ABSTRACT
The term ‘political economy’ has become outmoded and has largely been dropped from the lexicon of mainstream economists. Its decline dates, in large part, to Alfred Marshall’s choice of the title Principles of Economics for his 1890 treatise. For Marshall, this choice was intended to ensure the scientific status of the ‘engine of analysis’, which he created to focus on the problems of value, price and income distribution. His choice also reflected the view, principally associated with John Neville Keynes’s Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891), that the hard scientific core of economic theory should be insulated from particular ideologies and moral principles. This would make the discipline ‘value free’; however, one further consequence was that economics became separate from practical advice on matters of policy.
