David Bennett is director of postgraduate studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he lectures on psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and the politics of art censorship. His essay comes from a book in progress that examines how the discourses of sexual psychology and economics have interacted since the eighteenth century. His other books include Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (1998), Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory (1993), and Rhetorics of History: Modernity and Postmodernity (1990).