ABSTRACT
Political economy is a tradition of social analysis that dates at least from the eighteenth century and, in the works of Smith and others was concerned to understand the dynamics of what was then the new economic order of nascent industrial capitalism. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was more or less synonymous with what is today called ‘economics’. Always a field of contention, in the hands of Marx and Engels it became, famously and perhaps indelibly, linked with the critique of capitalism and working class efforts to establish a socialist society.
