Return of Political Economy as an Interdisciplinary Approach

Nowadays usually has argued that the main topic of political economy is analyzing economic phenomena from social, political and historical point of view, and it contains a relationship between economy, society and politics. The concrete investigations show that such concept of political economy as an interdisciplinary approach is generally a new one that appeared since 1970s. From seventeenth century to the first half of nineteenth century political economy generally assumed as a science of public policy-making, and from the late nineteenth century to early years of second half of twentieth century, first as an outdated term, and second generally as a discipline contains within itself less scientific aspects of economics. Thus, political economy contains conceptual pluralism, and more important, this conceptual developments accompanied by the relationship between economics and politics. In this article, with insistence on pluralistic nature of this knowledge, author shows that Schumpeterian conception of political economy as ‘different thing for different peoples’ is a historicist notion of political economy. Author tries to analyze conceptual transformations of political economy from the historical point of view, concentrating of three main periods.