Noun
the branch of social science that deals with the production and distribution and consumption of goods and services and their management
Source: WordNetIt's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy. Stephen Leacock
Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a ‘science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities. Herbert Marcuse
I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings. Richard Cobden
...the principles of political economy have elevated the working class above the place they ever filled before. Richard Cobden
Among minor alterations, I may mention the substitution for the name political economy of the single convenient term economics. I cannot help thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our science. William Stanley Jevons
Political economy has only become a science since it has been confined to the results of inductive investigation. Jean-Baptiste Say