Systems of Life

Richard A. Barney (Edited By) Richard A. Barney is an associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford University Press, 1999) and has edited several volumes, including Rhetorics of Plague, Early and Late for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (Winter 2010–11). He is currently at work on a book about the biopolitics of the sublime in eighteenth-century Britain.Warren Montag (Edited By) Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014). He is also the editor of Décalages, a journal on Althusser and his circle, and the translator of Etienne Balibar's Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness (Verso, 2013).

• Introduction: Systems of Life, or Bioeconomic PoliticsRichard A. Barney and Warren Montag 11. Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth CenturyChristian Marouby 352. An African Diasporic Critique of ViolenceJames Edward Ford III 563. Rousseau: Vital Instinct and PityPierre Macherey 824. System and Subject in Adam Smith's Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic LifeCatherine Packham 935. Vitalism's Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics Richard A. Barney 1146. Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political EconomyAnnika Mann 1357. William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny Amanda Jo Goldstein 1628. Concerning Hunger: Empire Aesthetics in the Present MomentMrinalini Chakravorty 2019. The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin's Entangled BankTimothy C. Campbell 236List of Contributors 257Index 261