Preface

Summary

What is “political economy”? The term was coined early in the seventeenth century by Antoine de Montchrétien (a now largely forgotten dramatist) to explain to the French king how the management of a family household could serve as a good model for the management of the polity. His once influential Traicté de l'oeconomie politique (1615) inaugurated a tradition of urging rulers and legislators to become “economists,” to base policy on the assumption that among the first aims of government were the proper understanding and management of a market economy just in the process of emerging. (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations [1776] was, among other things, the masterwork in that tradition.) Today the study of political economy is sometimes defined – more clearly, if less ambitiously – as an attempt to link the subject matter of political science with the methods and theories of neoclassical economics. But that definition is misleadingly narrow. Indeed, the concept of political economy that the contributors to this volume address describes a broad field of inquiry in which historians and philosophers, as well as economists and political scientists, now make contributions of shared and equal interest. It is arguable, too, that their interdisciplinary research and theorizing represent a recovery and replenishment of political economy as it first emerged in early modern Western thought – namely, an inquiry distinctively concerned with the conduct, institutions, and values of market societies, but always ready to borrow from history, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, and political theory.