Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economi...

Why was Wollstonecraft's landmark feminist work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, categorised as a work of political economy when it was first published? Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft's major writings - including her two Vindications, her nove...

This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also ...

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of J.S. Mill in just one hour.John Stuart Mill is remembered today as the leading exponent of Utilitarianism, arguing that our aim in life must be the attainment of pleasure and the minimizing of pain for the majority of people. The principle that lies at the heart of Utilitarianism is ‘the greatest benefit of the greatest number’ – an idea that perhaps seems self-evident today but one that was seen as radical wi...

Raymond Williams was one of the world's leading cultural critics. With this book, Williams brilliantly documents the exciting birth of the popular press, and explores the growth of the reading public in English-speaking culture in Western Society. The Long Revolution of the title is the third revolution of culture after the democratic revolution and the industrial revolution. Almost uniquely, William's work bridged the divides between aesthetic and socio-economic inquiry, between ...

The language we use forms an important part of our sense of who we are - of our identity. This book outlines the relationship between our identity as members of groups - ethnic, national, religious and gender - and the language varieties important to each group. What is a language? What is a dialect? Are there such things as language 'rights'? Must every national group have its own unique language? How have languages, large and small, been used to spread religious ideas? Why have particula...

Impressive and authoritative, this essential book brings together a collection of essays in honour of Peter Groenewegen, one of the most distinguished historians of economic thought of a generation. His work on a wide range of economic theorists such as Adam Smith, François Quesnay and Alfred Marshall approaches a level of near insuperability.

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities with the patterns of thought which characterised Victorian racial theory. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialised thinking of the past, Colonial Desire shows we are operating in complicity with historical ways of viewing 'the other', both sexually and racially.Colonial Desire is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and 'culture'. Robert ...

The concept of gender continues to be a central issue in literary and cultural studies, with a significance that crosses disciplinary boundaries and provokes lively debate. In this fully revised and updated second edition, David Glover and Cora Kaplan offer a lucid and illuminating introduction to ’gender’ and its implications, including:an overview of the critical language and concepts surrounding gender from their historical inception to contemporary debatesdiscus...

Why did Economics, in its formative phase, have so much input from medically educated writers? The innovations that physicians brought to their economic discourse played a key role in shaping the future of the discipline, and this volume draws together the work of leading international academics to address this fascinating topic. This book examines

Michael Cronin looks at how translation has played a crucial role in shaping debates about identity, language and cultural survival in the past and in the present. He explores how everything from the impact of migration on the curricula for national literature courses, to the way in which nations wage war in the modern era is bound up with urgent questions of translation and identity. Examining translation practices and experiences across continents to show how translation is an integral p...

Though Robert Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. Robert Mayhew offers at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment, giving historical depth to our current planetary concerns.