Wanting and working: Petimetría, or the economy of desire

Abstract

After Mandeville, there arose theories of national economic prosperity that argued against the negative connotations of luxury, creating a positive linkage between commerce (the abundant production and trade of goods), and expanded consumption. This current of eighteenth-century thought conceived of the impulse to do productive work, and to purchase goods (and thus happiness) with the fruits of work, as prerequisites to national prosperity. Petimetría, associated with leisure, excess consumption, and overspending, is a conceptual category that captures the opposite of productive work yielding personal happiness and economic health. Petimetres and petimetras are used in a variety of eighteenth-century texts to explore cultural tensions around the links between desire and work, desire and consump­tion, and national prosperity during a period in which consumption was increasingly aligned with public virtue. This study argues that petimetría can be conceived of as an «economy of desire»: a shadow economy, a spectre of the abject figuring the negation of neoclassical economic theories that stipulated a regulatory role for the virtuous and patriotic consumer, and thus a fundamental «»function for desire within the ideology promoting commerce as crucial to national economic growth.