“…It’s better to ask for the earth than to take it,” observes the mysterious Inspector Goole in J. B. Priestly’s An Inspector Calls.
The rhetoric of economics includes the study of how economic theories enter the public sphere. How are ideas made promoted or critiqued? We come to our understandings of economics and politics through our cultures, and few things shape a culture more than screen and stage. I write plays specifically because they have the power to move audiences to action.
An Inspector Calls (see Wikipedia and elsewhere for spoilers) is a brilliant work challenging the British social order. The wealthy family being subjected to Inspector Goole’s questions accumulated wealth through the labor of working-class young women in a textile factory. The hints of Dickens’ world linger into the 1912 setting, a reminder of how slowly things improved for the workers in London.
Currently, a version of the play is available via Amazon Prime video. I encourage those interested in the rhetoric of economics to view the film adaptation and consider how relevant the message is today, more than a half-century after the play premiered in the Soviet Union. Yes, this is a work that premiered in the Communist nation.
Priestly was an unabashed Labour supporter, with at least some sympathies with the Marxist movements of his time. George Orwell actually included Priestly on a list of authors and thinkers the British government should avoid supporting. There’s some irony in Orwell working on propaganda, of course, but he was staunchly anti-communist.
Economists and political scientists need to understand that fictional works are more persuasive than academic papers or even the most popular mass-audience non-fiction books.
Watching a performance of An Inspector Calls should move any the most ardent supporter of capitalism to understand that without moral decency any system fails. The brilliance of the play is that it aims higher than Dickens, even though the wealthy remain caricatures of self-delusional greed.
My students vaguely recall that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle changed policies in the United States. They understand that Dickens drew attention to the working class of London. Some students appreciate how Hollywood films critique capitalism while existing within the most capitalist of media. But An Inspector Calls is a more nuanced work than most films, a more deliberately persuasive artistry.
The play is a masterwork of dramatic writing. There are questions left unanswered and nothing is resolved — yet many lessons have been taught throughout the three acts.
If I were teaching a course on economic in theater, I’d include An Inspector Calls as the script I admire. There are many plays about class, wealth, and justice, but few are constructed so masterfully. (I am excluding adaptations from books to stage.)