Political economy was the original term used for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth. Political economy originated in moral philosophy. It developed in the 18th century as the study of the economies of states, polities, hence the term political economy.
In the late 19th century, the term economics came to replace political economy, coinciding with 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 and with the hope of the term becoming "the recognised name of a science."
Today, political economy, where it is not used as a synonym for economics, may refer to very different things, including Marxian analysis, applied public-choice approaches emanating from the Chicago school and the Virginia school, or simply the advice given by economists to the government or public on general economic policy or on specific proposals. A rapidly-growing mainstream literature from the 1970s has expanded beyond the model of economic policy in which planners maximize utility of a representative individual toward examining how political forces affect the choice of policies, especially as to distributional conflicts and political institutions. It is available as an area of study in certain colleges and universities.
Read more about Political Economy: Etymology, Current Approaches, Related Disciplines
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or economy:
“Our political problem now is Can we, as a nation, continue together permanentlyforeverhalf slave, and half free? The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.”
—Abraham Lincoln (18091865)
“The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchants economy is a coarse symbol of the souls economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)