What is the relationship between our conception of humans as producers or creators; as consumers of taste and pleasure; and as creators of value? Combining cultural history, economics, and literary criticism, Regenia Gagnier's new work traces the parallel development of economic and aesthetic theory, offering a shrewd reading of humans as workers and wanters, born of labor and desire. The Insatiability of Human Wants begins during a key transitional moment in aesthetic and economic theory, 1871, when both disciplines underwent a turn from production to consumption models. In economics, an emphasis on the theory of value and the social relations between land, labor, and capital gave way to more individualistic models of consumerism. Similarly, in aesthetics, theories of artistic production or creativity soon bowed to models of taste, pleasure, and reception. Using these developments as a point of departure, Gagnier deftly traces the shift in Western thought from models of production to consumption. From its exploration of early market logic and Kantian thought to its look at the aestheticization of homelessness and our own market boom, The Insatiability of Human Wants invites us to contemplate alternative interpretations of economics, aesthetics, and history itself.

Affectivity and the Social Bond offers a fresh and original perspective on the relationship between affectivity and transcendence in nineteenth and twentieth century French social theory. Engaging in a conceptual analysis of the works of Comte, Durkheim, Bataille and Girard, this book exposes a major transformation brought about by the sociological gaze in understandings of affectivity and its relationship to both sociality and transcendence in nineteenth century social thought: the ambivalence between the transcendence of the social and the immanence of affective experience. Revealing the manner in which questions of violence and economy are intertwined in the sociological analysis of affectivity, Affectivity and the Social Bond reflects upon the problem of controlling affectivity, alongside the political implications and possible dangers of a sociological model which seeks the roots of the social bond first and foremost in the affective realm. A rigorous engagement with the classics of French social theory, their treatment of human affectivity and its relationship to social integration and regulation, this book will appeal not only to sociologists and social theorists, but also to those with interests in social and political philosophy and the history of ideas.

They borrow from published works without attribution. They remake literary creation in the image of consumption. They celebrate the art of scissors and paste. Who are these outlaws? Postmodern culture-jammers or file-sharing teens? No, they are the Copywrights—Victorian and modernist writers, among them Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, whose work wrestled with the intellectual property laws of their day. In a highly readable and thought-provoking book that places today's copyright wars in historical context, Paul K. Saint-Amour asks: Would their art have survived the copyright laws of the new millennium? Revisiting major works by Wilde and Joyce as well as centos assembled by anonymous writers from existing poems, Saint-Amour sees the period 1830–1930 as a time when imaginative literature became aware of its own status as intellectual property and began to register that awareness in its subjects, plots, and formal architecture. The authors of these self-reflexive literary texts were more conscious than their precursors of the role played by consumption in both the composition and the consecration of literature. The texts in question became, in turn, part of what Saint-Amour characterizes as a "counterdiscourse" to extensive monopoly copyright, a vocal minority that insisted on a broadly conceived public domain not only as indispensable to free expression and fresh creation but as a good in itself. Recent events such as the court battle over the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extends copyright terms by 20 years, the patenting of the human genome and of genetically altered seed lines, and high-stakes controversies over literary parody have increased public awareness of intellectual property law. In The Copywrights, Saint-Amour challenges the notion that copyright's function ends with the provision of private incentives to creation and innovation. The cases he examines lead him to argue that copyright performs a range of political, emotional, and even sacred functions that are too often ignored and that what seems to have emerged as copyright's primary function—the creation of private property incentives—must not be an end in itself.

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) is remembered primarily for Say's Law, one of the cornerstones of classical economics. The success of his Traite d'economie Politique made Say the best-known expositor of Adam Smith in Europe and America, and he became France's first professor of political economy.The set covers the following themes: * Say in the history of economics* classical statements on Say's Law* later statements on Say's Law (the prelude to the General Theory)* the Keynesian Revolution and the attack on Say's Law* Lange, Say's Law and the demand for money* modern reconstructions of Say's Law* commentaries on classical views relating to Say's Law* Retrieving the classical understanding of Say's Law.

In Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature, Lesa Scholl explores the ways in which the language of starvation interacts with narratives of emotional and intellectual want to create a dynamic, evolving notion of hunger. Scholl's interdisciplinary study emphasises literary analysis, sensory history, and political economy to interrogate the progression of hunger in Britain from the early 1830s to the late 1860s. Examining works by Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Mayhew, and Charlotte Bronte, Scholl argues for the centrality of hunger in social development and understanding. She shows how the rhetoric of hunger moves beyond critiques of physical starvation to a paradigm in which the dominant narrative of civilisation is predicated on the continual progress and evolution of literal and metaphorical taste. Her study makes a persuasive case for how hunger, as a signifier of both individual and corporate ambition, is a necessarily self-interested and increasingly violent agent of progress within the discourse of political economy that emerged in the eighteenth century and subsequently shaped nineteenth-century social and political life.