William K. Tabb - Reconstructing Political Economy: The Great Divide in Economic Thought

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Reconstructing Political Economy

Reconstructing Political Economy offers an original perspective on the questions the great economists have asked and looks at their significance for todays world. Written in a provocative and accessible style, it examines how the diverse traditions of political economy have conceptualized economic issues, events and theory. Going beyond the orthodoxies of mainstream economics, it shows the relevance of political economy to debates on the economic meaning today.

This book is a timely and thought provoking contribution to a political economy for our time. In this light, it offers fresh insights into such issues as modern theories of growth, the historic relations between state and market, and the significance of globalization for modern societies. Reconstructing Political Economy will be of great interest to economists, political scientists, and historians of economic thought.

William K.Tabb is Professor of Economics and Political Science at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Japanese System: Cultural Economy and Economic Transformation, The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto; and co-editor of Instability and Change in the World Economy.

Contemporary Political Economy series

Edited by Jonathan Michie, Birkbeck College, University of London

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The great divide in economic thought

William K.Tabb

London and New York

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First published 1999

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

1999 William K.Tabb

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Tabb, William K.

Reconstructing political economy: the great divide in economic

thought/William K.Tabb.

p. cm. (Contemporary political economy series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-20762-2 (hardbound: alk. paper).

ISBN 0-415-20763-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Economics. 2. EconomicsHistory. I. Title. II. Series.

HB171.5.T13 1999

330dc21 9847961

CIP

ISBN 0-203-04931-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-25480-5 (OEB Format)

ISBN 0-415-20762-2 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-20763-0 (pbk)

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The Econ tribe occupies a vast territory within the far North. Their land appears bleak and dismal to the outsider, and travelling through it makes rough sledding; but the Econ, through a long period of adoption, have learned to wrest a living of sorts from it. They are not without some genuine and sometimes even fierce attachment to their ancestral ground, and their young are brought up to feel contempt for the softer living in the warm lands of their neighbours, such as the Polscis and the Sociogs. Despite a common genetical heritage, relations with these tribes are strained the distrust and contempt that the average Econ feels for these neighbours being heartily reciprocated by the latterand social intercourse with them is inhibited by numerous taboos. The extreme clannishness, not to say xenophobia, of the Econ makes life among them difficult and perhaps even dangerous for the outsider. This probably accounts for the fact that the Econ have so far not been systematically studied.

(Leijonhufvud 1973:347)

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