ABSTRACT
Political Economy, Literature and the Formation of Knowledge, 1720–1850 provides an important historical corrective to our understanding of the necessity of the idea of political economy, the return of politics to economics. It complicates the dominant assumptions of contemporary economics, its turn to finance and to technocracy, and offers new ways of historicizing the discipline in its fullest social, political, cultural, and philosophical contexts. This chapter traces the ways in which these visualized abstractions denuded economics of its political concerns, by naturalizing its authority and narrowing its concerns, before exploring the ways in which visual culture has offered us ways of interrupting this trajectory. The machine was a macroeconomic hydraulic marvel: a system of tanks, pumps, sluices, channels, and levers that simulated the action of money as it moved around the economy and could allow the economist to see the interconnected effects of taxation, spending, stock prices, and inflation.
