Critique of political economy
Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions,[1] and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given[2][3] or as transhistorical (true for all human societies for all time).[4][5] The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with modernity (post-Renaissance Western society).[6][7][8]
Critics of political economy do not necessarily aim to create their own theories regarding how to administer economies.[1][3][9][10] Critics of economy commonly view "the economy" as a bundle of concepts and societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of any self-evident economic laws.[3][11] Hence, they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience.[2][12]
There are multiple critiques of political economy today, but what they have in common is critique of what critics of political economy tend to view as dogma, i.e. claims of the economy as a necessary and transhistorical societal category.[3][13]
Differences between critics of economy and critics of economical issues[edit]
One may differentiate between those who engage in critique of political economy, which takes on a more ontological character, where authors criticise the fundamental concepts and social categories which reproduce the economy as an entity.[3][10][11][68][69] While other authors, which the critics of political economy would consider only to deal with the surface phenomena of the economy, have a naturalized understanding of these social processes. Hence the epistemological differences between critics of economy and economists can also at times be very large.[48]
In the eyes of the critics of political economy, the critics of economic issues merely critique certain practices in attempts to implicitly or explicitly rescue the political economy; these authors might for example propose universal basic income or to implement a planned economy.[9][31][68][70]