Blackwell Reference Online

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For over 350 years the term political economy has been used to articulate the interdependence of political and economic phenomena. The first published use of the term “political economy” is found in Treatise on Political Economy authored by a French writer, Antoyne de Montchrétien, in 1616. The first publication in English using this term was Sir James Steuart's book Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy in 1767. Political economy is considered to be the original social science because the broad theoretical visions of society articulated by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries predated the splintering of social science into narrower disciplines of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Study in the field of political economy has always been a broader field than the conventional study of either economics or political science. Much of political economy scholarship has involved analyzing relational issues of politics and economics because markets are embedded in political and cultural contexts. Therefore, political economic scholarship has also typically addressed basic moral issues of social justice, equity, and the public good ( Gondwe 1992 ; Gilpin 2001 ). Scholarship in political economy encompasses three broad perspectives representing fundamentally different visions of the good society. They ... log in or subscribe to read full text