The split of public policy, political science and economics from the original discipline of political economy has not served us well. In this blog, we review the history of that split and the ideas and forces that drove the separation of the various elements of what Adam Smith described as “a branch of the science of the legislator or statesman.”

While reading about the deployment ordered by US President Trump of regular force Marines to Los Angeles to support the 4000 federalised National Guard troops already deployed, as so many others will have, I searched for other instances of use of federal regular force troops, as opposed to federalised National Guard troops. There is precedent for use of federalised National Guard troops in Los Angeles, which occurred in 1992 to contain riots following the acquittal of four police officers for the assault of Rodney King. On that occasion, President George H.W. Bush federalised the National Guard two days after it had already been called up by then-Governor Pete Wilson (R).

One of the best statements of the particular nature of political economy was given by English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill in the Preface to his 1948 Principles of Political Economy.

In 2004, LSE economist Tim Besley noted that New Political Economy, as he called it, aimed to reverse the split that occurred between political economy and the economic pursuits of the marginalists.

The truest sign of great poetry is not that it speaks to its time, but that it speaks to our time and our relations to it. Seldom has that been more true than of William Butler Yeats great allegorical poem, The Second Coming. A key question of our times must surly be ‘Can the centre hold?’

Futuresphere was originally founded in London in 2013 to respond to what has subsequently been termed ‘poly-crisis’. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the ensuing UK banking crisis and Eurozone debt crisis, as well as the global climate crisis, a group of like-minded professionals believed that corporations, financial institutions and governments had to change how they thought about and understood the future. But ‘day jobs’ took priority; the initiative stalled.

A decade later, the original Futuresphere is not the only thing that has been revealed to have stalled. While time has quieted some of the most vociferous complaints about the wounds of 2008, it has done little to address the structural problems and contradictions that led to the 2008 global financial crisis; action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been nugatory and certainly has not kept up with the lofty and pious rhetoric of Paris in 2015 or of national politicians since then.