Economy
by
The term “economy” in its contemporary sense came into use only quite recently. It is often assumed that the idea of the economy, defined as the relations of material production and exchange in a given territory and understood as an object of expert knowledge and government administration, was introduced by political economists such as William Petty, François Quesnay, and Adam Smith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or even by Aristotle. In fact, however, this use of the term developed only in the 1930s and 1940s and was well established only by the 1950s (T. Mitchell 2005). In earlier periods, “economy” (usually with no definite article) referred to a way of acting and to the forms of knowledge required for effective action. It was the term for the proper husbanding of material resources or the proper management of a lord’s estate or a sovereign’s realm. “Political economy” came to mean the knowledge and practice required for governing the state and managing its population and resources (Tribe 1978; Poovey 1998). Michel Foucault (1991) connects the development of this expertise to the wider range of practices known as “government,” in an older sense of that term referring not to the official institutions...
This essay may be found on page 97 of the printed volume.