ABSTRACT
The concept of political economy as an academic inquiry has undergone a wide range of interpretations, just as economics has been variously defined between the concept of scarcity and that of resource allocation in both the microeconomic and the macroeconomic sense. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments showed the importance of moral values in the formation of civil society; but his Wealth of Nations was a turns around from such moral moorings toward a study of the dynamics of economic exchange, which were shown to be the rules of competition born of self-interest. Classical political economy in the mould of its inductive approach to socioeconomic analysis, particularly the analysis of the production, ownership and distribution of wealth and the underlying conflict including market mechanism as a particular case of conflict or consensus, becomes an embodiment of utilitarian methodology. Marxist political economy shot out of Ricardo’s Labour Theory of Value.
