The historical moment

Works of art and scholarship are informed by the historical moment in which they are created. So, for example, the nineteenth-century writers who grappled variously with problems of economics and culture – Carlyle, Coleridge, J.S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin and many others who dealt with aspects of the material circumstances and the cultural manifestations of human existence – were inevitably conditioned by the nature of the society in which they found themselves – that is, by the values, concerns and state of development of the world at the moment in time at which they happened to be studying it.

Such an observation is no less true today than it was 100 or 200 years ago. Thus, in embarking on the present project of examining the relationships between economics and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century – the chasms which divide the two domains and the linkages which might be forged between them – our task is inexorably contextualised by the condition of the world as it stands today.