speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he declared that it should be the duty of every teacher in the country to "communicate the virtues of business and enterprise".
21. In the first paragraph, the author introduces his topic by
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