ABSTRACT
This chapter retraces the origins and development of the political economy tradition which, roughly speaking, emerged in the late seventeenth century and wound down at the end of the nineteenth century when—as explained in Chapter 3—it was displaced by modern mathematical economics. Although Adam Smith is often credited for having founded this tradition, the author insists on the need to consider his French predecessors. Nevertheless, Smith, together with David Ricardo and J.S. Mill, takes centre stage in this historical account. Smith’s notion of “sympathy,” which is echoed in the works of many of his French predecessors and in Mill (but much less so in Ricardo’s works), provides the key to understanding the moral outlook that makes this tradition unique. The rest of the book examines how this vision faded away but, to some extent, has been rediscovered in a new guise by contemporary trends in behavioural and evolutionary economics, as explained in the final chapter. Because Karl Marx proposed what he described as a “critique” of political economy (rather than an entirely new paradigm), this chapter examines Marx’s economics, arguing that it was technically flawed. This weakens his critique of capitalism as a whole, even if evidently other aspects of Marx’s overall philosophical legacy continue to be relevant to contemporary political debates on economic and political inequalities.
