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