Prior to the 1970s, political science for the most part happily
ignored questions of production, exchange, consumption, and investment.
The new prominence of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship in that decade
as well as the transformation of many institutions, trends and premises of
the post-World War II order (including the collapse of Bretton Woods, the
rise of OPEC and Third World liberation movements, the advent of
détente, and the first global recession since the Great Depression)
ushered many innovative themes and methodologies into our discipline.
Political economy was the most direct result of both these trends, taking
its place as one of the first of a wave of “inter-” or
“multidisciplinary” fields of study.Darel E. Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Williams College, Williamstown, MA (dpaul@williams.edu). He is the author
of Rescaling International Political Economy: Subnational States and
the Regulation of the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2005) as
well as of several articles on cities in the contemporary global political
economy.