After political economy

Politics and economics were once a unified discipline — and both were much better for it

Political theorist C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987)

There was once an influential academic journal called the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. In the late 1960s, it was split into the Canadian Journal of Economics and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. Some scholars, notably the University of Toronto’s C.B. Macpherson, vocally opposed the move. Still, at the time, few can possibly have realized the seismic intellectual shift it portended.

For his part, Macpherson’s opposition was heavily informed by his own approach to political science, best represented by his magnum opus The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and by his overriding belief that the discipline shouldn’t limit itself to either pure empirical description or idealistic abstraction. More generally, criticism of the split reflected the longstanding belief of many scholars working in related fields that politics and economics should be studied in tandem because each is unavoidably embedded in the other.

In Canadian political economy, thanks partly to the pioneering work of figures like Harold Innis, it was long understood that economic institutions like markets always operate against the backdrop of social and cultural conditions that can’t be captured by quantitative metrics like supply and demand.¹ Historian Irene Spry, a friend and colleague of Macpherson’s, later explained his opposition to the breakup of the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science this way:

…it seemed to him, as I think it seemed to everybody who was influenced by Innis certainly, that you couldn’t separate economics and politics, that it had to be political economy to make any sense at all. Economists tend to think that because they think they can measure things that they’re working at, they are more scientific than other social scientists who are dealing with data that they can’t always measure. And so they feel they should go off by themselves and practice their mathematical analysis separately, without trying to take into account the political elements. But the only way in which you can subject problems to very concrete mathematical analysis is by simplifying them to the point at which you have controllable things to measure. And if you simplify human activities, if you whittle away the social institutions and the political activities, you’re left with such a limited aspect of human activity that it’s unintelligible.

In a 1987 radio program aired in the wake of Macpherson’s death, broadcaster David Cayley pointed out that the problem runs in the other direction as well. Which is to say: unless sufficiently attuned to questions of economics and material reality, political theory can become unhelpfully broad and abstract. And, just as economics cannot simply be abstracted from the social complexities that define economic life in the real world, the study of political theory cannot ignore the material contexts in which political ideas are invariably formed and applied.

When I studied the discipline myself — incidentally in Macpherson’s old department, though no longer called the Department of Political Economy — I was sometimes frustrated by its seeming indifference to where theory comes from. (If you’re going to read Hobbes, for example, don’t you also need to think about the English Civil War?) This aside, I also think that contemporary liberal theory in particular has suffered from a lack of attentiveness to the economic realities that variously, ground, shape, and constrain political institutions.²

In any case, the splitting up of the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science ultimately signified something more far reaching than the death of one specialized academic journal. Extracted from political economy, the discipline of economics was free to shift in an increasingly quantitative and empirical direction — becoming, sometimes at least, mathematical to the point of absurdity. This trajectory has had the effect of turning economics into a value-free science: something distillable to a series of generalized laws and propositions that often leaves more fundamental questions unexamined.

Political theory, by contrast, was pulled hard in the other direction and was similarly left the worse for it. In some cases, the result was the kind of postmodern excess that has helped give the phrase “critical theory” a pejorative connotation. Elsewhere, the eschewing of political economy has simply meant insufficient attention to how material realities unavoidably shape political ideas and condition their application: a kind of “republic of letters” approach in which philosophy is put in conversation mainly, and sometimes only, with itself.

In both cases, we are left with disciplines less well equipped to describe and interpret the world, let alone aid in changing it.

1. The same belief informed Karl Polanyi in his groundbreaking book The Great Transformation, and outside Canada it had an important lineage in the German school of political economy.

2. There’s a strong case the same applies even to the most progressively-minded liberal thinking. Notwithstanding its undeniable brilliance (and very real attention to the kinds of issues raised by socialists and social democrats), John Rawls’ landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice operates in an abstract register that is largely removed from tangible issues of class and power.