An Assessment of the New Political Economy: Its Potential for the Social Sciences and for Sociology in Particular

The new political economy brings all three elements back together again: choice, institutions, and models. In my estimation, the new political economy, born in the 1950s, is the single most important factor of bringing Adam Smith's program back to social science.' Yet, more than one hundred and fifty years of neglect cannot be erased over night. A lot remains to be done before we have truly moved from a new political economics to a general explanatory social science with division of labor.