POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE ‘MODERN VIEW’ AS REFLECTED IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT

This paper focuses on the gradual decomposition of classical political economy and its transformation into ‘economics’, a process which was to culminate in the conception of ‘theory’ as a mere engine of analysis. Why exactly did modern ‘economics’ become accepted? What was meant to be achieved – and was it? And why did some writers reject both old political economy and modern economics? We intend to contribute to an understanding of these issues by analysing a set of representative histories of economic ideas from this period: those by Luigi Cossa (1880), John Kells Ingram (1915, originally published in 1888), and Charles Gide and Charles Rist (1915).