Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'oeconomie politique, 1758

Political economy was the original term for the study of production, the acts of buying and selling, and their relationships to laws, customs and government.

It developed in the 17th century as the study of the economies of states which placed the theory of property in the theory of government.Some political economists proposed the labour theory of value (first introduced by John Locke, developed by Adam Smith and later Karl Marx), according to which labour is the real source of value. Many political economists also looked at the accelerating development of technology, whose role in economic and social relationships grew ever more important. view more...