Theories Of Comparative Political Economy

Ronald H Chilcote

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781032220550
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975363
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Professor Chilcote has written an extraordinary comprehensive comparison of mainstream, liberal views and alternative, radical views of history, development, class, government, and democracy. This book will be extremely valuable to both students and scholars." —Howard Sherman, University of California, Riverside Theories of Comparative Political Economy builds on die proposition that the study of politics and economics has evolved into political economy in a number of significant ways, and that the new issues and ideas that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s will cany on into the new millennium. This book is a sequel to Chilcote's Theories of Comparative Politics (Westview, 1981), which was substantially revised and published in a second edition in 1994.

1
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE COMPARATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY

The present generation of political scientists wrestles with the question of what is political and what is political science. Economists debate the prospects of development under equilibrium or inegalitarian conditions. Many acknowledge the contributions of Marx to these questions, yet most tend to steer clear of Marxism, preferring instead to distinguish politics from economics and to avoid issues of state, power, class, and class struggle. Addressing these issues constructively will require critical attention to political economy and to the contributions of comparative analysis.

This book is a sequel to my 1981 Theories of Comparative Politics: The Search for a Paradigm, which was substantially revised and published in a second edition in 1994. Its mission was to assess the prospects for a paradigm in political science and comparative politics in general and in political economy in particular and to encourage students and academics to reexamine issues that appeared to be settled, challenge established theories and concepts, and probe new areas of inquiry. It focused on Marx and Weber as precursor thinkers on system and state, culture, development and underdevelopment, and class. Its conclusion, dedicated to the concepts and theory of political economy, serves here as a point of departure.

The themes that emerge from this earlier book are fundamental to comparative political economy: transitions to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism; class; the state; imperialism; and the links between theories of imperialism and development, and democracy.

My work differs somewhat from another recent effort to synthesize an understanding of political economy In Theories of Political Economy, James Caporaso and David Levine (1992) examine a multitude of approaches to political economy, identify and briefly develop principal concepts, and reflect on contrasting perspectives. Their emphasis, however, is on mainstream rather than alternative approaches. Their treatment of questions of the state, democracy, and other themes would benefit from more detailed attention to class analysis and its methodological possibilities for the study of political economy; it is this concern, among others, that characterizes the radical political economy that this book seeks to promote.

In search of a new formulation, I begin this chapter with a historical overview of how political economy has been envisaged by various thinkers over time. The chapter describes the impact of debates and positioning with regard to political economy on the social sciences in general and political science and economics in particular and goes on to discuss a number of ideas that shape our thinking about important issues and problems in the contemporary world. It turns next to the methods employed by a comparative political economy and finally to the results of important comparative studies in a variety of theoretical frameworks.

ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

The origins of political economy date to the late eighteenth century and to the writings of the important classical political economists, including not only Marx but also David Ricardo and Adam Smith. These thinkers focused on capitalism and its evolution mainly in rapidly developing Europe, and especially in England. The major schools of thought that have shaped the theory of political economy from ancient to modern times are

• Petty commodityism
• Mercantilism
• Classical liberalism
• Utopian socialism
• Marxism
• Marginalism
• Neoclassicalism
• Keynesianism
• Post-Keynesianism
• Neo-Marxism

My summary of these schools, which is necessarily sketchy borrows from the useful overviews of Ronald Meek (1956) and Ernest Mandel (1968); it will serve as a guide for understanding political economy today.

Most historians of political economy date its origins to petty commodity production, under which money appeared, prices fluctuated, some producers fell into debt, and primitive communal relations began to dissolve. Mang-tsze in China and Plato and Aristotle in Greece first attempted to explain the instability that accompanied petty commodity production and to find ways to overcome it on behalf of the communal society. They recognized the impact of the division of labor on commodity production, and Aristotle in particular distinguished between use value and exchange value. Mang-tsze considered agricultural labor the source of value, and Plato came close to offering a similar theory. The expansion of petty commodity production in the European Middle Ages stimulated the scholastic theologians Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas to address the problem of value. Aquinas, for instance, sought a fair price, thereby justifying the merchant's profit and defending the established commercial order. Eventually, this medieval conception of a just price lost its significance in the face of international trade. Duns Scotus, another scholastic thinker, worked with a theory of exchange value based on labor, and Abd-al-Rahman-Ibn-Khaldun, an Islamic philosopher, elaborated a historical-materialist view of history.

The principal concern of political economy between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries was the nature of wealth in an impersonal system of markets. This was a period marked by the discovery and conquest of new geographical areas, new flows of capital to and from the New World, and the rise of monarchs and merchants who promoted nationalism, undermined local barriers to commerce, and benefited from foreign trade and the erosion of the power of the old order of church and nobility Mercantilist writings of the period pragmatically analyzed how nations produced wealth, pointing to the importance of a credit balance of payments, a favorable trade balance, manufacturing, and fertile soil. The early mercantilists described economic life in terms of a circulation of commodities, whereas writers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries addressed questions about the social surplus product that became evident with the growth in manufacturing and technology in agriculture. Two strains of political economy appeared. One, the British school, was represented by William Petty, who in Political Arithmetic (1651) analyzed the agricultural origins of surplus value. The French Physiocrats constituted the other. In Détail de la France (1695), Pierre Boisguillebert concentrated on agricultural labor as the only source of value. Francois Quesnay argued in his Economic Table (1758) against the mercantilist assumption that wealth sprang from trade and stressed the surplus produced in agriculture. He advocated that taxes be paid by the landowners, not the small farmers, merchants, and manufacturers, whom he considered productive. Finally, Nicholas Barbon, in A Discourse of Trade (1690), related the value of a commodity to the cost of making goods and emphasized communal profit, which according to Ronald Meek (1956) represented a transition from mercantilism to the classical approach of Adam Smith and others.

The classical liberals believed that private property should be protected and that the production of wealth was based on the incentive to work instilled in the individual by the right to property. Individual initiative therefore had to be free of mercantilist constraints. These ideas emanated from English thought, in particular the advocacy of free trade in the writings of Dudley North and the notion in John Locke that production was the consequence of individual effort to satisfy human needs and that workers should be able to use or consume their own products.

Adam Smith consolidated these ideas in classical political economy. In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he brought together the major themes of commodity, capital and value, and simple and complex labor. He was the first to formulate a labor theory of value, making it possible to identify the amount of labor in the value of commodities. He identified laws of the market to explain the drive of individual self-interest in competition and envisaged a competitive market equilibrium.

David Ricardo, in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), was both a disciple and a critic of Smith, and he contributed refinements to political economy. Ricardo advocated the accumulation of capital as the basis for economic expansion. He believed that governments should not intervene in the economy and argued that a division of labor and free trade policies would benefit all nations. He related Smith's ideas of orderly growth and market equilibrium to the international economic system. He also noted the conflict between the interests of landlords (opposed to the community) and capitalists (favorable to the community). His interpretation influenced socialist interpretations of political economy, in particular his propositions that the value of any commodity was purely and solely determined by the quantity of labor necessary for its production and that social labor was divided among three classes, landowners, capitalists, and workers.

Among other classical liberals were Thomas R. Malthus and Jeremy Bentham. In Principles of Political Economy (1820), Malthus contributed a theory of population to political economy arguing that population reproduced faster than food production and therefore unchecked population growth would mean mass starvation and death. In Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham viewed man's selfishness as natural and desirable but believed that individual and public interests should coincide. Government action was acceptable as long as it was not a response to the narrow interests of special groups, and individuals should be allowed freedom within a framework of moral and legal constraint.

The insights of Ricardo into labor and production and the gloomy prognosis of Malthus stimulated a group of Utopian socialists in their criticism of capitalism. Robert Owen pushed for labor reforms, including a shorter workday and the ending of child labor, and promoted village cooperatives. Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, an aristocrat later relegated to poverty, believed that the workers deserved the highest rewards of society and advocated the reorganization of society. John Stuart Mill manifested socialist leanings in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), in which he retraced the path of Smith and Ricardo but placed emphasis on production rather than on distribution. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, another Utopian socialist, was a critic of the orthodox economics of his time.

Transcending the theory of the Utopian socialists as well as that of the classical liberals, Karl Marx worked out a theory of surplus value and a synthesis that allowed for an explanation of class struggle. He developed theories on the prices of production and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. His early work attacked the Utopian socialists and his later work the classical liberal economists, Ricardo and Smith in particular. For example, in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) he exposed the "metaphysics" of Proudhon's political economy and argued that one should examine the historical movement of production relations and that the production relations of a society formed a whole.

The marginalist theory of value and neoclassical political economy were developed in response to all three of these schools. The marginalists looked for "marginal" qualities in their analysis of equilibrium. The neoclassicists attempted to be rigorous, detailed, and abstract. They emphasized equilibrium and thus were often criticized for not accounting for the disturbances that affected equilibrium and structural crises.

In the midst of the great depression, John Maynard Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), moved political economy from an apologetic stance on capitalism to a pragmatic one. Rather than justify capitalism in theory, it was now essential to preserve it in practice by mitigating the extent of periodic fluctuations. One of Keynes's followers, Paul Samuelson, and others have persisted in this macroeconomic tradition to this day.

The post-Keynesians...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 Political Economy and the Comparative Understanding of History
• 2 Theories of Transition
• 3 Theories of Class
• 4 Theories of the State
• 5 Theories of Imperialism
• 6 Theories of Democracy
• Other References Consulted
• Index