All Production Is Reproduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 75-108
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Wallmann
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Entire Economy

The aim of this article is to probe the connections between two key fields of knowledge of the French Enlightenment: political economy and natural history. It does so by analyzing the uses of reproduction, a term that eighteenth-century political economists imported from natural history. While historians of knowledge have demonstrated the crucial role played by political and economic concerns in the practices of naturalists, intent on improving their nation, the significance of natural history for the development of political economy has not been sufficiently analyzed. Studying side-by-side the works of the period’s most famous school of political economy, the physiocrats, and one of its most influential naturalists, the Comte de Buffon, the paper demonstrates that the physiocrats adopted not only the term from natural historians, but also the conceptual baggage that accompanied it. Buffon radically reconceptualized the reproduction of living beings as a process governed by natural laws and not divine intervention. As the paper argues, the physiocrats’ political-economic system was based on precisely such a conception of the natural laws of reproduction, which they extended from the world of the living to the entire economy of the nation.

Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-161
Author(s):  
Annika Mann
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

This chapter reconsiders the emergence of political economy, biology, and literature as separate fields of research—disciplines—by examining representations of noxious generation in the politics and poetry of the late eighteenth century. In the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the status of the French Revolution, both writers collapse biological theories of reproduction and political theories of social collectivity, depicting generation as the proliferation of embodied collectives stimulated by print. In their poems The First Book of Urizen (1794) and “To a Little Invisible Being, Soon to Become Visible” (probably composed in 1799), William Blake and Anna Barbauld critique that collapse, even as they reflect upon how that collapse is itself facilitated by the tools of poetic discourse, by form and figure. Both poets explore how the “visible form” of writing, the structure of the book, and the figure of the womb are complicit in the generation of new kinds of bodies in the world. In so doing, Blake and Barbauld expose the unavoidably shared ground of poets, political economists, and scientists at the very moment those writers began increasingly articulating their own separateness.

scholarly journals “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

Humane Markets

2019 ◽  
pp. 293-315
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Economic

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.

The Enlightened Image of Nature in the Dutch East Indies: Consequences of Postmodernist Doctrine for Broad Structures and Intimate Life

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis Pyenson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social History ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
The World ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Intimate Life

Eighteenth-century natural-history illustration in the Dutch East Indies reveals verisimilitude as a goal shared between colonial artists and their counterparts in Europe. Natural-history images more generally exhibit common styles in the world settled and dominated by Europeans. Apparently dramatic differences in the local settings of the artists produced only trivial variations in representing nature pictorially, in just the way that astronomy and physics in the European colonies and spheres of influence departed hardly at all from European practice. The overwhelming strength of disciplinary norms, in science and in art, is the standard explanation for this circumstance. An alternative explanation from social history is proposed. It centers on the hypothesis of a homology between households in colonial settings and in Europe. The alternative explanation implies that both the observatory and the artist's workshop were insensitive to superstructural variation in costume and architecture, as well as variation in climate and cuisine. The hypothesis behind the alternative explanation, designated by the term complementarity, derives directly from the postmodernist dictum that ideas are extrusions of social interactions. Nevertheless, just as the strength of disciplinary norms is unresolved in postmodernist doctrine, so complementarity directly challenges the postmodernist predilection for affirming the distinctiveness of colonial cultures.

Patriotic natural history and sericulture in the French Enlightenment (1730–1780)

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Stockland
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Experimental Manipulation ◽  
Anatomical Structure ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
State Administrators ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Behavior

Rural practices of silk cultivation came under increasing scrutiny from French savants, state administrators and agricultural improvers during the eighteenth century. The lacklustre performance of the French sericultural industry greatly concerned state administrators at mid century, who viewed dependence on foreign supplies of raw silk as a major source of political and economic weakness. Practitioners of natural history came to champion the disciplined observation of silkworms as vital to the reform of the domestic sericultural industry. Amateur naturalists and provincial savants turned their attention to the anatomical structure and behavior of silkworms, in an attempt to codify sericultural practices that were consistent with the “natural œconomy” of these precious insects. The various techniques that constituted the rapidly expanding field of natural history – dissection, microscopic observation, experimental manipulation and classification – provided a set of tools for making the French sericultural industry materially viable in the face of stiff international competition. Encouraged and rewarded by various bodies of the royal administration, namely by the Bureau de Commerce and the Intendance de Languedoc, these investigations were configured as civic-minded and patriotic pursuits that would contribute to the regeneration of the patrie. By enhancing domestic productivity and public welfare, natural history seemed to offer state administrators a solution to the problems that racked French state and society under the ancien régime. Patriotism provided a powerful social and moral validation for the practice of scientific observation, at a time when natural history was still widely ridiculed as an anti-social pastime for the idle and the eccentric.

scholarly journals The Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Stein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Atmospheric Pollution ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Optimum Population ◽  
The World ◽  
The Times

In April 2009, Sir David Attenborough, the respected face and voice of British natural history programmes for more than fifty years, became the patron of a new charity, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), an organisation campaigning to limit the world's population. His reason for accepting the honour, he confessed to The Times, was that he was terribly worried about the dramatic increase of the world's population and the effect it was having on the quality of human life throughout the world:There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes only a mere fifty-six years ago. It is frightening. We can't go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of the space and food production.

POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-444
Author(s):  
ANDREW JAINCHILL
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The French Revolution

Among the stunning changes in material and intellectual life that transformed eighteenth-century Europe, perhaps none excited as much contemporary consternation as the twin-headed growth of a modern commercial economy and the fiscal–military state. As economies became increasingly based on trade, money, and credit, and states both exploded in size and forged seemingly insoluble ties to the world of finance, intellectuals displayed growing anxiety about just what kind of political, economic, and social order was taking shape before their eyes. Two important new books by Michael Sonenscher and John Shovlin, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution, tackle these apprehensions and the roles they played in forging French political and economic writings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both authors also take the further step of demonstrating the impact of the ideas they study on the origins of the French Revolution.

scholarly journals Gli erbari aretini da Andrea Cesalpino ai giorni nostri

2008 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
University Museum ◽  
Over Time

The production of this book has been made possible by the collaboration of a number of scholars and the generosity of the Arezzo Provincial Authority. It provides detailed descriptions of the contents of precious botanical collections amassed by natives of Arezzo, or simply conserved in institutions situated within the territory. The book provides an overview of both herbals of dried plants and painted herbals from the sixteenth century up to the present, starting from the one created in 1563 by the Arezzo doctor Andrea Cesalpino. The first herbal in the world to be organised through systematic criteria, this collection is now in the Botanical Section of the Florence University Museum of Natural History, together with another small eighteenth-century herbal produced by a pharmacist from Cortona, Agostino Coltellini. Conserved in Cortona itself is another eighteenth-century herbal, this one painted by Mattia Moneti, while in Castiglion Fiorentino and Poppi respectively are the intriguing collections of the Hortus siccus pisanus (18th century) and of the Biblioteca Rilliana (late 17th century). Also described in the book is a herbal from the Convent of La Verna (18th century) and the Egyptian herbal of Jacob Corinaldi (19th century), conserved in Montevarchi. Finally there are also the modern herbals, illustrating the continuity over time of a practice that is the foundation of all systematic study. The book is in fact rounded off by an anastatic reprint of the description of the Cesalpino herbal published in 1858, which is still a seminal work for studies such as those contained in this collection.

Globalization of Japan: Japanese Sakoku Mentality and U.S. Efforts to Open Japan. By Mayumi Itoh. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. 256p. $45.00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-266
Author(s):  
Kent E. Calder
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economic

The tide of globalization that has swept the world political economy over the past two decades is clearly a development of epic importance. Given Japan's economic scale—one-seventh of global GNP and more than one-quarter of world savings—its ability and inclination to respond is likewise a subject of broad international concern. Yet, the debate on Japan's evolving political-economic course has so far yielded far more heat than light.

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