Conclusion: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance

Writing in 1866, at a moment when the lexicon of a distinctively American language of political economy was being worked out, Amasa Walker crafted his influential The Science of Wealth: A Manual of Political Economy. What is striking about The Science of Wealth is the way in which it figures its central protagonist—capital—in a vocabulary that relies, in seemingly equal measure, on both clarity and anxiety. On the one hand, by mobilizing a common metaphor (see Introduction), capital is conceived as an element of nature and as something as deeply inbuilt in the world as its natural topography. Capital exists as something natural and given in the landscape—the basic structure upon which the rest of the economic world is shaped. On the other hand, however, Walker’s discussion also reveals a kind of anxiety about capital and its basic force. The attempts to classify categories even as resolutely natural as capital are subject, Walker admits, to irksome ambiguities. In Walker’s words, the “general intelligibility” of capital is self-evident.