ABSTRACT
Here is one story about the body and its relation to the history of economic discourse. From the early beginnings of modern economics in the late eighteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, economic theory was grounded in different but explicit theories of the body, its disposition, and its effects. The classical political economists, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, were inclined to formulate the categories and concepts of economic analysis as expressions of personal sensations and sensibilities, regardless of whether the individuals thus constituted by the senses were perceived as entities whose bodies’ unity could be organized and represented by their desires or, alternatively, by their capacity to labor. The birth of modern economics, therefore, saw the corporeal, sensate body elevated to the privileged status of a first principle. The virtue of classical political economy, in this story, is that it was a coherent, centered discourse in which the ‘whole human’, with all his/her natural sentiments, emotions, affections, and sensations – nowhere better presented than in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) – became the organizing principle to understand, traverse the landscape of, and manipulate individual bodies within the social body.
