As the name they gave their subject implied, the great political economists of the 19th century knew that the economy cannot be studied fruitfully in isolation from the polity. The notion that there is, or should be, a distinct and autonomous discipline of 'economics', whose practitioners are solely concerned with economic relationships, and for whom the corresponding political relationships are professionally irrelevant, would have seemed to them absurd, even shocking. By a curious paradox, however, the 19th-century tradition of political economy has fallen further and further into abeyance the more closely the economy and the polity have been intertwined in practice. Nowadays, in this country at any rate, economists study economics, while political scientists study politics. The result is that neither discipline has much to say about the central economic and political problems of our time.

LRB 5 July 1984 | PDF Download