The Political Economy of Regulatory Competition. A Diachronic Institutional Theory of Legal Change in an Era of Globalization

If anything, the narrator's concluding statement that "the interests of one were the interests of all" supports the economists' theories, just as her explanation that foreign competition justifies a temporary reduction of wages endorses the principle of laissez-faire. For the most part, however, Gaskell sidesteps the controversy surrounding political economy by avoiding disquisitions on theory of any kind. Rather than airing debates about the New Poor Law, free trade, or the wage fund, Gaskell presents the problem as one of communication and knowledge-as a conflict, that is, between the masculine refusal to know except in abstractions and the feminized imaginative embrace. Parliament rejects the People's Charter, the narrator suggests, because legislators did not want to know the conditions of the poor; the workmen in Manchester strike because the masters do not tell their employees about the foreign competition the mills face. If representatives for each side explained their interests in concrete terms, the narrator claims, mutual forbearance or even sympathy would result, as it does when Carson and Job Legh finally elaborate their positions for each other ...»