On Political Economy and its Fallacies: Why Critiques and Rethinking Matter

Abstract

This article is the 10th anniversary lecture of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, delivered in 2021. It provides a reflection on key issues and fallacies that lie at the origins of political economy. It is argued that, as regards the problem of knowledge production, the formulation of factually and logically incorrect theories begins with English classical political economy. Political economy as developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century—a period which saw a rapid increase in its trade especially with its colonies of conquest, while also making the transition to factory production—proceeded on the basis of verbal and material fallacies and silences which have been reproduced in historiography and the discipline of economics to this day.