field list

A course in Political Economy

The people who built political economy as we practise it, in the order they arrived.

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Thomas Robert Malthus

1766 – 1834

Population pressure as an economic law; the argument every food and climate debate revisits.

United Kingdom·Political Economy

David Ricardo

1772 – 1823

Comparative advantage and rent theory — still the core argument for trade.

United Kingdom·Economics · Political Economy

John Stuart Mill

1806 – 1873

Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.

United Kingdom·Political Economy · Philosophy · Politics

Karl Marx

1818 – 1883

Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.

Germany·Political Economy · Philosophy

Friedrich Engels

1820 – 1895

The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.

Germany·Political Economy · History

Max Weber

1864 – 1920

Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.

Germany·Political Economy · History

Karl Polanyi

1886 – 1964

The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.

Hungary·Political Economy · History

Gunnar Myrdal

1898 – 1987

Cumulative causation and the economics of racial inequality in America.

Sweden·Economics · Political EconomyNobel

Friedrich Hayek

1899 – 1992

Prices as information; the intellectual engine of late-century market liberalism.

Austria·Economics · Political EconomyNobel

Raúl Prebisch

1901 – 1986

Centre-periphery theory drove Latin American development strategy for decades.

Argentina·Political Economy · Economics

Joan Robinson

1903 – 1983

Imperfect competition and a lifelong challenge to orthodox capital theory.

United Kingdom·Economics · Political Economy

Kwame Nkrumah

1909 – 1972

Led Ghana to independence and theorised neo-colonial economic dependence.

Ghana·Politics · Political Economy

Ha-Joon Chang

b. 1963

Kicking Away the Ladder documented how rich states industrialised behind protection.

South Korea·Political Economy · Economics

Mariana Mazzucato

b. 1968

The Entrepreneurial State reframed public investment as the source of major innovation.

Italy·Economics · Political Economy

Thomas Piketty

b. 1971

Capital in the Twenty-First Century put wealth inequality data at the centre of policy.

France·Economics · Political Economy