Panel discussion

The reintegration of political economy invites intellectual historians at work today to explore many of the concerns animating critical theory and Marxist political economy of an older vintage through new actors and concepts. Just as the recent turn to law expanded the horizons of intellectual history (Wheatley 2023), I argue that historians’ incorporation of the actors and concepts associated with political economy has already begun to do the same. As the only historian on this roundtable predominantly trained in French history, I would also like to suggest that political economy opens up possibilities to incorporate the best of what French “socio-intellectual history” has to offer even if, as Lilti (2014) claims, intellectual history as such does not exist in France. I will illustrate these points with two concepts central to my own research: development and the standard of living. Both, in distinct ways, are what Sartori (2014) describes as “relational concepts...whose meaning is determined by its relationship to a whole constellation of social practices.” Development fits squarely within the Marxian framework Sartori develops which attends to the historically specific meanings of concepts with “very long histories.” The idea of development that paved the way for development economics and international development projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries acquired its “modern” meaning in the economic crisis of the 1930s and the anxieties of British and French colonial administrators. In contrast, the standard of living, coined by English political economists in the 1830s, illuminates how a new political-economic concept emerged from the ascendant form of capitalist political economy of the period. Here, the standard of living offers a glimpse at the birth of relational concepts, rather than the refashioning of older ones. I will conclude by considering what the history of these concepts reveals about the “Europe” of modern European intellectual history.