​In the eighteen years between Isaac Watts' and Adam Smith's remarks regarding the utility of systematic thinking at the middle of the eighteenth century, we find a conceptual arc--in miniature--that fits the broader development of European thinking about "system" from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Both authors stress the attractions of systematic efficiency and coherence, for instance, but while Watts focuses his appreciation on the relatively more narrow compass of the epistemological benefits for knowledge formation (where "science" could designate any field of developed expertise), Smith expands system's importance to apply potentially to any kind of practical, social, or scientific enterprise whose "end" also incorporates a definitively aesthetic dimension of "fitness" or "beauty." Not quite three decades after his brief consideration of the relevance of "system" to sympathy in A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith would demonstrate all the more emphatically the significance of systematicity to an ambitious project articulating the complex relations of political economy in his Wealth of Nations (1776), where the term system and its variants appear, not coincidently, more than one hundred and sixty-five times. Furthermore, not only was Book 4 of that treatise devoted to "Systems of Political Oeconomy," but Smith eventually identified versions of systems in fields that also included agriculture, commerce, physics, ethics, administration, finance, taxation, and philosophy.
This collection of essays takes its cue from the ascendency of system indicated by Smith's work in order to articulate a framework in which to grasp the complex relations among biological knowledge, economics, and politics in Europe and its colonies from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In these terms, this volume aims to draw on recent scholarly accounts of the significance of "system" in Renaissance and Enlightenment contexts in order to revaluate the importance of the systematic to biopolitical theory, which has paid particular attention to the importance of this historical period, especially in the case analysts such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume can therefore be taken as an argument that the concept of "system" can help specify all the more concretely the ways that the "bio" was articulated in relation to the "political" in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century biopolitics, with "economy" serving as a useful mediating term between them by offering a way to articulate their "order" as a matter of exchange, valuation, or management. Given Smith's remark about the "beauty" of systems, moreover, it is no accident that several of the essays in this volume examine the relevance of aesthetic production--whether poetry, fiction, comedy, or visual art--to the deployment of economic values in relation to both biological and political spheres.