On Tolstoy and full joy: The delightful economics of “Anna Karenina”
As San Joseans wonder if they'll get slapped with new “infrastructure” taxes under Prop 5, Econlib's Richard Gunderman reminds—in an elegant deep-dive of Tolstoy's famous novel—that for all free marketism's strengths, economics ultimately can't account for the happiness of mankind. Gunderman's thoughts on this elusive, incalculable, wonderful pursuit we call “joy,” below.
[D]oes economics offer our best shot at joy?
To understand these questions more deeply, we turn to a very different account found in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina. Some characteristics of Tolstoy and his novel might recommend him to economists. First, Tolstoy commanded a large fortune. Furthermore, multiple polls of writers and the reading public have singled out Tolstoy as the greatest writer who ever lived, with Anna Karenina frequently emerging at the top of rankings of the best novels.
To begin with, I would note that wealth and joy, at least in Tolstoy’s eyes, are not necessarily correlated. The richest of the principal characters in the book is Count Alexi Vronsky, the man who will become the lover of the novel’s title character, Anna Karenina, the wife of a government official. Vronsky is “terribly rich, handsome, and has first-rate connections,” yet despite scoring highly on all parameters of the well-being equation, by the novel’s end, he declares sincerely that, “To me, life is worth nothing.” …
For insight into joy, we must consider another character in Anna Karenina, a woman often regarded as a doormat by contemporary readers, namely Oblonsky’s long-suffering wife, Dolly. When we first meet her, she has just found out about her husband’s affair with the governess and informed him that she cannot go on living in the same house with him. Says her husband to himself, “She will never forgive me. And what is more terrible is that it is all my fault, yet I am not to blame.” …
Yet Dolly finds joy of a kind that her husband will never know. Consider a scene in which she is bathing her children in a river. “She took no greater pleasure in anything than in this bathing with all her children. To run her fingers over all these plump little legs while pulling on their stockings, to gather up in her arms and dip these little naked bodies and hear their delighted and terrified squeals, to see the wide-open eyes of these splashing cherubs of hers was a great pleasure for her.” …
Dolly’s life contains its full share of heartache, perhaps more. Her husband will continue to see other women and deplete his wife’s estate. Her children will continue to behave badly from time to time and break her heart. They will fall ill. And yet,
… hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children—the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.
… Dolly’s moment of truth comes when she sees Anna’s life firsthand. She is beautiful. She is surrounded by luxury, and she is engaged in good works. She and Vronsky have a hospital built to tend the peasants. Anna describes herself as “unforgivably happy” and her life as a dream. Her little daughter is surrounded by the finest toys from all over Europe, and she has the best nurses and maids that money can buy. From the standpoint of a hedonic calculus, Anna seems to have it all.
Yet Dolly quickly realizes that something is wrong. “Anna, the wet nurse, the governess, and the child were not accustomed to being together and the mother’s visit was an unusual event.” The last straw comes when Dolly asks Anna how many teeth her daughter has and she gets it wrong, not knowing about the last two teeth. Anna admits, “Sometimes it’s hard for me being in a way superfluous here. It is not the way it was with my first.” Anna has constructed a life for herself in which she is not really a mother.
It is not long before Dolly resolves to leave. In fact, she cannot get home to her children soon enough. Anna has the kind of house and family that would look great in a glossy magazine, while Dolly by comparison seems threadbare and worn out, hardly fit for a photo shoot. But Dolly has something Anna cannot purchase at any price: genuine love for her children, the deepest possible dedication to them. As a result, she experiences a joy in being a mother that is utterly unknown to Anna.
In one sense, at least, Tolstoy’s perspective on joy may be more authentically economic than the economists’ accounts. In Aristotle’s writings, we find economics contrasted with politics, politics involving the management of a state (polis, city) and economics focusing on the household (oikos, household or family). Oblonsky and Anna care for neither the state nor the family and thus fail at both, while Dolly represents the consummate economist, primarily because she loves her family.
Why doesn’t Tolstoy, one of the world’s great geniuses, simply provide us with an equation for joy and a table enumerating the values for each of his characters, including Vronsky, Oblonsky, Dolly, and Anna? Perhaps because he does not believe in it. Could it be that he has concluded that whatever joy is, it is not susceptible to scientific modes of inquiry and cannot be figured out in the way many economists suppose? Instead of calculating joy, he found it necessary to tell a story about it.
Read the whole thing here.
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