'To think about the study of literature as possessing “values” is, I think, already to skew things. In the Anglophone tradition, something has “value” if it can be measured in external units. Adam Smith famously argued that a value of a thing is measured either in terms of what might be substituted for it (its exchange value) or in terms of its quanti able utilities (its use value). In this framework, value is primarily an economic concept, but, at least from Jeremy Bentham on, it has also been a governmental one. Although earlier philosophers like John Locke or David Hume did not deploy the term, Bentham introduced it precisely to advise those he calls “legislators” on how to manage a population’s happiness. As such, it quickly came under attack: “ Worth was degraded into a lazy synonyme of value ; and value was exclusively attached to the interests of the senses” as Samuel Coleridge put it. (Introduction)
