Marx and Critical Political Economy

Abstract

Like Hegel, Marx criticises political economy both for failing to relate its insights to a broader set of social concerns and for failing to recognise its nature as a historically grounded system of thought and practice. Also, like Hegel Marx sees these two failures as interlinked. Classical economic thought was unable adequately to conceptualise the relationship between economic developments and political and social factors because of the way in which it viewed relationships and categories specific to capitalism as having wider historical validity. Conversely, the inability of classical political economy to recognise that its insights were temporally bounded arose from its lack of attention to the context in which those insights were embedded.