ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that the tradition of political economy, by bringing power back in, has addressed many problems left unanswered by economic liberalism. Yet for all that, political economy is vulnerable to the criticism that it neglects forms of power other than those linked with economic power and the political expression of economic interest. One way of putting this is to say that political economy has a reductionist view of power, in which power relations are reduced to clashes of economic interest, typified in conflicts between capital and labour and in struggles between core and periphery within the world-system. This is to assume a single unitary and overarching approach to power, encapsulated in the focus on the capitalist mode of production and world-system.