Classical Political Economy: History and Present Day

In the domestic literature, the idea of the crisis of economic science is more and more clearly heard. Science today appears to be a field of confrontation of different economic theories, paradigms and research programs. In these circumstances comes the realization of the need to return economic science to its classical, political-economic foundations. Political economy as a scientific direction contains the necessary tools capable of giving an adequate description of modern processes occurring in the economy. One of the methodological features of classical political economy is that the object of its study is the public economy taken as a whole. The economic analysis of the public economy allows to overcome a number of signifi cant limitations existing in the economic mainstream when describing the qualitative changes occurring in the modern economy. A practical consequence of applying the methodology of political economy can be the justification of the concept of the coming public economy as post-economic, instead of the idea of post-industrial society. As the main arguments in justifying the coming post-economic society, political economy presents a description of the processes of destruction of the key elements of the economic economy – the market mechanism of distribution and the institution of private property – observed in the real economy.