ABSTRACT
Among the upper orders of Irish society, from the 1830s onwards, the cultivation of political economy, its widespread dissemination, especially amongst the working classes and the strict application of its principles to the economic life of the country, were seen as absolutely vital to economic progress. By the nineteenth century in Britain political economy had become the unchallenged mode of political discourse, the self-knowledge of industrial society, though the author's argue that in largely agricultural and colonial Ireland, its status was more problematic. Political economy was especially well qualified as a bonding agency in society as it seemed to provide consensus both at the discursive and at the ‘material’ economic levels. Attacks on political economy became more virulent in 1847 in response to the Great Famine and in the revolutionary year of 1848.
