Among the multitude of new individuals that the anthropological experimental field of modernity has produced, only the economic man has survived. This provides ample reason to make this type, its origins, and its economic conditions the subject of a historical analysis. Joseph Vogl's study examines the extensive exchange relationships between economics, political theory, anthropology, and literature or aesthetics, spanning from the Baroque period through the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the early decades of the 19th century. It addresses a poetics of knowledge that traces the discursive strategies of an economic science as well as the economic penetration of literary forms, a reciprocal relationship between economic text and textual economy. Together, they create the scene that the homo oeconomicus continues to dominate for the time being: as that specimen.