Kalkül und Leidenschaft

Among the multitude of 'new people' that the anthropological experimental field of modernity has produced, only economic man has survived... reason enough to make this type, its origin and its economy the object of a historical analysis. Joseph Vogl's study examines the sprawling exchange relations between economics, political theory, anthropology and literature or aesthetics, proposing an arc from the Baroque to Enlightenment and Romanticism into the first decades of the 19th century. It is about a poetology of knowledge that pursues the discursive strategies of an economic science as well as the economic penetration of literary forms, an interrelation of economic text and textual economics. Together they result in the scene that the ›homo oeconomicus‹ has mastered until further notice: as the specimen that has sent itself to become nothing less than man par excellence.