The phrase "political economy" has at least four meanings:
- the heir of Enlightenment moral philosophy in the same sense that today's proper sciences are the heirs of Enlightenment natural philosophy.
- the rubble left of the Marxist, Marxisant, and Marxizoid project of social analysis and utopian transformation after history bombed it throughout the twentieth century until the rubble bounced.
- the mixed economics and political science subdiscipline of public choice--the largely right-wing application of the assumptions of methodological individualism and anomic psychological self-interest to the social sciences.
- things that have too much politics to be economics, too much history to be politics, too much sociology to be history, and too much economics to be sociology.
Political economy here at Berkeley is also an undergraduate major. Yet there is no central meeting place where all the people teaching in it can see what they are doing in their work outside the classroom. This is an attempt to provide such a central meeting place.
So: if you are:
- associated in any way with Berkeley's Political Economy teaching program,
- have gotten anything written that you are proud of recently,
- feel that it is at something like the "working paper" stage, and
- do not object to me puting it up here at http://delong.typepad.com/berkeley_pe_notes/ to show that the Berkeley Political Economy Teaching program does have a large and valid research intellectual footprint,
then please send it along as an attachment (.doc or .pdf or whatever) to me at brad.delong@gmail.com.
It is my view that the program will be viewed much more favorably by California Hall in five years or so if my successor can point to a substantial research/public education/public advocacy footprint from those teaching Political Economy (in addition to pointing out how much of the education that happens at Berkeley is done by it, and at how low a cost)...
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