Panel Discussion

As the first social science, political economy was, for Marx, the epistemic space out of which capitalism (a form of opaque sociality characterized by blind compulsions once dynamic and contradictory) had emerged as a theoretical object. His “critique of political economy” coupled an account of political economy as its own age apprehended in thought, with an account of why the apprehension of that age had taken the specific conceptual form of political economy. Seen from this perspective, the history of political economy marks a key moment for exploring the articulation of concept history with histories of the social. But Marx also thought that political economy had essentially collapsed as a scientific project, and it was the simultaneous inescapability and impossibility of political economy’s intellectual project that formed the reflexive point of departure for his critique. The intellectual history of political economy represents a privileged point of entry into the ways that historical actors experienced their own sociality. Insofar as political economy is a form of knowledge specifically calibrated to grasp forms of interdependence that are opaque to everyday experience, it specifically allows us insight into the ways in which historical actors made sense of the transformation of life worlds by entanglement with the forms and dynamics of capitalist sociality. Whether articulating explicit attitudes towards economic concepts, or incorporating economic concepts into registers of discourse that are not explicitly economic, the reach of political economy across geographical and discursive space is one of the defining features of modern intellectual history. Approaching the history of European empires through this lens reveals how these histories came to be inextricably entangled with the history of political economy; how political economy served as a political technology; and the ways in which political economy emerged as a normative register for colonial political conflict.