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In the eighteenth century the burgeoning field of political economy incorporated an array of economic, social, moral, and historical themes. This article argues that the Physiocrats’ application of Nicolas Malebranche’s work reveals a critical corporeal component of political economy. The Physiocrats and Malebranche both feared the corrosive effects on the human body of unmitigated commerce and overconsumption. François Quesnay and his Physiocratic acolytes reproduced and expanded on Malebranche’s argument that the cognitive faculty of the imagination could stymie epistemological processes and thus the ability to perceive what the Physiocrats understood to be the natural foundations of political economy. The expanse of Atlantic trade, the subsequent “consumer revolution,” and the growth of new social practices transformed French life and brought individual bodies into novel forms of contact. In reaction, the Physiocrats and political economists prioritized relationships between physical bodies and consumer goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Body-politic metaphors served historically as figurative vehicles to transmit assorted socio-political messages. Through an examination of the metaphors la mollesse (softness) and Adam Smith's impartial spectator, this article will show that the language of eighteenth-century French and British writers was not simply heuristic or metaphorical. Contemporaries reacted to the growth of commerce and luxury, and the concomitant creation of new public spaces and forms of social interaction, by arguing that the corporeal mediated the social. I want to introduce the concept of corporeal sociability: cognitive physiology and the network of the senses, contemporaries argued, contained the information necessary to assess novel forms of commerce and revealed that sociability was congenitally embodied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]