Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2006
Prior to the 1970s, political science for the most part happily ignored questions of production, exchange, consumption, and investment. The new prominence of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship in that decade as well as the transformation of many institutions, trends and premises of the post-World War II order (including the collapse of Bretton Woods, the rise of OPEC and Third World liberation movements, the advent of détente, and the first global recession since the Great Depression) ushered many innovative themes and methodologies into our discipline. Political economy was the most direct result of both these trends, taking its place as one of the first of a wave of “inter-” or “multidisciplinary” fields of study.Darel E. Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Williamstown, MA ([email protected]). He is the author of Rescaling International Political Economy: Subnational States and the Regulation of the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2005) as well as of several articles on cities in the contemporary global political economy.