ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the impact of arms spending ‘theoretically’, in terms of the various paradigms, though the effort ends only in reinforcing the scepticism about economic analysis. Economics is not just a functional ‘box of tools’ as reassuredly imagined in some forms of discourse: it is simply an engine that will go anywhere depending on the tracks one sets for it. The linkages between social and economic issues became acutely visible and clear; and the idea of a political economy returned, however, shamefacedly, from out of exile and banishment. As a thumbnail sketch of economic philosophies, the foregoing account is seriously incomplete for not mentioning perspectives that have consistendy opposed, righdy or wrongly, the mainstream drifts. In classical and neoclassical theory, the state is an economic minus, or at best an ‘indirectly’ productive agent to the extent it aids an ‘infrastructural’ development.
