ABSTRACT
Political Economy, as a minimum, denotes the melding for comprehension and analysis of economy and polity that is of business/financial affairs and legal/governmental processes. Increasingly political economists are turning to information and communication to analyze sources and dispositions of political/economic power. Communicatory power derives from and contributes to economic power as the foregoing remarks on mythology and ideology indicate. Sensing each human heart to be afflicted to some degree at least by selfishness, contemporary humane liberal political economists remain apprehensive lest concentrated power put to self- serving ends inflict great injury. For Karl Marx the humane liberal political economists' prescription of an active and ameliorative state ensuring competitive markets by opposing economic concentration would be sheer fantasy. Despite Adam Smith's status as political economist, elements of mythologizing can be detected in his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, particularly when considered apart from another of his major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
