Economics and the Mutation of Political Doctrine

Abstract

The term “political economy” seems to have entered modern discourse for the first time in 1611 in a treatise on government by L. de Mayerne-Turquet.¹ Four years later a fellow “Consultant Administrator,” Antoyne de Montchrétien, Sieur de Watteville (c.1575–1621), published his Traicté de l’oeconomie politique (1615), which though “a mediocre performance and completely lacking in originality,”² marks the beginning of an intellectual enterprise that has continued — with some large ups and downs — to this day. The object of that enterprise is to generalize Aristotle’s οικονομικη (“economics”) to the level of the πολιτεια (“commonwealth” or “state”). For in Aristotle’s Politics³ “economics” is to be construed as “the art of household management” where “household” means a more or less self-sufficient, manorial estate. Hence at the outset “political economy” was an attempt to extend the art of estate management to the needs and resources of a modern nation state, of which France was in the 1600s the foremost example.