经济学课程简介

政治经济学(Political Economics)

课程内容：

本课程是经济类专业学生的基础理论课程，主要内容包括商品经济的一般理论和马克思主义政治经济学的基本原理,学习本课程的意义在于：一方面了解马克思主义政治经济学作为马克思主义理论的三大组成部分之一它是经济学而不是政治学,另一方面明确马克思主义政治经济学的基本原理对社会主义建设仍然具有指导意义。本课程的重点在于商品经济的基本理论和社会资本再生产理论、难点是关于社会主义市场经济的基本内容。因此，教学中应突出重点和难点。通过学习使学生对马克思主义的认识有一个科学的态度，即一要坚持，二要发展。所谓坚持，就是要坚持马克思主义科学的、符合人类社会发展趋势的基本原理；所谓发展，就是对马克思主义理论不能搞教条主义、本本主义，而是要坚持其科学的成分，舍弃其过时的结论。

Originally, political economy meant the study of the conditions under which production or consumption within limited parameters was organized in nation-states. In that way, political economy expanded the emphasis of economics, which comes from the

Greek oikos (meaning "home") and nomos (meaning "law" or "order"); thus political economy was meant to express the laws of production of wealth at the state level, just as economics was the ordering of the home. The phraseéconomie politique (translated in English as political economy) first appeared in France in 1615 with the well-known book by Antoine de Montchrétien, Traité de l’economie politique. The French physiocrats,

along with Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Henry George, or Karl

Marx were some of the exponents of political economy. The world's first professorship in political economy was established in 1754 at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy (then capital city of the Kingdom of Naples); the Neapolitan philosopher Antonio Genovesi was the first tenured professor. In 1763, Joseph von Sonnenfels was appointed a Political Economy chair at the University of Vienna, Austria. Thomas Malthus, in 1805, became England's first professor of political economy, at the East India Company College, Haileybury,Hertfordshire. Glasgow University, where Smith had been Professor of Logic and of Moral Philosophy, changed the name of its Department of Political Economy to the Department of Economics (ostensibly to avoid confusing prospective undergraduates), in the academic year 1997–98, leaving the class of 1998 as the last to be graduated with a Master of Arts in Political Economy.

In the United States, political economy first was taught at the College of William and Mary, where in 1784, Smith's The Wealth of Nations was a required textbook.[5]

Current approaches

In its contemporary meaning, political economy refers to different, but related, approaches to studying economic and related behaviours, ranging from the combination of economics with other fields to the use of different, fundamental assumptions that challenge earlier economic assumptions:

Political economy most commonly refers to interdisciplinary studies drawing upon economics, sociology, and political science in explaining how political

institutions, the political environment, and the economic system — capitalist, socialist, or mixed — influence each other.[6] The Journal of Economic Literature classification codes associate political economy with three subareas: the role of government

and/or power relationships in resource allocation for each type of economic

system,[7]international political economy, which studies the economic impacts

of international relations,[8] and economic models of political processes.[9] The last area, derived from public choice theory and dating from the 1960s, models voters, politicians, and bureaucrats as behaving in mainly self-interested ways, in contrast to

a view, ascribed to earlier economists, of government officials trying to maximize

individual utilities from some kind of social welfare function.[10] An early and

continuing focus of that research program is what came to be called constitutional political economy.[11]

Economists and political scientists often associate political economy with

approaches using rational-choice assumptions,[12]especially in game

theory,[13] and in examining phenomena beyond economics' standard remit, such

as government failure and complex decision making in which context the term

"positive political economy" is common.[14] Other "traditional" topics include