ABSTRACT
Warren Samuels has spent his scholarly career examining the intellectual history and internal logic of arguments concerned with the economic role of government. He has been quite eclectic in his approach and has studied deeply the thought of the classical economists, and modern economists such as Pareto, Knight, Hayek, Coase and Buchanan, as well as those scholars working within the institutionalist tradition of economic and political economy scholarship. While he has cast a rather wide net for study, his basic message has been rather consistent. Samuels emphasizes the irreducible embeddness of all economic processes in the political and legal nexus. This is a significant point to emphasize, especially when we remember the post-1950s effort by economists to develop an institutional antiseptic theory of the economic process. By emphasizing the framework within which all economic activity takes place, Samuels has sought to put the political back into political economy and as such, he surely deserves to be recognized as one of the foremost scholars responsible for resurrecting political economy in the second half of the twentieth century.
