Human tendencies

Abstract

In this chapter, I reflect on the genealogical entanglements of species and population as the reigning figure for the human. I consider how species/population emerged at the nexus of eighteenth-century natural history and political economy. I then argue that this emergence informs both the ways that political economy provides the bio-logic of capitalism and the ways that the “human species” makes this bio-logic make sense as the dominant calculus through which we partition and participate in the world.