Political Economy

 Political economy is a branch of political science and economics studying economic systems (e.g. markets and national economies) and their governance by political systems (e.g. law, institutions and government). Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems like the labor markets and financial markets, as well as phenomena such as growth, distribution, inequality, and trade, and how these are shaped by institutions, laws, and government policy. Originating in the 16th century, it is the precursor to the modern discipline of economics. Political economy in its modern form is considered an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theory from both political science and modern economics.

Political economy originated within 16th century western moral philosophy, with theoretical works exploring the administration of the states' wealth; "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word oikonomos, or household management. The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats such as François Quensay and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot.

In the late 19th century, the term "economics" gradually began to replace the term "political economy" with the rise of mathematical modeling coinciding with the publication of an influential textbook by Alfred Marshall in 1890. Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity with the hope of the term becoming "the recognized name of a science." Citation measurement metrics from Google Ngram Viewer indicate that use of the term "economics" began to overshadow "political economy" around roughly 1910, becoming the preferred term for the discipline by 1920. According to economist Clara Matthei, this shift was driven by the increasing consensus of classical liberalism as natural-law; and persisted despite evidence to the contrary during the First World War. Today, the term "economics" usually refers to the narrow study of the economy absent other political and social considerations while the term "political economy" represents a distinct and competing approach.

Originally, political economy meant the study of the conditions under which production or consumption within limited parameters was organized in nation-states. In that way, political economy expanded the emphasis on economics, which comes from the Greek word oikos (meaning "home") and nomos (meaning "law" or "order"). Political economy was thus meant to express the laws of production of wealth at the state level, quite like economics concerns putting home to order. The etymology of the phrase economie 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. Other contemporary scholars attribute the roots of this study to the 13th century by Tunisian Arab Historian and Sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, for his work on making the distinction between "profit" and "sustenance," in modern political terms called surplus, and that required for the reproduction of classes respectively. He also calls for the creation of a science to explain society and goes on to outline these ideas in his major work, the Muqaddimah. In Al-Muqaddimah Khaldun states, "Civilization and its well-being, as well as business prosperity, depend on productivity and people's efforts in all directions in their own interest and profit" -- seen as a modern precursor to Classical Economic thought.

Leading on from this, the French physiocrats were the first major exponents of political economy, although the intellectual responses of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Divid Ricardo, Henry George, and Karl Marx to the physiocrats generally receive much greater attention. The world's first professorship in political economy was established in 1754 at the University of Naples Federico II in southern Italy. The Neapolitan philosopher Antonio Genovesi was the first tenured professor. In 1763, Joseph von Sonnenfels was appointed a Political Economy chair at the University of Vienna, Austria. Thomas Malthus, in 1805, became England's first professor in the field, at the East India Company College, Haileybury, Hertfordshire. At present, political economy refers to different yet related approaches to studying economic and related behaviors, raging from the combination of economics with other fields to the use of different, fundamental assumptions challenging earlier economic presumptions.

x----------x

This post is sponsored by Burberry.