I have a favor to ask of the subscribers: I am trying to figure out how to explain or label the multitude of different kinds of CURRENT research in the area of political economy -- which I would describe as the study of the relationship among the economy, the culture, and political/social/economic institutions. It seems to me that there is more than one school of study within the discipline of economics itself. I hate to call _anything_ specifically "neoclassical", because several different schools of study within mainstream economics derive from variants on the basic neoclassica model and could be said to operate within that tradition. That also leads to what I believe is a very misleading habit of economists -- behaving as if there is One Great Truth that all mainstream economists adhere to. While there does seem to be SOME willingness to acknowledge the coexistence of a variety of schools of analysis with regard to MACROeconomic policy -- Chicago, Minnesota, MIT-Princeton-Wharton, Buchanan -- there seems to be no way to label the variety of schools of applied microeconomic study. I have heard Buchanan's narrowest formulations of rent-seeking described as "neoclassical", but that runs into the problem I just noted: everyone I have asked who works in the "new institutional" economics considers their own work to be within the neoclassical tradition as well. Only post-Walrasians or the (handful of) neo-Marxists would make a distinction, I guess. Would students of LSE-style economics call themselves "empiricists"? Then when you LEAVE economics departments, there are scholars currently working on what would be called problems of political economics in anthropology, sociology, political science, and history -- not to mention business school and urban studies and schools of general policy analysis. So. If anyone has suggestions for (a) identifiable CURRENT schools of political economy, within or between scholarly disciplines; and (b) favorite WORKS of political economy, would you do me a favor and send me a private message, and I'll collate them all into one big posting for the list? Thanks. -- Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova University [log in to unmask]