Political Economy and Communication: an epistemological approach to the origins

Abstract

The gap that separates the European political economists of communication –more Marxist-rooted– from their American counterparts –who tend to profess more liberal political ideas–, as well as the epistemological and methodological confusion, which has burdened this approach from the beginning, about what is and what is not the political economy of communication and culture (PECC) (probably due to this lack of consensus or of a common basis), have led some scholars to talk about the need for refounding the approach or even to declare it obsolete. On the contrary, this paper argues that the point is not to redefine the PECC but to recover its true dimensions, to reclaim it as a critical approach that aspires to comprehensiveness and is influenced by moral philosophers. With this aim in mind, this paper goes back to the historical roots of the approach, especially emphasizing the role of the classical economists. That is, we propose to rediscover the classical economists for the PECC and for political economy in general. In all of this we have a main purpose: to stress the enormous wealth contained in an epistemological approach that has been underexploited in spite of its vast democratizing potential.