>
> Granted. In that case, try Fredy Perlman:
>
> According to economists whose theories currently prevail in America,
> economics has replaced political economy, and economics deals with scarcity,
> prices, and resource allocation. In the definition of Paul Samuelson,
> "economics - or political economy, as it used to be called ... is the study
> of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ
> scarce productive resources, which could have alternative uses, to produce
> various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and
> in the future, among various people and groups in society."(1) According to
> Robert Campbell, "One of the central preoccupations of economics has always
> been what determines price."(2) In the words of another expert, "Any
> community, the primers tell us, has to deal with a pervasive economic
> problem: how to determine the uses of available resources, including not
> only goods and services that can be employed productively but also other
> scarce supplies."(3)
Look, I basically agree with Perlman - but this is not an attack on economics as such, but on bad economics, and suggesting that it should be done better, along the lines of 'political economy'. For sure. I'm lucky enough to be in a department that calls itself 'Political Economy' rather than 'Economics', from which it began to split in the 1970s. Our intro course for undergrads is called 'Economics as a Social Science'.
I agree that mainstream neoclassical economics is full of problems as a science and as a discipline: it's largely ahistorical, it has trouble dealing with the social underpinnings of economic phenomena, its rationalist spine is rotten and its empiricist exoskeleton doesn't hold it together. But to me, again, this makes it flawed as a social science, inadequate to its object - economic phenomena - and so should be improved or replaced by better social science. It's not that economic phenomena are inherently un-examinable.
I don't think Economics the discipline is likely to be reformed anytime soon; good social science doesn't necessarily drive out bad and for sociological reasons it is invulnerable to its critics and its internal dissidents. And anyway, there is an awful lot of unobjectionable pragmatic, empirically-oriented work in economics, in the universities, in the banks and in the public sector. It's not like people have been utterly clueless about how economies work since the marginal revolution, and the neoclassicals have developed a number of useful ideas that we would be silly to throw out entirely.
As for the canard about a 'critique' of political economy being something wholly different to a 'contribution': just as Kant was not wanting to do away with 'pure reason', 'practical reason' or 'aesthetic judgment' but to inquire into the conditions that made them possible and what that ought to mean for them, so Marx explored the social preconditions for 'political economy'. Had he argued that 'political economy' was an impossibility, so much the worse for Marx, but in fact no-one can read Capital without seeing that it is largely concerned with explaining economic phenomena.
Mike Beggs