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The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic \"life,\" making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.

Deontology and consequentialism are two prominent, disparate tenets of normative ethics concerned with prescribing norms for ethical action in order to advance human flourishing. While consequentialism in its purest form is practical and realistic, its precepts do not intrinsically consider justice and human rights, which are salient canons of deontology. Contrariwise, though plenary deontology categorically focuses on duty or rule-based ethics, its prescripts overlook the consequences of moral action, which results in indeterminate and conceivably dramatic implications for societal eudemonia and human flourishing. Traditionally, consequentialists have sought to quantify the moral value of action by formulating creative expressions. Attempts have also been made to combine ideologies in order to resolve moral conflicts that arise in both normative ethical positions. This article fuses these approaches, creating a single formulation to measure the moral value of action. Used as a guideline in the moral decision-making process, this formulation enjoins individuals to consider the consequences of action beyond the self, to ruminate beyond the immediacy of an act under consideration, and to regard unqualified societal and global norms for justice and human rights as a baseline for all moral action.