Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government. Political economy originated in moral philosophy Ethics is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and bad, noble and ignoble, right and wrong, justice, and virtue. It developed in the 18th century as the study of the economies of states—polities, hence political economy.

In late nineteenth century, the term "political economy" was generally replaced by the term economics Economics is the social science that is concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία from οἶκος (oikos, "house") + νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)". Current, used by those seeking to place the study of economy upon mathematical and axiomatic bases, rather than the structural relationships of production and consumption (cf. marginalism Marginalism refers to the use of marginal concepts in economic theory. Marginalism is associated with arguments concerning changes in the quantity used of a good or of a service, as opposed to some notion of the over-all significance of that class of good or service, or of some total quantity thereof, William Stanley Jevons William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician. His book The Theory of Political Economy (1871) expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna (1871) and by Léon Walras in Switzerland (1874), marked the opening of a new period in the, Alfred Marshall Alfred Marshall was an English economist and one of the most influential economists of his time, being one of the founders of neoclassical economics. His book, Principles of Economics (1890), brings the ideas of supply and demand, of marginal utility and of the costs of production into a coherent whole. It became the dominant economic textbook in).

History of the term

Originally, political economy meant the study of the conditions under which production or consumption within limited parameters was organized in the nation-states. The phrase économie politique (translated in English as political economy) first appeared in France in 1615 with the well known book by Antoine de Montchrétien: Traité de l’economie politique. French physiocrats Physiocracy is an economic theory developed by the Physiocrats, a group of economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of land agriculture or land development. Their theories originated in France and were most popular during the second half of the 18th century. Physiocracy is perhaps the first well-, Adam Smith Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and, David Ricardo David Ricardo was an English political economist, often credited with systematizing economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator, who amassed a considerable personal fortune. Perhaps and Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, self-taught political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 184 were some of the exponents of political economy. In 1805, Thomas Malthus The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS , was a British scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularised the economic theory of rent became England's first professor of political economy, at the East India Company College Charles Grant was the EIC director who was the driving force to its foundation. It first opened in Hertford Castle, then moved in 1809 to a purpose-built site at Hertford Heath, near Hertford, now used by Haileybury. Its architect, William Wilkins, later went on to design the National Gallery in London, which bears some similarities, Haileybury, Hertfordshire The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and Essex. The world's first professorship in political economy was established in 1763 at the University of Vienna The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is, therefore, the oldest university in the German-speaking world and one of the largest in Central Europe, Austria; Joseph von Sonnenfels was the first tenured professor.

In the United States, political economy first was taught at the College of William and Mary The College of William & Mary in Virginia is a public research university located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States. Founded in 1693 by a royal charter (by a British letters patent) issued by King William III and Queen Mary II, it is the second-oldest institution of higher education in the United States after Harvard University. William; in 1784 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus written by Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith and first published in 1776. It is an account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century - was a required textbook.^[1]

Glasgow University The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the world, where Smith was Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy, changed the name of its Department of Political Economy to the Department of Economics (ostensibly to avoid confusing prospective undergraduates) in academic year 1997–1998, making the class of 1998 the last to be graduated with a Scottish Master of Arts degree in Political Economy.

Current approaches

In its contemporary meaning, political economy refers to different, but related, approaches to studying economic and political behaviours, ranging from the combination of economics with other fields to the use of different, fundamental assumptions that challenge orthodox economic assumptions:

• Political economy most commonly refers to interdisciplinary studies drawing upon economics Economics is the social science that is concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία from οἶκος (oikos, "house") + νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)". Current, law Law is a system of rules, usually enforced through a set of institutions. Laws can shape or reflect politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a primary social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading on derivatives markets. Property law defines rights and, and political science Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. And from these revelations they attempt to construct in explaining how political institutions, the political environment, and the economic system—capitalist Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned; supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are determined mainly by private decisions in the free market, rather than by the state through central economic planning or through democratic planning; profit is distributed to owners who invest in, socialist Socialism is an economic and political theory based on public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources, mixed A mixed economy is an economic system that includes a variety of private and government control, or a mixture of capitalism and socialism—influence Articles in economics journals are usually classified according to the JEL classification codes, a system originated by the Journal of Economic Literature . The JEL is published quarterly by the American Economic Association (AEA) and contains survey articles and information on recently published books and dissertations. The AEA maintains EconLit, each other. When narrowly construed, it refers to applied topics in economics implicating public policy, such as monopoly In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. (This is in contrast to a monopsony which relates to a, market protection Protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states, through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other government regulations designed to discourage imports, and prevent foreign take-over of domestic markets and companies. This policy is closely aligned with anti-globalization, and, government fiscal policy,^[2] and rent seeking In economics, rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic or political environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.^[3]
• Historians A historian is an individual who studies and writes about history, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all events in time. If the individual is concerned with events preceding written history, the have employed political economy to explore the ways in the past that persons and groups with common economic interests have used politics to effect changes beneficial to their interests.^[4]
• "International political economy International political economy is an academic discipline within the social sciences that analyzes international relations in combination with political economy. As an interdisciplinary field it draws on many distinct academic schools, most notably political science and economics, but also sociology, history, and cultural studies. The academic" (IPE) is an interdisciplinary field comprising approaches to international trade and finance, and state policies affecting international trade, i.e. monetary and fiscal policies. In the U.S., these approaches are associated with the journal International Organization An international organization is an organization with an international membership, scope, or presence. There are two main types:, which, in the 1970s, became the leading journal of international political economy under the editorship of Robert Keohane, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Stephen Krasner Stephen Krasner is an international relations professor at Stanford University and is the former Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State, a position he held from 2005 until April 2007 while on leave from Stanford. They are also associated with the journal The Review of International Political Economy. There also is a more critical school of IPE, inspired by Karl Polanyi Karl Paul Polanyi was a Hungarian intellectual known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his influential book The Great Transformation's work; two major figures are Susan Strange Susan Strange was a British academic who was influential in the field of international political economy. Her most important publications include Casino Capitalism, Mad Money, States and Markets and The retreat of the State : The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy and Robert W. Cox.^[5]
• Economists and political scientists often associate the term with approaches using rational choice Rational choice theory, also known as rational action theory, is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior. It is the dominant theoretical paradigm in microeconomics. It is also central to modern political science and is used by scholars in other disciplines such as sociology and philosophy assumptions, especially game theory Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences, most notably in economics, as well as in biology , engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making, in explaining phenomena beyond economics' standard remit, in which context the term "positive political economy" is common.^[6]
• Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, use political economy in referring to the neo-Marxian approaches to development Economic development is the increase in the amount of people in a nation's population with sustained growth from a simple, low-income economy to a modern, high-income economy. Its scope includes the process and policies by which a nation improves the economic, political, and social well-being of its people and underdevelopment The term "underdevelopment" originated in the mid-1950s. In October 1955, Gunnar Myrdal gave a series of lectures in Cairo at the invitation of the National Bank of Egypt, later published under the title Development and Under-development: A note on the Mechanism of National and International Economic Inequality . A revised version was postulated by André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs are syndicated by Agence Global.
• New political economy students treat economic ideologies as the phenomenon to explain, per the traditions of Marxian political economy. Thus, Charles S. Maier suggests that a political economy approach: interrogates economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises....in sum, [it] regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must themselves be explained.^[7] This approach informs Andrew Gamble's The Free Economy and the Strong State (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), and Colin Hay's The Political Economy of New Labour (Manchester University Press, 1999). It also informs much work published in New Political Economy an international journal founded by Sheffield University scholars in 1996.^[8]

Related disciplines

Because political economy is not a unified discipline, there are studies using the term that overlap in subject matter, but have radically different perspectives:

• Sociology Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter studies the effects of persons' involvement in society as members of groups, and how that changes their ability to function. Many sociologists start from a perspective of production-determining relation from Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, self-taught political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism and socialism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 184. Marx's theories on the subject of political economy are contained in his book, Das Kapital Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Capital, in the English translation) is an extensive treatise on political economy written in German by Karl Marx and edited in part by Friedrich Engels. The book is a critical analysis of capitalism. Its first volume was published in 1867.
• Political Science Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. And from these revelations they attempt to construct focuses on the interaction between institutions and human behavior, the way in which the former shapes choices and how the latter change institutional frameworks. Along with economics, it has made the best works in the field by authors like Shepsle, Ostrom, Ordeshook, among others.
• Anthropology Anthropology is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. The term "anthropology", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/, is from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia, "discourse" or "study", and was first studies political economy by studying the relationship between the world capitalist system and local cultures.
• Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of human or other animal mental functions and behaviors. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist. Psychologists are classified as social or behavioral scientists. Psychological research can be considered either basic or applied. Psychologists attempt to understand the is the fulcrum on which political economy exerts its force in studying decision-making (not only in prices), but as the field of study whose assumptions model political economy.
• History History is the study of the human past. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it sometimes attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. Historians debate the nature of history and its documents change, using it to argue political economy; historical works have political economy as the narrative's frame.
• Economics Economics is the social science that is concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία from οἶκος (oikos, "house") + νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)". Current focuses on markets by leaving the political—governments, states, legal frameworks—as givens. Economics dropped the adjective political in the 19th century, but works backwards, by describing "The Ideal Market", urging governments to formulate policy and law to approach said ideal. Economists and political economists often disagree on what is preeminent in developing production, market, and political structure theories.
• Law Law is a system of rules, usually enforced through a set of institutions. Laws can shape or reflect politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a primary social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading on derivatives markets. Property law defines rights and concerns the creation of policy and its mediation via political actions that have specific results, it deals with political economy as political capital and as social infrastructure—and the sociological results of one society upon another.
• Human Geography Human geography is an interdisciplinary field combining approaches from academic geography with the traditional subject matter of social science, thus emphasizing population issues such as tourism, urbanisation, and so on is concerned with politico-economic processes, emphasizing space and environment.
• Ecology Ecology is the scientific study of the distributions, abundance and relations of organisms and their interactions with the environment. Ecology includes the study of plant and animal populations, plant and animal communities and ecosystems. Ecosystems describe the web or network of relations among organisms at different scales of organization deals with political economy, because human activity has the greatest effect upon the environment, its central concern being the environment's suitability for human activity. The ecological effects of economic activity spur research upon changing market economy incentives.
• International Relations International relations or International studies (IS) represents the study of foreign affairs and global issues among states within the international system, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and multinational often uses political economy to study political and economic development.
• Cultural Studies Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and Marxist literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of popular contemporary culture, and is to this extent distinguished from cultural anthropology. Researchers concentrate on how a particular medium or message relates to matters of ideology, social class, studies social class, production, labor, race, gender, and sex.
• Communication examines the institutional aspects of media and telecommuncation systems, with particular attention to the historical relationships between owners, labor, consumers, advertisers, and the state.

See also

• Economic study of collective action
• Public Choice
• EAEPE
• Economic system
• Economist
• Economic ideology
• Institutional economics
• Important publications in political economy
• Socioeconomics
• Social Capital

References

1. ^ Image of "Priorities of the College of William and Mary"
2. ^ Groenwegen (1987, p.906).
3. ^ Anne O. Krueger, "The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society," American Economic Review, 64(3), June 1974, pp.291–303
4. ^ McCoy, Drew R. "The Elusive Republic: Political Ecocomy in Jeffersonian America", Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1980.
5. ^ Cohen, Benjamin J. (2007), ‘The transatlantic divide: Why are American and British IPE so different?’, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 2, May 2007
6. ^ Alt, James E. and Kenneth Shepsle (eds.) (1990), Perspectives on Positive Political Economy (Cambridge [UK]; New York: Cambridge University Press).
7. ^ Charles S. Mayer "In search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy", Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp.3–6.
8. ^ cf: David Baker, "The political economy of fascism: Myth or reality, or myth and reality?" New Political Economy, Volume 11, Issue 2 June 2006, pp.227–250.

External links

• National System of Political Economy—Major work on political economy by Friedrich List.
• Harmony of Interests—Work contrasting American System and British System of political economy by Henry C. Carey
• International Political Economy at Jacobs University Bremen
• Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex, UK
• O'Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at the SMU Cox School of Business Dallas, TX USA
• [1]

Further reading

• Groenwegen, Peter (1987). "'political economy' and 'economics'", The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 3, pp. 904–07.
• Pressman, Steven, Encyclopedia of Political Economy Routledge, 1999
• Pressman, Steven, Interactions in Political Economy: Malvern After Ten Years Routledge, 1996
• Winch, Donald, Riches and poverty : an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750–1834 Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge U.P., 1996.
• Winch, Donald, "The emergence of Economics as a Science 1750–1870". In: The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. 3. London: Collins/Fontana, 1973.

Categories: Political economy

See Also:

• Political Economy
• Category:Political Economy: Encyclopedia
• Monopoly (Economics)
• Category:Monopoly (Economics): Encyclopedia
• Regional: North America: United States: Business and Economy: Public Utilities: Directory

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