Critique of political economy

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Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions,[1] and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given[2][3] or as transhistorical (true for all human societies for all time).[4][5] The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with modernity (post-Renaissance Western society).[6][7][8]

Critics of political economy do not necessarily aim to create their own theories regarding how to administer economies.[1][3][9][10] Critics of economy commonly view "the economy" as a bundle of concepts and societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of any self-evident economic laws.[3][11] Hence, they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience.[2][12]

There are multiple critiques of political economy today, but what they have in common is critique of what critics of political economy tend to view as dogma, i.e. claims of the economy as a necessary and transhistorical societal category.[3][13]

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference :3 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b Murray, Patrick (March 2020). "The Illusion of the Economic: Social Theory without Social Forms". Critical Historical Studies. 7 (1): 19–27. doi:10.1086/708005. ISSN 2326-4462. S2CID 219746578.
  3. ^ a b c d Louis, Althusser; Balibar, Etienne (1979). Reading Capital. Verso Editions. p. 158. OCLC 216233458. 'To criticize Political Economy' means to confront it with a new problematic and a new object: i.e., to question the very object of Political Economy
  4. ^ Fareld, Victoria; Kuch, Hannes (2020), From Marx to Hegel and Back, Bloomsbury Academic, p. 142,182, doi:10.5040/9781350082700.ch-001, ISBN 978-1-3500-8267-0, S2CID 213805975, retrieved 17 September 2021
  5. ^ Postone 1993, pp. 44, 192–216.
  6. ^ Mortensen. "Ekonomi". Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap. 3 (4): 9.
  7. ^ Postone, Moishe (1995). Time, labor, and social domination : a reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. Cambridge University Press. pp. 130, 5. ISBN 0-521-56540-5. OCLC 910250140.
  8. ^ Jönsson, Dan (7 February 2019). "John Ruskin: En brittisk 1800-talsaristokrat för vår tid? - OBS". sverigesradio.se (in Swedish). Sveriges Radio. Archived from the original on 5 March 2020. Retrieved 24 September 2021. Den klassiska nationalekonomin, som den utarbetats av John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith och David Ricardo, betraktade han som en sorts kollektivt hjärnsläpp ... [Transl. Ruskin viewed the classical political economy as it was developed by Mill, Smith, and Ricardo, as a kind of 'collective mental lapse'.]
  9. ^ Ramsay, Anders (21 December 2009). "Marx? Which Marx? Marx's work and its history of reception". www.eurozine.com. Archived from the original on 12 February 2018. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
  10. ^ Ruccio, David (10 December 2020). "Toward a critique of political economy | MR Online". mronline.org. Archived from the original on 15 December 2020. Retrieved 20 September 2021. Marx arrives at conclusions and formulates new terms that run directly counter to those of Smith, Ricardo, and the other classical political economists.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ruskin2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Patterson, Orlando; Fosse, Ethan. "Overreliance on the Pseudo-Science of Economics". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 9 February 2015. (OpEd)
  13. ^ Ruda, Frank; Hamza, Agon (2016). "Introduction: Critique of Political Economy" (PDF). Crisis and Critique. 3 (3): 5–7.