9. L’économie de l’espoir à la lecture du roman de Charles Dickens De grandes espérances

Hope is a fundamental emotion that reflects a state of mind, determines our attitude towards the future, our handling of uncertainty, and conditions our actions and decisions. Rational economic approaches have paid relatively little attention to this emotion. Some economists, however, encourage the inclusion of hope in economic analysis. By working on the links between literature and economics, this paper seeks to determine what a dialogue between literature and economics might contribute to both the understanding of hope within economic analysis, and to the interpretation of Dickens's novel from this perspective. We propose to explore a Dickensian novel that focuses on hope, namely Great Expectations (1861). What is striking is that he first expresses aspirations and anticipations of a very rational kind, similar to those studied by later standard economic theory. The novel however stresses their shortcomings, and gradually moves toward a more complex definition of an economic hope, more spiritual and philosophical by nature, and closer to what economists are developing today in the face of the very uncertain future that lies ahead of us.