ABSTRACT
The term “political economy” continues to be used in a number of related senses. For instance, what we refer to today as economics was generally known as political economy during the nineteenth century – not inappropriately since it was a mixture of the descriptive and the prescriptive. Economic doctrines and economic maxims went together. During this period, moreover, the notion of immutable economic laws was widespread. The object was to discover them, and from them to derive principles of sound economic policy.
