How does political economy differ from economics?
I’ll make a few quotations here from the Gilpin book I mention somewhere below. You may be surprised that political economy as a term preceded economics… For Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776), political economy was a “branch of science of both the statesman or legislator” and a guide to the prudent management of the national economy, or as John Stuart Mill, the last major [political] economist, commented, political economy was the science that teaches a nation how to become rich. These thinkers emphasized the wealth of nations, and the term “political” was as significant as the term “economy.” In the late nineteenth century, this broad definition of what economists study was narrowed considerably. Alfred Marshall, the father of modern economics, turned his back on the earlier emphasis on the nation as a whole and on the political as important. In his highly influential Principles of Economics (1890), Marshall substituted the present-day term “economics” for “political econom
