Contemporary Critiques Of Political Economy

The present volume makes students and researchers familiar with contemporary issues in global political economy with a focus on the working of global capitalism in the last four to five decades. The volume covers a wide range of issues from conceptual questions to empirical investigation with the aim to promote a critical understanding of the major challenges posed by contemporary capitalism. It contains contributions of leading political economists from India and abroad. The volume will be a significant resource for developing a graduate course in global political economy. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This book presents a positive account of Aristotle’s theory of political economy, arguing that it contains elements that may help us better understand and resolve contemporary social and economic problems. The book considers how Aristotle’s work has been utilized by scholars including Marx, Polanyi, Rawls, Nussbaum and Sen to develop solutions to the problem of injustice. It then goes on to present a new Social Welfare Function (SWF) as an application of Aristotle’s theory. In exploring how Aristotle’s theories can be applied to contemporary social welfare analysis, the book offers a study that will be of relevance to scholars of the history of economic thought, political theory and the philosophy of economics.

The nature of the contemporary global political economy and the significance of the current crisis are a matter of wide-ranging intellectual and political debate, which has contributed to a revival of interest in Marx’s critique of political economy. This book interrogates such a critique within the broader framework of the history of political economy, and offers a new appreciation of its contemporary relevance. A distinctive feature of this study is its use of the new historical critical edition of the writings of Marx and Engels (MEGA2), their partially unpublished notebooks in particular. The sheer volume of this material forces a renewed encounter with Marx. It demonstrates that the international sphere and non-European societies had an increasing importance in his research, which developed the scientific elements elaborated by Marx’s predecessors. This book questions widespread assumptions that the nation-state was the starting point for the analysis of development. It explores the international foundations of political economy, from mercantilism to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and to Hegel, and investigates how the understanding of the international political economy informs the interpretations of history to which it gave rise. The book then traces the developments of Marx’s critique of political economy from the early 1840s to Capital Volume 1 and shows that his deepening understanding of the laws of capitalist uneven and combined development allowed him to recognise the growth of a world working class. Marx’s work thus offers the necessary categories to develop an alternative to methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism grounded in a critique of political economy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Marx’s thought and in the foundations of International Political Economy.

This volume covers the theoretical method, macroeconomics, microeconomics, international trade and finance, development, and policy of economic theory. It incorporates various alternative approaches as well as a broad spectrum of policy issues.

Subversive thought is none other than the cunning of reason when confronted with a social reality in which the poor and miserable are required to sustain the illusion of fictitious wealth. Yet, this subsidy is absolutely necessary in existing society, to prevent its implosion. The critique of political economy is a thoroughly subversive business. It rejects the appearance of economic reality as a natural thing, argues that economy has not independent existence, expounds economy as political economy, and rejects as conformist rebellion those anti-capitalist perspectives that derive their rationality from the existing conceptuality of society. Subversion focuses on human conditions. Its critical subject is society unaware of itself. This book develops Marx's critique of political economy as negative theory of society. It does not conform to the patterns of the world and demands that society rids itself of all the muck of ages and founds itself anew.

"The book presents a high-impact re-reading of core topics in the Marx and Marxist debates including: value-theory, the commodity-nature of money, complex or skilled labour, the determination of the value of labour-power and the nature of extraordinary surplus value. Drawing on this literature, the book provides original and innovative insights into key controversies in contemporary capitalism such as the increasingly intellectual character of commodity-producing labour, the emergence of global value chains, the relevance of ground-rent bearing commodities, and the specific, uneven developmental dynamics of "resource-rich" countries in the global process of capital accumulation. Contributing to the renewed vitality of critical studies of the economic works of Karl Marx, this book will be essential reading for all those interested in contemporary debates within Marxism, as well as readers of political economy, economics, development studies and economic sociology"--

This book is original in focusing on critical political economy, identifying its character and reviewing its continuing legacy. In doing so it throws new light on Hegel and Marx and a range of subsequent theorist. It also develops a perspective on topics such as postmodernism, globalization, identity politics and the cultural turn.