Introduction

The history of economic thought since the mid-seventeenth century has been characterized by a succession of models that attempt to ground economic ideas in the methodologies, conceptual structures, and mathematics of the natural sciences. While mechanics and the idea of a self-adjusting economic machine have provided the most well known examples in classical and neoclassical theory, it is less known that physiology played a crucially important role in shaping the early development of the classical model. From Hobbes to Quesnay, the dominant set of metaphors shaping the conceptual structure of the economic theory of production and exchange were drawn from physiology and the comparison of the economy to the living body (and the larger economy of nature).

For early economists whose starting point was production, physiology provided an obvious set of analogies. Nature, like the economy, was produced by the self-activity of living organisms. It depended on the extraction and transformation of nutritive and other materials from the earth, which were circulated and consumed. And it reflected design and organization in its parts and its totality. Conceptually, early economists drew on many related domains: mechanics, matter theory, theories of activity and motion, chemistry, and physiology.