DOBB (Maurice).
Political Economy and Capitalism. Essays in Economic Tradition.
A celebrated collection of essays by the Cambridge Marxist economist Maurice Dobb, the culmination of his early career studies of classical political economy, notably scarce with the dust jacket.
Written in conversation with Keynes’s complete denouncement of classical political economy in his General Theory, Dobb insisted on ‘returning to classical political economy as a way forward. Dobb would later state that Political Economy and Capitalism was too hastily written and not adequate for addressing Keynes’s critique of classical political economy. However, ‘several generations of Dobb’s readers’ believed the book to be ‘the most trenchant critique of its day of the foundations of modern Western economic theory’ (McFarlane and Pollitt). The book would provide a primary theoretical basis for all of Dobb’s future work and for many generations of political economists. It is in Political Economy and Capitalism that Dobb first demonstrates that the classical political economists did not hold to a ‘subsistence’ theory of wages. Rather, wages in particular and income distribution in general are governed by institutional and historical conditions that are ontologically distinct from conditions affecting production, productivity, and growth. Therefore, production and distribution should be analysed separately, to achieve a full understanding of institutional dynamics’ (Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics).
