ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘political economy’ has been introduced as an object of scientific investigation in the aftermath of the revolution in the natural sciences, which in turn was spearheaded by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The end of the Middle Ages marked a turning point for the understanding of the development of human knowledge. In 1758, the French scientist François Quesnay published his famous ‘Tableau économique’, a description of the dynamic working of a social production and reproduction system. The reaction of scholars supporting the upcoming bourgeois takeover of political state power – this break occurred finally in World War 1 – came much faster. In 1874, the school of Marginalism – Carl Menger, Leon Walras, and Stanley Jevons – produced a completely new approach to the field and called it a theory of economics.
