A Critical History of the Economy

Description

This book explores a central idea in recent critical International Political Economy - that the economy does not exist separately from other domains of life, such as society, politics and culture - and in doing so, provides a detailed intellectual and critical history of the economy.

Formulating an alternative approach to the widespread use of the representational model in diverse approaches to writing the history of the economy, the author draws on contemporary theorists to treat the economy as an object that is produced by discursive and institutional practices. Walter narrates the intellectual process through which the economy came to be analytically separated from its social and political moorings in the nineteenth century and offers a historical perspective on current IPE concerns, and links IPE with the growing field of contextualist intellectual history.

This important and innovative volume will be of strong interest to students and scholars of International Political Economy, International Relations, Economics, History and Political Theory.

Contents

Part 1: Preliminaries 1. Beyond the Representational Model Part 2: The Analysis of Wealth 2. Reason of State 3. Reason of State and the Strong State 4. The Analysis of Wealth and Rivalrous States Part 3: Political Economy 5. The Wealth of Nations and the Economy 6. Political Economy and the Economy

Author Bio

Ryan Walter is Research Fellow at theCentre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia. He has two primary lines of research. One is the history of economic discourse, with particular emphasis on how the economy came to be understood as a non-political zone. The second is the history of political thought and the relationship between intellectual history and contemporary political theory. He is currently investigating the overlaps and divergences between Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality and Quentin Skinner's intellectual histories of sovereignty and liberty.

Related Subjects

1. History of Economic Thought
2. Politics & International Relations
3. International Politics
4. International Relations
5. Political Philosophy
6. Political Theory
7. International Political Economy
8. Political Economics
9. International Relations Theory