Haoming Liu

Research Topic

The Making of the ‘Dismal Science’: Political Economy and Anti-economism in Britain, 1798-1848

Supervisor: Brian Young

My DPhil project explores the much mystified field of inquiry of political economy in early nineteenth-century Britain, and a corresponding anti-economism that bonded together "moralists" and "conservative romantics" who shared the impression of the contemporary development in economic science as a gruesome revival of Mandevilleanism. I shall particularly focus on the political, theological, and intellectual contexts behind the disputes around Malthus both inside and outside political economy, as well as the implications of the gradual separation of political economy as a distinct academic discipline from moral philosophy. This serves partly as a continuation to my MPhil research on Adam Smith, where I explored Smith's suppressed expression of aesthetics in relation to his moral philosophy and political economy. 

I am from Nanjing, China. I earned my BA in Economics and Applied Math (minoring in Political Science and Critical Theory) at Macalester College in Minnesota, USA, and completed an MPhil in Intellectual History at Oxford. My postgraduate research is largely a result of my (very personal) reflection and contemplation of the modern discipline of economics; though the most direct intellectual inspiration for my master's thesis is the final chapter of John Guillory's Cultural Capital, where Guillory constructed a genealogy of the convergence and divergence of economic and aesthetic values, which pointed toward a "sociology of judgement." More broadly, I am interested in the history of social science, philosophy of music, and Marx. I do music amateurly.