Keynesian International

David Marquand

• Controlling the Economic Future: Policy Dilemmas in a Shrinking World by Michael Stewart
  Harvester, 192 pp, £18.95, November 1983, ISBN 0 7108 0182 3
• In Defence of the Mixed Economy by Andrew Shonfield, edited by Zuzanna Shonfield
  Oxford, 231 pp, £15.00, February 1984, ISBN 0 19 215359 5
• The Welfare State in Crisis: Social Thought and Social Change by Ramesh Mishra
  Harvester, 208 pp, £15.95, December 1983, ISBN 0 7108 0240 4

As the name they gave their subject implied, the great political economists of the 19th century knew that the economy cannot be studied fruitfully in isolation from the polity. The notion that there is, or should be, a distinct and autonomous discipline of ‘economics’, whose practitioners are solely concerned with economic relationships, and for whom the corresponding political relationships are professionally irrelevant, would have seemed to them absurd, even shocking. By a curious paradox, however, the 19th-century tradition of political economy has fallen further and further into abeyance the more closely the economy and the polity have been intertwined in practice. Nowadays, in this country at any rate, economists study economics, while political scientists study politics. The result is that neither discipline has much to say about the central economic and political problems of our time.