POLITICAL ECONOMY

POLITICAL ECONOMY, the name given to the modern soi-disant science concerned with the production, distribution, and exchange of wealth, against the relevancy of which to the economics of the world Ruskin has, for most part in vain, during the last forty years emitted a scornful protest, affirming that this is "mercantile" and not "political economy at all," which he insists is the "economy of a state or of citizens," consisting "simply in the production and distribution at fittest time and place of useful or pleasurable things ... a science which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life, and to scorn and destroy those that lead to destruction ... though, properly speaking, it is neither an art nor a science, but a system of conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture," with which last, however, the modern political economists maintain their science has nothing whatever to do.