This book brings together a collection of essays in honour of Peter Groenewegen, one of the most distinguished historians of economic thought. His work on a wide range of economic theorists approaches a level of near insuperability.

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future.

This nontechnical book provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of political economy that can easily be understood by any reader with an introductory-level background in economics. As 21st-century political debate becomes polarized across ideological lines, students and citizens need to understand the underlying values on which contending arguments are based. The current political gridlock calls for a deeper appreciation of the competing perspectives in political economy. Now revamped for a third edition, Political Economy: A Comparative Approach supplies a truly interdisciplinary examination of the development and evolution of political economy from the Enlightenment onward, drawing material from the realms of political theory, sociology, philosophy, and history as well as from economics to present detailed comparisons of competing perspectives on a variety of current issues. The book begins with an introduction to political economy that provides readers with an overview of the historical development of the discipline, followed by in-depth analyses of four ideological perspectives in political economy—Classical Liberalism, Radicalism, Conservatism, and Modern Liberalism. The author then applies each of the four ideological perspectives to a range of contemporary issues, such as the role of government, economic instability, poverty, labor relations, discrimination, education, culture, the environment, and international trade. Readers will gain insight into the methods and practice of political economics as well as better understand the history of political/economic thought and the effects of historical processes—European industrialization, for example—on modern debates.

This book captures the complexities of both development and environment, from the political economy point of view, to offer a broad economic and environmental history of post-independence India. It analyses the various components of constitutional provisions, policies, programmes and ecology protection measures during the post-independence period, that is, 1947–2020. The author also investigates India’s land and forest policies of the 21st century: Fair Compensation of Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006, which pose a great threat to ecology and the environment. The volume argues how, on one hand, the development agenda has undermined the environmental components for the first three decades of independence and, on the other hand, how the popular vote bank politics further has aggravated the issues related to environment in India. This book is an essential interdisciplinary resource for scholars and researchers of history, economic history, environmental studies, environmental history, Indian history and development studies.

This collection of twelve new essays by distinguished scholars in the fields of history and the philosophy of economics is one of the first book-length studies of Hume‘s political economy.

`In Political Economy and the Labour Party, Noel Thompson gives an informative and stimulating outline of the ideas and theories that have shaped the party’s economic policy since 1900.’ - Times Literary Supplement A new edition of the American Library Association's `Outstanding Academic Book' award winner. This new volume brings this study of the rich tradition of British socialist political economy and its influence on the British Labour Party fully up-to-date. Surveying the Labour tradition from the Fabianism of the Webbs to the `social-ism’ of Tony Blair’s Third Way, this new edition considers the critical engagement of these political economies with capitalism and the policies they articulate. It also discusses the manner in which they influence, or establish the context for, Labour’s economic thinking and policymaking and traces the ideological trajectory British social democratic political economy over the course of the twentieth century. In its concluding chapter this volume assesses the present character of the political economy advanced by the Labour Party and raises the question as to whether it can any longer be considered part of the social democratic tradition. This is an essential new edition of this now standard text for students taking courses on the history of political and economic thought and, more generally, courses on the political and intellectual history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.

The book investigates the many ways that economic and moral reasoning interact, overlap and conflict both historically and at present. The book explores economic and moral thinking as a historically contingent pair using the concept of economic normativities. The contributors use case studies including economic practices, such as trade and finance and tax and famine reforms in the British colonies to explore the intellectual history of how economic and moral issues interrelate.

Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2019 This book explores how political economy intersects with sociolinguistics, specifically how neoliberalism, inequality and social class mediate language in society issues. After the preface, in which the author sets the scene for the content of the book, Chapter 1 is an extensive, though selective, review of sociolinguistics research which has been framed as political economic in orientation. The chapter concludes that such research generally contains little in the way of thorough and in-depth coverage of the key ideas and conceptual frameworks said to undergird it. With this consideration in mind, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are organised around in-depth discussions of, respectively, political economy as a general disciplinary frame; neoliberalism as the variegated variety of capitalism dominant in the world today; and stratification, inequality and social class, as phenomena intrinsic to capitalism, which in the neoliberal era have come to the fore as key issues. Drawing directly on the background provide in Chapters 2-4, Chapters 5 and 6 explore two distinct political economy-informed lines of research, on the one hand, the 'neoliberal citizen', and on the other hand, 'discursive class warfare'. The book ends with an epilogue addressing issues arising around political economy in sociolinguistics.