The late-18th and 19th-century field of "political economy," from which arose the modern fields of economics, sociology, and political science (among others), contrasts sharply with its contemporary offspring. Political economists drew on all the streams of academic speculation — they were as much philosophers as social scientists, and they recognized none of the distinctions among the various contemporary social sciences. Moreover, they saw themselves as reformists, often radical reformists. The great figures in this tradition include Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. They and their followers searched for solutions to the major economic, social, and political crises of their times. In the process, they gave birth to most modern social ideologies and much of the shape of our present world.

Self-styled American and European radicals, for example, helped end monarchy and expand the franchise. The free-labor ideology of European radicals and American Radical Republicans helped abolish serfdom and slavery and establish a new basis for industrial labor relations. The late 18th and 19th centuries also witnessed the liberal reformism of Jeremy Bentham, Smith, James and John Stuart Mill, and the Marquis de Condorcet; the socialist revolutionary ideologies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Marx; the labor unionism of Beatrice and Sydney Webb; and, influential at the time but now mostly forgotten, the competitive common ownership ideology of Henry George and Léon Walras. This ideology shaped the Progressive movement in the United States, the "New Liberalism" of David Lloyd George in Britain, the radicalism of Georges Clemenceau in France, even the agenda of the Nationalist Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen. The Keynesian and welfare-state reforms of the early 20th century set the stage for the longest and most broadly shared period of growth in human history.

Today, economies around the rich world have stagnated, while inequality has sharply increased. Most citizens in wealthy countries have seen their incomes languish for a generation and have lost faith in the promise of widely shared social progress that has underpinned political stability since the Industrial Revolution. Disillusioned with the status quo, voters from the United States to Italy and beyond have joined reactionary populist movements of the right and left.

So where are the heirs of the political economists? Political economy has fragmented into a series of disparate fields, none of which has the breadth, creativity, or courage to support the reformist visions that were crucial to navigating past crises.

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education