Beyond the Father: Frankenstein as an Economic and Political Allegory, from Godwinian perfectibility to Malthusian limits

This article argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein renders visible a fundamental problem for understanding the limits of political economy: the logic of unintended consequences. It reads the novel as a narrative elaboration of this problem within the intellectual horizon of the debate between William Godwin and Thomas Robert Malthus on the limits of human and social perfectibility. Shelley articulates this problem through two complementary planes. On the one hand, Victor Frankenstein represents deliberate intervention whose effects exceed the agent’s capacity for foresight and control. On the other, the Creature embodies individual action that, through interaction with the social environment, generates consequences contrary to its own ends. Although these dimensions operate through distinct mechanisms, they generate the same type of outcome. This dual articulation is not incidental; it emerges within her intellectual horizon, shaped by the debate between Godwin and Malthus, which brought to the fore the limits of human perfectibility and the tensions inherent in social interaction. Within the history of economic thought, this problem cuts across distinct traditions. One, associated with deliberate intervention, concerns the organisation of economic life under conditions of imperfect knowledge, while the other, linked to social interaction, extends from Bernard Mandeville to Adam Smith in analysing unintended outcomes arising from individual action. Frankenstein brings these two analytical logics into a unified frame. In doing so, the novel reveals a fundamental limit of purposive action, the difficulty of maintaining control over processes whose dynamics exceed the agent’s capacity for anticipation. Rather than illustrating an external principle, Frankenstein articulates, from within, a problem central to political economy, the limits of control under conditions of complexity and uncertainty.