ABSTRACT
Political economy presents perhaps the first sustained attempt to conceive the economy as a sphere of justice. As classically represented by Adam Smith, political economy advances the wealth of nations as an independent normative domain, whose economic system is what separates genuine civilized society from the brute struggle for survival of savages. 1 Granting the economy a worth of its own, political economy turns to analyze an economic order freed from domestic confines and direct political regulation. What it discovers is a market economy driven by laws of its own making that are the unintended result of the self-seeking of individual commodity owners. They engage in market activity simply to satisfy their particular needs, yet they end up establishing an economic system reproducing its own relations according to laws that operate without being expressly willed by anyone.
