A Brief History Of Political Economy

Investigating the ideological dimension and exploring the continued impact of Marx, Keynes and Hayek, the authors demonstrate how these three economic narratives became entangled over time and under increasing complexity, overlapping and competing with each other. The book reflects on the meaning of the historical legacy of the three narratives and investigates their significance today. All three outlined the prospects for a better and more economically efficient world with increased social justice. Magnusson and Stråth argue that they constitute a legacy on which a new economic tale must be based, a legacy to draw on or confront.

This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages. New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy brings together a select group of young and established scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds—history, economics, law, and political science—in an effort to begin a re-conceptualization of the origins and history of political economy through a variety of still largely distinct but complementary historical approaches—legal and intellectual, literary and philosophical, political and economic—and from a variety of related perspectives: debt and state finance, tariffs and tax policy, the encouragement and discouragement of trade, merchant communities and companies, smuggling and illicit trades, mercantile and colonial systems, economic cultures, and the history of economic doctrines more narrowly construed. The first decade of the twenty-first century, bookended by 9/11 and a global financial crisis, witnessed the clamorous and urgent return of both 'the political' and 'the economic' to historiographical debates. It is becoming more important than ever to rethink the historical role of politics (and, indeed, of government) in business, economic production, distribution, and exchange. The artefacts of pre-modern and modern political economy, from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, remain monuments of perennial importance for understanding how human beings grappled with and overcame material hardship, organized their political and economic communities, won great wealth and lost it, conquered and were conquered. The present volume, assembling some of the brightest lights in the field, eloquently testifies to the rich and powerful lessons to be had from such a historical understanding of political economy and of power in an economic age.

Shows how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic. Details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and dehistoricisation of the dismal science.

Written over fifty years ago, History and Historians of Political Economy is now being published for the first time. John Maynard Keynes, after reading the manuscript, called Stark “one of the most learned men on these matters that I have ever come across.” Its publication is an important event in the study of the history of social ideas, particularly economic ideas. Werner Stark's most significant contribution to scholarship is his extensive work in the sociology of knowledge. In this volume, he reveals his parallel analysis of the history of economic thought, highlighting the paramount influence of social and historical factors. The themes of Stark's work are extraordinarily contemporary. He discusses economic historiography and the rational reconstruction method, issues that continue to be debated today. History and Historians of Political Economy is divided into two parts. The first section explains the beginnings of the history of economic thought as well as the theoretical and historical approaches towards the subject. The second section examines the relationship between phenomena and the explanation of phenomena theory. Stark illuminates the insights and limitations of the various approaches of study to the history of economic thought by analyzing the works of Eugen Dühring, Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and many other prominent scholars. History and Historians of Political Economy is of significant value to the studies of economics and sociology. Stark's book raises a number of critical questions: How should past theories be understood and explained? What is the relationship between ideas and events? Do economic theories reflect universal truths or relative ones? These issues are as unsettled today as when originally presented. History and Historians of Political Economy is an essential addition to the libraries of economists, political theorists, sociologists, and historians of ideas.

This collection of essays draws on fresh readings of classic texts as well as rigorous research in the archives of Europe's greatest imperial power. Its contributors paint a powerful picture of the nature and implementation of political economy in the long eighteenth century, from the East to the West Indies.

The field of international political economy gained prominence in the early 1970s--when the Arab oil embargo and other crises ended the postwar era of virtually unhindered economic growth in the United States and Europe--and today is an essential part of both political science and economics. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of this important field's development, the contrasting worldviews of its American and British schools, and the different ways scholars have sought to meet the challenges posed by an ever more complex and interdependent world economy. Benjamin Cohen explains the critical role played by the early "intellectual entrepreneurs," a generation of pioneering scholars determined to bridge the gap between international economics and international politics. Among them were brilliant thinkers like Robert Keohane, Susan Strange, and others whose legacies endure to the present day. Cohen shows how their personalities and the historical contexts in which they worked influenced how the field evolved. He examines the distinctly different insights of the American and British schools and addresses issues that have been central to the field's development, including systemic transformation, system governance, and the place of the sovereign state in formal analysis. The definitive intellectual history of international political economy, this book is the ideal volume for IPE scholars and those interested in learning more about the field.

Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of ‘Homo Economicus’ provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figure’s significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith’s seminal texts – Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations – and Henry Fielding’s A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen’s Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens’ engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway’s exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.