Political Economy and the Development of State Theory

Jeremy Leaman
Additional contact information
Jeremy Leaman: Loughborough University

Chapter 1 in The Political Economy of West Germany, 1945–85, 1988, pp 1-8 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Political economy as a branch of knowledge has experienced a marked revival over the recent years as a result of a number of developments, including the partial erosion of boundaries between traditional humanities subjects like politics, economics, sociology, history, geography and psychology. However, as a result of the process of self-adjustment within academics the concept has been stretched considerably to accommodate a wide variety of often quite different areas of study. Because of this wild abundance of ‘political economies’ — which include, e.g. the study of economic statecraft or of political behaviour using economic categories — it is important to define the point of departure of this variant. Here political economy is understood as the study of the production and distribution of social wealth, and this book is concerned with the historical reality of the politico-economic development in West Germany rather than with the development of German political economy as a (national) branch of knowledge. Within this framework particular attention is paid to the development of state policy. The following conspectus of theories of political economy thus pays particular regard to the role of the state. Even so such a conspectus can only be introductory and abbreviated in nature.

Keywords: Political Economy; Capitalist Society; Liberal Tradition; Social Wealth; Petty Bourgeoisie (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1988
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-19040-9_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349190409

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19040-9_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().