Political economy

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Political economy belongs to the category of the social sciences. The name of this science, “political economy”, comes from the Greek words “politeia” and “oikonomia”. The word “politeia” means “social organisation”. The word “oikonomia” is made up of two words: “oikos”-household, or household affairs, and “nomos”-law. The science of political economy received its name only at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It studies the laws of the social production and distribution of material wealth at the various stages of development of human society.

‘Political Economy’ was used prior to the 20th century, (when the term ‘Economics’ supplanted it); for its earliest exponents such as William Petty and Adam Smith, Political Economy was a branch of Ethics. With the growth of positivism in the 19th century, however, Political Economy, like Sociology, came to be seen as a branch of science.

The British pioneers of Political Economy contributed much to the development of Hegel's views in that they showed the relation between human thinking and social relations and how these social relations developed through specific historical stages related to the progress of techniques of production.

After the completion of his earliest investigations, Marx concentrated the majority of his theoretical work on the critique of political economy because Marx saw that the work of the political economists most clearly exhibited the ideological forms which dominated bourgeois society: explaining the science of economics through the perspective of the large and small scale capitalist, not through the perspective of the working class.