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What is political economy? This is a controversial question and debate continues, as shown by, and despite, the publication of a huge new volume, one of the 10-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. This very valuable series has been a monumental production, under the general editorship of Robert Goodin, of the Australian National University's Research School of the Social Sciences. The extremely useful, although somewhat uneven, Political Economy volume, edited by Barry Weingast and Donald Wittman, has 59 chapters, more than 1000 pages, and aspires to provide a comprehensive coverage of the state (or 'the reach') of the discipline or sub-discipline. But right at the outset of reading this volume we can see how controversial is the question of defining the field - what it is that political economy studies and the methodologies that it brings to its research. |
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