Page 24 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy
P. 24

Chapter One


                   Genealogy of Political Economy














                             TWO POLITICAL ECONOMIES         1

             Classical Political Economy
             Dating from the Scottish Enlightenment, political economy is the scholarly
             discourse studying power relations affecting the production, distribution, and
             consumption of wealth, income, and resources—including information and
                                   2
             communication resources. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (first edi-
                                                        3
             tion, 1776) is often regarded as the inaugural text. Smith defined his disci-
             pline, political oeconomy, as a “branch of the science of a statesman or legis-
                                                                          4
             lator” helping governments set conditions to stimulate economic growth. His
             subject was political economy because it was within the context of statecraft
             that he studied economic processes and relations. Smith was a radical in his
             day as his liberal doctrine of wealth creation through competition, specializa-
             tion (division of labor), and freer international trade challenged the received
             tenets of mercantilism. Once the industrial capitalist class attained domi-
             nance, however, Smith and his successors (David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus,
             James Mill, Jeremy Bentham) became voices for the new establishment.
               A notable feature of classical political economy was its narrowed focus—
             its participation, one might say, in the division of scholarly labor. Following
             the precedent set at Glasgow University by his predecessor and mentor, Fran-
             cis Hutcheson, Smith taught political economy as a distinct and severable
             component of moral philosophy, the other parts being natural theology, ju-
             risprudence, and ethics (the focus of Smith’s other renowned tome, The The-
                                   5
             ory of Moral Sentiments). According to some, The Wealth of Nations and
             Moral Sentiments were meant by Smith to be interdependent in the sense that
             Moral Sentiments sets out the ethical framework for a market economy, while

                                             13
   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29